After a lot of sweating and swearing, we’ve had time to track our stats for the last couple of days since our coding and server tweaks and updates, and the numbers are pretty clear:

You can see the highest peak is lunchtime (12PM – 2PM approx) Nov-11 and that was more or less the reflection of the high loads we were getting on the box. Later that night, you can see it dropped when we began the initial tweaks to the Apache configuration and we added additional caching to the site. As you can see on the 12th to 15th, load was still high, but it was already better. You can see the 9 hours of downtime when the load was pretty much dead from the eAccelerator pooch job. Then on the night of the 15th we did additional tweaks to the search system and upgraded Apache and PHP and the scores dropped again by a huge margin. You can see the peaks for the 16th and 17th are much lower than previous days.

Below the chart you can see the current load averages, which are right on the money with our target goal.

So congrats to Elvio, Nick and Jamie on a job well done!