Hmm..

edited May 2012 in Hardware
Not sure where to put this, in hardware or software.

But what's the minimum system for something running a LAMP setup? I recently retired the old Celeron system for a slightly (very slightly) newer system, a 1GHz Duron. But PHPBB still seems a little slow, and so do a few other PHP and MySQL related things.

The system has a measly 384MB of RAM, but it's fairly temporary, as soon as I can get some stuff to replace it. I might just make my Pentium 4 system the server instead..

Comments

  • Well, it doesn't take much to run a LAMP server. But it really depends on what you're hosting and how many users you have.

    WinBoards, once upon a time, was hosted on a P4. I think it survived on less than that at some point in its life...
  • It's lagging really badly with PHPBB. Sometimes login operations take seemingly forever, but they never truly time out.

    I just upgraded it to a P4 system, and it's still doing it. I have a feeling that's not the problem. And I'm not accessing it via the internet, I'm accessing it from across the room. Is there maybe something I'm doing wrong here?

    Or could it just be my router?
  • K, so maybe this should be moved to software now.

    Because it suddenly is working just fine. It's running perfectly now. Perfectly. Everything is speedy and smooth. I've done nothing, and I mean, literally nothing to it. But it's working smoothly now.

    What the hell is going on here?
  • What the hell is going on here?

    It's Linux. This is normal.
  • K, so maybe this should be moved to software now.

    Because it suddenly is working just fine. It's running perfectly now. Perfectly. Everything is speedy and smooth. I've done nothing, and I mean, literally nothing to it. But it's working smoothly now.

    What the hell is going on here?

    Probably some background process eating up CPU cycles...

    is this a fresh phpBB install or an old one?
  • Fresh, I think I'm going to re-install it though.
  • My two secret weapons are APC and PostgreSQL. On average spongebob (winboards server) uses ~300MB of RAM and serves up fairly fast.
  • It's not about RAM now. Checking TOP, this new system with over 1GB of RAM is mostly free. It's something else, I'm thinking it's network related. Or a PHP bug. (Maybe this should be moved to software)
  • I used to run a PHPBB forum on a dual 650Mhz P3 with probably 256MB of ram. I don't know if PHPBB 3 requires a little more umph out of a machine but you could always test out BOD's idea and try a windows AMP platform.
  • It seems like when it does this, SSH tunneling gets glitchy too. I was running top through an SSH tunnel on my laptop, and it said there was only about 3% CPU usage, but then the screen got frozen.

    So I have no idea what's going on. This has happened with three different systems, it's the reason I'm transplanting the hard drive. What could be going on here?
  • What version of linux are you using anyways? It may need to be tweaked, or just try a different OS like windows 2000 or something to see if the problem still occurs.
  • This has happened with three different systems, it's the reason I'm transplanting the hard drive. What could be going on here?

    Wait, so you've been moving the hard drive between three different systems? Keeping the same OS install on all three?

    If so, that should tell you the problem isn't with hardware. Unless it's the hard drive itself. The problem is likely in software... so backup the files and try reinstalling the OS.
  • I'm using Debian 6.0.5.

    Well there's also a chance it's the hard drives. They're older, slower hard drives. I'm going to try with a newer one tomorrow, and with a new Debian install. I'm sure that a Northwood Pentium 4, hell, even a 1GHz Duron should be enough for a simple PHPBB3 forum with only one user. :|
  • aka, Squeeze. You know, I only just recently realized that all of the Debian versions were named after Toy Story characters?
  • Lol yeah, I've always liked that.

    And it's release cycle. Even though a lot of people bash it for having out of date packages, I've always liked the fact that most updates are just security updates and don't require much configuring. If I wanted modern packages, I'd use Sid.
  • Somehow after all these years I still never found a reason to learn Linux in depth. I can manage my way around it set up some services but always wind up just using windows to accomplish anything.

    Hope you figure out if the hard drives are causing the bottleneck, at least then we can fully rule out hardware.
  • I bet it is. It's the only hardware either servers have had in common, and well.. they're old drives lol. Too small for a server anyway, imo.
  • Even 15 year old IDE hard drives should still be good enough to run PHPBB. Its more a matter of are they starting to fail, if it has some bad sectors and knows about them then the controller could be trying to recheck the errors which would cause it to lock up.
  • Somehow after all these years I still never found a reason to learn Linux in depth. I can manage my way around it set up some services but always wind up just using windows to accomplish anything.

    I've had to learn Linux because that's what my university teaches. They are working on teaching more Windows stuff now, but for most of my time there, all they've taught is Linux.

    It is nice because I never got much into Linux on my own. I dabbled here and there, but preferred to stay in Windows.

    Now I can live happily in either OS. I still prefer Windows for most things, but there's a few things I'd prefer to use Linux for. Mostly on the server side of things.
  • At work our servers are ~90% Linux based. I still use Windows on my workstation however.
  • I've always liked Linux better on a server, if just because I like being able to use a modern command line. It's so much faster for a server related task. And I can disable the entire desktop manager, and not even use the graphics card.
  • I've always liked Linux better on a server, if just because I like being able to use a modern command line. It's so much faster for a server related task. And I can disable the entire desktop manager, and not even use the graphics card.

    Yeah, but you can do that on Windows now too.

    The Windows command line can be quite powerful as well, especially with powershell.
  • BlueSun wrote:
    I've always liked Linux better on a server, if just because I like being able to use a modern command line. It's so much faster for a server related task. And I can disable the entire desktop manager, and not even use the graphics card.

    Yeah, but you can do that on Windows now too.

    The Windows command line can be quite powerful as well, especially with powershell.

    You can disable the desktop completely, leaving you with a text only system?

    Why do I not know how to do this? :|
  • Yeah, Microsoft is moving to a remote management model. You have your personal workstation in your office and connect to the datacenter (since MMC snapins can do that) and manage all your machines from the comfort of your own environment, instead of having 8 RDP sessions open. It will actually be pretty cool in Windows Server 8 since everything AFAIK will be scriptable with PowerShell - and the GUIs will just run PS commands underneath - and those can run across many machines simultaneously. Microsoft is a little late to the game (Puppet was there years ago), but it is going to kick ASS when properly implemented.

    I mean, as much as a Windows server can. If you're doing Windows stuff it'll be great, anyway.
  • You can already do a lot without RDP sessions if you have the admin pack installed (Well, now it's called Remote Server Administration Tools... MS likes to rename things to longer, more complicated names).

    I have scripts to manage AD and DNS remotely. It's awesome sauce.
  • Ah. Learning a lot from this thread. XD

    Eh, well I've had a busy week. Hopefully monday I'lll get to finish setting it up again, and see if it does it again. I already reinstalled Debian, I just didn't configure anything.
  • Best way to tell if this is network related is to setup a constant ping to the server, get a baseline, and then load some pages and see if the latency increases or if you get timeouts.
  • Good idea. That never even occurred to me. XD
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