I regularly monitor my network and CPU usage. After running into performance problems with my Apache web server I decided to update the network statistics process I was using to try and catch performance problems before they happen.
Back in December I noticed problems with timeouts while trying to connect to our website. I could secure shell into the server with no problem. I ran top and noticed no processes running amok and CPU usage was low. There were some httpd Apache server processes running. I could also login to the Plesk control panel. Everything looked ok.
I opened a ticket with our host provider and found out that I needed to learn how to tune my Apache web server.
Recently we decided to prune our list of email subscribers. We had been noticing a drop in response rates to our mail outs and wondered what was going on. Last month we sent out 44,754 newsletters with 24% either viewing or clicking on a link. A year ago we sent 29,255 and had a 30% activity rate.
I've never liked how Movable Type handles Recent Entries. They only show up on the main index page, the very place where your recent posts are already displayed. Why show a list of titles in the sidebar, when you're already displaying the entries themselves. Here's how I 'fix' that so recent entries show up elsewhere, but not on the main page. The beauty of this approach is that you don't even have to republish to have Recent Entries show up on all your pages even if they're static.
Now that the new VPS has stabilized I wanted to see what my network and CPU stats are like. I lost my old scripts when the old hard disk failed. I'll post something about my new and improved backup process soon. However, because I blogged about them, and I was backing up my Movable Type database, so I had copies of my Perl scripts.
Yesterday we started having problems with our VPS. It started out simply enough, it just looked as if the MySQL server process had failed. But by early this morning our VPS provider was saying the hard disk had failed and they were moving us to a new server.
But the real problem started when they said our VPS backups were also corrupt.
Continue reading "Successfull Restore After Hard Disk Crash" »
© 2008 Mike Silversides
