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Ick
GF crashed my server today, so I'm going to have to switch to another script. I'd think dual 833 processors and 512mb ram would be enough but apparently it wasn't-- I disabled the forum and all was well. Granted we're running in the hundreds of simultaneous connections.


Realiiity.com Forums
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Re: [ellipsiiis] Ick In reply to
How did it crash your server? Is it running as a CGI or mod_perl? What webserver and database, operating system?

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] Ick In reply to
IIS, Mysql, no mod_perl. The CPU was almost constantly at 100%, as soon as I turned it off it went down to 40% with the rest of the site (and two very involved games) still running.


Realiiity.com Forums
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Re: [ellipsiiis] Ick In reply to
How many users were online? Normal amount, or a lot more than usual?
I'm not sure how good IIS performs, so I can't really recommend or come to any conclusions, but hopefully this info will be useful for Alex or Jason Smile

Adrian
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Re: [brewt] Ick In reply to
It's a Survivor site and today was the premiere episode for this season so traffic was outrageous-- Thursdays we always have triple or quadruple the traffic we have on normal days and this is the first Thursday with a new show that we've had since switching to GF. When we used DCforums last season we'd always have problems with the games crashing our server, but ugpraded until there weren't problems anymore. Our systems guy said we had more traffic today than any day last season, so DCF may have crashed too, I don't know, but he said it was definitely perl that was causing the problems and this is the only perl script we run. (Games are all ASP) I tried running perl both as the executable and the ISAPI dll and with both had equal problems. I also turned off guest viewing for most of the forums and still had problems. The systems guy said the only way to run it would be to have a second server just for the perl scripting but I can't afford a second server so I'm going to try switching to a PHP board I guess and hope it helps. It's unfortunate because feature-wise GF by far blows everything else away.


Realiiity.com Forums
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Re: [ellipsiiis] Ick In reply to
Hi,

A much cheaper (though not quite free unfortunately) would be to get PerlEx. See:

http://www.activestate.com/Products/PerlEx/

which will help reduce the overhead.

Hope that helps,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Ick In reply to
Just some more thoughts on this. For really heavy loads (> 20 hits per second), you really need to use an embeded solution, CGI won't cut it. Thankfully, if you are getting those sorts of loads, you will be on a dedicated server, and will have some options (there is no way a virtual would handle that).

CGI involves: IIS launching a new process, loading perl into memory, loading the program and it's libraries, compiling the program, connecting to the database, and running the program.

Embeded technolgies like mod_perl, SpeedyCGI or PerlEx all work the same. They keep perl and your program in memory, compiled and connected to the database at all times. Often they are part of IIS/Apache and running your program is just like running a part of the web server. With mod_perl you can see a 20-300x increase in performance and load handling.

If you'd like some help making this work, please feel free to drop me a line and we can discuss some solutions.

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [ellipsiiis] Ick In reply to
Hi ellipsiiis,

I notice that you run your forum under forums.cgi instead of gforum.cgi, is this a symlink or did you just rename the script?

Cheers...


moog
-- I've spent most of my money on beer and women... the rest I just wasted.
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Re: [travers] Ick In reply to
I just renamed it. Also, as an update to the above, Alex was very helpful and we have the script running with Perlex now, so hopefully this Thursday will be a breeze :)


Realiiity.com Forums
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Re: [ellipsiiis] Ick In reply to
I just wanted to add an update that installation only took a couple of tweaks and the server is running flawlessly this week. Thanks Alex!


Realiiity.com Forums
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Re: [ellipsiiis] Ick In reply to
Good job! Can you calculate some figures for us on the difference Perlex made?

- wil