midtoad's blog

Webserver woes

Posted Tuesday Nov. 1st... If you've been trying to gain access to this site over the past couple days, you'll have noticed periods of unavailability of the server. There's no set of rack-mounted servers here with a full RAID system for extra reliability, all serviced by a trained maintenance team; instead, there's a single NSLU2, and a frustrated owner sitting a long way in an office wondering why he can't access his own website.

Something is causing my server to lock up periodically, and I don't know what it is. I don't even have enough diagnostic tools at this point to tell if the CPU is getting overtaxed, or the memory is being all used up, or a rogue process is taking over the whole system, or it's something else. I'll be doing some troubleshooting over the next few days, and apologize for any inconvenience.

Update Saturday Nov. 5th... still having problems; my server seems to hang periodically. Worse, I am unable to download and install the diagnostic packages I need in order to troubleshoot. All I can do is occasionally check the server and reboot if necessary. Sorry.

Update Sunday Nov. 6th... I've moved my Frog blog over to a 2nd NSLU2 server that I had available. This unloads the primary server so it handle the other tasks it needs to. Let's see if this makes a difference to system stability!

Update Monday Nov. 7th... System has been running well the past 24 hours, so offloading this blog onto a second NSLU2 has had some effect. Of course, I also switched from Apache to Cherokee webserver, so that's likely also reduced the load.

Next thing will be to move some of my dynamic website content from mySQL to another, lighter-weight, database, possibly sqlite.

Update Wednesday Nov. 9th... numerous reboots required yesterday. This is not working well! With more and more traffic expected onto my bikeroots site, I need better reliability than the NSLU2 seems to be able to provide. I think it's time to move everything back to the old webserver, a Pentium-III 1 GHz machine with lots of RAM and a large hard drive.