We're running an ecommerce site based upon lemonstand (lemonstandapp.com) and we are having problems with performance. We need to get our linode tuned so that apache, mysql etc. are all set-up correctly. We probably need some sort of cacheing system set-up as well. So... LAMP stack and lemonstand is written in PHP.

We're running a number of linodes for different operations and we'd like to have someone we can tap regularly when we need some help.

Thanks.

If you're unable to find someone, people here should be able to give you a lot of pointers for hitting the low-hanging fruit

(forgive me that this isn't what you're asking for directly)

These might be something like:

- Switch from Apache to lighttpd/nginx/litespeed, which tend to perform better than Apache out of the box (Apache tuning can go a long way, although I'd argue that even tuned it's not as fast)

- Make sure you're using an appropriate MySQL configuration. IMO, it's not usually worth manually tweaking this, better to just pick the right sample config for your memory profile and move on

- Installing a PHP opcode cache like APC can ease CPU time

Those are all things that can be done fairly simply. Other options are, if you're under high load, to start scaling horizontally a bit (say, move the MySQL server to its own linode), put a caching linode in front of the rest (with something like varnish, perhaps), or even just scale vertically by getting a faster linode. I'm not saying that throwing money at the problem is warranted, just that it's one of the many options for getting more performance

Might be good to narrow down *whats* causing the traffic. That way you aren't just tweaking things blindly (You can tweak MySQL all you want but if your issue is your app uses too much disk IO then you're 'fixing' the wrong thing). Optimize but target your optimization.

The usual culprit in my experience is lack of memory. If your system starts swapping it might as well just explode.

Not trying to cut out any Linode guru's - so be sure to give any that reply first shot.

But....

If nobody here has the time or interest - there's a Slicehost guy that does VPS support - and seems to have a pretty good following.

Info at:

http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php ... e=1#Item_0