Recently I've been having server troubles lately and I wanted to see if anyone else
was in a similar boat and how you overcame it. Because of these server issues, it's
putting me in a difficult situation and I don't want to give up on a wiki I've
been working on for the last 3 years. I'm hoping to get some advice from others who
run their own wikis, especially high traffic wikis.
Background information:
-Front page runs wordpress (
http://www.koreanwikiproject.com) --- however not much of the
traffic goes here.
-Most of the traffic goes to the wiki on the site:
http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki
-I get less than 2,000 hits a day.
-I was on the shared dreamhost plan for a few years, until dreamhost couldn't handle
the wiki anymore. Lots of time outs and processes getting killed for exceeding my shared
memory capacity recently.
-In the last week I switched to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) on dreamhost (two VPS
actually: one is a regular VPS, the other is for mysql).
-For the first week dreamhost gives you 2300mbs of memory to work with to gauge how much
you need exactly. I turned on php caching using Xcache and this helped performance a
lot. Memory usage is usually under 400 mbs, but I get these huge spikes sometimes (even
exceeded the 2300 mbs given initially). Here is an image of my memory usage (does it every
20 mins I believe):
http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/Memory_usage_aug19.png
-The problem is the way dreamhost handles alloted memory over usage: It reboots the
server. I don't understand why they do this, but they explained it was to protect the
physical memory. This is annoying because anyone downloading anything on the server gets
their connection severed and the site goes down for a short time. In fact I don't see
this happening much to other websites.
I know some of you guys who get a lot more than 2,000 hits and even have semantic wiki
installed and still have done fine. Meanwhile, I'm not sure I want to pay $36 a month
for 2 VPS servers (One is a regular VPS, the other is for mysql) that is going to have
it's connection severed several times a day due to memory spikes. At the same time I
don't want to give up on a wiki I've been working on the past 3 years, so surely
there must be a better way than me having to pay $100 a month for my own server,
especially when my traffic isn't that high. Some advice from others who run wiki sites
would be really appreciated and even comparisons on what you guys are running with the
amount of traffic you get if possible.
Thank you,
Chris
