One $10 server or two $5 servers?

June 13, 2013 6.2k views
sb73542
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sb73542
Hi everyone, I was wondering what is the fastest setup for a typical LAMP (or LANMP) application on DO. I'm rather underwhelmed by the performance of my Drupal (Pressflow) site running on Nginx on DO. I suspect it might be because of poor DB performance. Would I gain anything by using two $5 servers instead of my current single $10 server? That way I could distribute Nginx + PHP on one VPS and MariaDB on the other one. Thanks for your help!
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3 Answers
webmaster June 13, 2013
1. Turn cache on
2. Inspect your slow-query.log and make proper indexing in DB

If you don't have proper indexing the HDD I/O slows down your site. If you migrate DB to another machine it will have minimal effect depending on how I/O heavy is your code, because the HDD is the same.

How to check if I/O is the problem:
1. A lot of records in slow-query.log most of them SELECTs
2. Low CPU usage and High load averages (you can use newrelic.com for monitoring)
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randyhaupt June 13, 2013
To monitor the I/O activity, you can install iotop ;-)
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chris.gogreen June 21, 2013
upgrade to two cpu's
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