Need help on Site loading & database optimization - URGENT

Hi Friends,

I need some help in making site access fast. On an average my site has the traffic 2500 hits per day and on 16th May it had 60,000 hits. On this day site was loading very slow even it was getting time out. I also check out the processes running by using "top" command it was indicating mysql was taking too much load.

There are around 166 tables (Including PHPBB forum) in my database. All contents on site are displayed by fetching it from database. I have also added indexing to respective tables where it is required. Plain PHP/HTML coding is used.

Technology:

PHP -- 5.2
MYSQL -- 5.0
Apache -- 2.0
Linux

Following is all the server details of my site:

CPU : Single Socket Dual Core AMD Opteron 1212HE
Memory: 2GB DDR RAM
Hard Drive: 250GB SATA
Ethernet: 100Mb Primary Ethernet Card

(/var/log) # uname -a
Linux 2.6.9-67.0.15.ELsmp #1 SMP Tue Apr 22 13:50:33 EDT 2008 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

kernel version:
2.6.9-67.0.15.ELsmp

(/var/log) # free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2026 1976 49 0 143 1474
-/+ buffers/cache: 359 1667
Swap: 1027 0 1027

RAM: 2 G

(/var/log) # df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 227G 20G 196G 10% /
/dev/sda1 99M 12M 82M 13% /boot
none 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 2.0G 196M 1.7G 11% /tmp

Disk usage: 10% used/ 196 G available.

Its an dedicated server and only 1 website is hosted.

Can anybody please suggest how can I optimize site in more appropriate manner so that it will not go down if traffic increases on site.

Thanks
Sandy

Comments

[pion]

Adding memcached, and a reverse proxy like squid as cache would be a logical first step.

[Todd Hoff]

You might also want to address the front-end issues as 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend.

http://highscalability.com/links/weblink/121