10%

Using the “Hostnames” report within Google Analytics, I was able to identify that 10% of users access the site via the m subdomain and 40% use www – the rest not using any subdomain at all. This was a real stroke of luck as it allowed me to test the new server with a controllable percentage of the total traffic, simply by updating the DNS records.

When given 10% load the VPS handled just fine, so after two days I moved on and tried it with 50%.

50%

A second report from Google Analytics also helped tremendously: hourly visits. With about 45% of hits coming from Indonesia (yes, really), I needed to know what time was the best window to try any drastic changes to the servers. The graph clearly shows that the longest quiet period I get is between 6pm and 9pm GMT – when most of Indonesia is asleep and web traffic drops in half:

On the first few occasions that I did try 50% of the load pointing at the new server – it buckled and almost completely fell over. A chat with Nick, a friend from Heavy Sumo, led me to explore the Apache configuration – and what a bizarre experience that was.

Here’s the settings that were used by default on the server, compared with the Apache defaults and the settings on the old server:

Notice the difference?

I have no idea why WebFusion would have their defaults so low. Changing these to match the settings of the old server had a significant boost on performance.

I left 50% traffic on the new server for a couple of weeks, and tried a couple of times to add a bit more, but users quickly complained about the site slowing down.  The slow down matched up to the Indonesian peak time around 2pm GMT, so I rolled back the DNS to point to the old server again.

90%

This stage required a little further exploration of Apache performance tuning articles. One interesting fact I discovered was that Apache has a hard-coded MaxClients limit of 256, which you can only raise by recompiling Apache – so that wasn’t particularly an ideal option.

The Apache Performance Tuning article from devside.net was the answer to my problems. It suggested a number of different solutions, two of which were to adjust Keep Alive and Timeout settings.

These changes, combined with the forking settings above, have made the server run much more smoothly. In fact, it’s now taking 100% of the traffic and people are noticing an improvement in speed.

100%

With the new server running well for a month, I then asked the previous host to delete the old server. Hopefully the new server should last a while before I need to consider load balancing to a second server.