I haven’t been so active anywhere on the net these days, my server is giving me real headache…as many of you know, I recently purchased a dual xeon 2.8 gig machine (which is bit advanced compared to old sever, feature wise), I was in impression that old server had some issues with hardware (read it as CPU) and because of that server load is most of the times high…

I changed the server, but this did not solve the problem, infact the server became totally unstable…now, tracing out the scripts was the totally painful task…this caused me lot of downtime and more than that, frustration…I had almost given up the hope, because things were not going on well and I did not want my customers to face any problems but Ashish gave me lots of hope and I will never forget his support 🙂

Basically in this period, any person will go mad, specially when he is ready to spend any number of amount to fix the problem but still experts cannot fix the problem…I had almost spent around Rs. 15,000 on it (US guys charge around 70-80$ per hour) and had lost the hopes but I did not stop trying out each and everything, I was trying hard to reach the base of the problem.

I knew that the problem was related to PHP scripts causing load on mysql but the question was “which scripts?” We identified few scripts (My old linux expert company and me) and asked users to fix it but still the problem did not stop.

I hired other company to see what can be wrong… they traced out the cause, which was related to wordpress blogs (I knew that wordpress was causing problem but I did not know how?), the main reason for this was WordPress Cache…so we disabled it in many blogs.

The server became bit stable but still it had some downtimes on random basis which made me worried more than earlier…because we had no clue when things will go down…the load remains around 1 throughout the day and suddenly it reaches 20,30,40,60 and machine goes down because of high load. Now this made me totally frustrated…But I did not want to loose hope since I had reached last stage and fixed the most of the issue, only this issue was left…

After digging the server like mad, I found out that, the issue was with mysql, it had some issues with temp tables and it was eating up my memory….

Okay, but how do I fix it? I was on mysql 4.1.18, the latest version was mysql 4.1.19 but cpanel did not have the latest version ready…so all I had to do was, wait, wait and wait…but luckily, cpanel updated their version to latest yesterday, I updated the mysql and I think the problems have been fixed 🙂

Today the server did not cause problem in the morning (it used to do it around 11.30AM daily) and I hope it does not cause the issue again…(Since I have fixed everything what I knew)

And if it still creates the issues again, I am ready to take the challenge and fight it…but won’t loose hope…

So, the purpose of this post was to say that, do not loose hope anytime, the problems will keep on coming and if you loose hope, nothing will happen…face the problems, let the problems try to destroy you mentally but face it and kill it…one day you will be the winner 🙂

Life