Server with complex and big Database

[Anon]

Hi folks!
We drive an Dell PowerEdge Server with 2 PIII 733 MHz and 512 MBs of RAM. Our database serves an Event- and Locationseeking website. So we have mainly three tables: Events, Locations and Dates. The Number of Events ranges at 15.000, 500.000 Locations and 200.000 Dates. An Event consist of an entry in the events-Table, one in the Dates and one in the Locations-Table. Currently all tables were about 200 MBs big. At the moment we serve about 1,000,000 Pageviews a month, peaks per hour are about 3,000 Pageviews. One Pageview consists of 3-10 Read-Queries.

Our big problem: the server slows down (and the load goes up - our server restarts at a load of 25 - happens sometimes :-((( ) to much, when the Pageviews are at about 2,000 a hour.

We drive the website on RedHat (Kernel 2.2.16-22smp), MySQL 3.23.36 and PHP4.

How can we get a better performance?

Hardware?
The maximum of RAM is to 2 GBs, the maximum Processors we can put in are 1 GHz PIIIs.

Software?
Oracle? Other OS?

Thank you for your response!

Alex

[Anon]

First of all, I hope your DB is normalized as it can be.
If the requests are very homogenous, maybe a apache-proxycache like squid may help.

It could be a good idea to run two computers, one as Web-, the other as DB-server, but there's no experience with that from my side.
Best regards,

King Louie

[fandelem]

Another idea would be putting the Locations table on another database on another computer .. although I think you need to find out (via some logging program attached to apache) what is being request the most -- and see if you can cache it at all (if it is all dynamic, you might want to think about moving whichever table gets the most activity to another computer .. it's really easy to just have PHP connect to another location and perform a query.. I believe the site 'hot or not' did something similar .. splitting their tables between a few computers to share the burden and reduce chances of bottlenecks).

good luck,

kyle