Ramping up nicely - 10 - 50 concurrent clients

Here is the link to the stress test graph below generated by the loadimpact.com server hitting the main url of tingoo.com/forum with 10,20,30,40 and 50 clients (max is 50 for freeloaders like me! :)

There were 24000 total requests in the span of about 4 minutes! That is not bad for a vanilla install, given that there aren't any posts out there yet and most of it is being handled by the cache on the server side, but still :)

Details

Target:
www.tingoo.com/forum/

Test started:
2009-07-09 10:58:34

Test ended:
2009-07-09 11:09:34

Clients 10 20 30 40 50
Delay (s) 4.34 4.45 4.54 4.94 5.29

This is on a 256mb VDS (with that ungodly turbopanel turned off!) The max memory never hit more than 80mb which is pretty darned good too! I was also able to keep browing the forum and viewing pages when 50 simulated clients were hitting it. I don't think Tingoo will ever hit 50 concurrent users anytime soon.

Time to start populating the forums, but the first order of business is the selection of an appropriate theme.

GoDaddy VDS (VPS ?)

Well, Godaddy has taken its share of knocks for being "this", "that" or the "other", but my experience hasn't been as bad as the one others describe. Maybe GoDaddy is working to get better? I dunno. My setup was all automated and flawless, SSL certificate and domain registration was a cinch and I even recieved two calls by their data center folks to help clear up the confusion caused by a poor choice of terms (imo).

In any case, I would say that the "help documentation" is still very elementary and instead of explaining the context of the item being "helped", it merely describes the buttons on a given panel. For example, you would see frustratingly annonying things over and over again in the "help articles"; things like, "Press the Configure DNS button to configure DNS"

All you can say to that is W.T.F. !!!

This brings us to the other issue. The basic VDS offered by GoDaddy is competitively priced, comes with 256mb of "dedicated" ram and maybe 512mb of "burstable" (whatever that means!) ... personally, I'm not counting on getting more than 256mb, if that.

So, you get your shiny new Virtual Dedicated Server, and despite the fact that it only has 256mb of ram, you think you can run a few websites off of it before you hit the memory wall? NOT SO!

Not if you plan to run their "Simple Control Panel". That thing uses tomcat and ends up hogging about 140mb of real RAM out of your allotted 256MB! So, I found this helpful little article here which explains how to optimize the memory situation on your VDS and how to stop this thing. (see here)

The gist of it is as follows:

To stop running turbopanel and tomcat daemons:

su - root
/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop
/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

To stop autostart of "turbopanel" and "tomcat" on reboot, do:

chkconfig turbopanel off
chkconfig tomcat55 off

To only start it when you want to use the Simple Control Panel, Do this:

/etc/init.d/tomcat55 start
/etc/init.d/turbopanel start

To turn it back off:

/etc/init.d/turbopanel stop
/etc/init.d/tomcat55 stop

Well, how much memory would you save? About 140MB! YESSIREEBOB!!

I was using around 178MB before and after turning my turbopanel/tomcat instance off, I see that it is down to about 38MB with apache, mysql and postfix running.

Happy VDS'ing!