Hi,
I had links running, had 3 sites listed, and two days later my isp had to shut my site down because search.cgi was using too much system resources (cpu and memory). In my log report it shows that search.cgi was requested 650 times in two days. Any idea why it "eats" resources that much? Sites having 3000 visitors per day, using links, how do they manage?

Your opinion would be really appreciated!
Thank you

I've got three guesses...

1. You're listing a lot of sites (probably close to 1000) and the search.cgi has to go through all of them.

2. Your ISP is using older computers to do their hosting. Linux will run on something as slow as a 33 mHz 386. Hard drive space is extremely cheap compared to processors. I can name ISP's that are hosting on Pentium 90's (and less) to their customers that are on their "less than ten dollars for unlimited transfers and unlimited storage!" plans.

3. It could be a combination of the two put together.

Serving 3000 visitors a day and having a large text-based database on Links will certainly slow down your server to a crawl!

I suggest you migrate to SQL Power Search add-on. What it will do is dump your database to a SQL table and searches will be alot faster - about 3 seconds to complete from my internal network as opposed to 8-9 seconds in the past.

John

I'm having something to your point, just about all the time I look in the admin there's a file called "CORE" its a binary file but I can read some of it, it has lines like out of memeory, memory corupted, Im using the Beta 2 version of Links is any one else getting those files?
Thanks
Joey

650 times in 2 days should ceartainly not overload the server.

I just recently ran into something similiar: I was setting up DBMan on a clients site, yet searches were taking over 35 seconds to complete. The database was only 250k, so I couldn't understand why. I set up the same thing on my server and it finished in under 1 second -- turned out the ISP's CGI server was a 486 66, and this was there dedicated machine just for CGI accounts that clients had to pay extra for. Ugh. Needless to say, we ditched them quickly.

To give you an idea, my site is running off a regular account at an ISP (not a dedicated or anything special) and I average about 12000 cgi calls a day and am still in business. =)

Joey: As for the CORE file, that usually indicates perl is seg faulting and your ISP's server either has some bad memory, or is overloaded.

It's a sad fact, but many ISP's try to shove 300+ accounts on one machine, then if any one starts to use CGI, they shut you down and blame the CGI for overloading the machine. Sure there are poorly written scripts that will loop forever, or suck up resources like there is no tommorrow, but none of my scripts are one of them. =)

Cheers,

Alex

Alex, I know what you are talking about 300+ on one server My sever has about 250+ users on it, as far as the "CORE" file it would make that core file,
Quate:
Sure there are poorly written scripts that will loop forever, or suck up
resources like there is no tommorrow, but none of my scripts are one of them. =)
You can say that again! Your scripts are the best I have ever run accross! I would take Links over a $500,000 dollar script even if itwas offered to me for free! I didnt mean any harm in what I said about that "CORE" file I don't know what exaclty it is, or does and was just wonding why it would keep showing up in there,
P.S.
that "Red" in STMP deal, just out of curicoty should that be their? Its there by default,
Thanks
Joey.

Joey,

Read my post in the beta forum regarding your core file.

~Trekker

Joey: Thanks! As for the Red, no remove that, it's just the name of my proxy server I use for SMTP access. Left it in by mistake, and probably caused some errors for people (by trying to look up some host red).

Cheers,

Alex

After I removed that "Red" the CORE file is no loger generated, just thought I'll let you know,
Thanks
Joey