On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:09, Benjamin Smith wrote: > The best way is to find out what the problem actually is. Have you looked > at /var/log/httpd/error_log and related logs? > > What about MySQL? When it's timing out, what's top report? Does the site ping > properly when these failures occur? > > Your question is sorta like going to a mechanic and saying "My car sometimes > doesn't run - what's wrong with it?". Apache/MySQL don't just quit working > without a very good reason - stock CentOS 4.2 install will handle mid-level > traffic (many millions of hits per month) on commodity hardware with > virtually no configuration changes or performance tuning, so problems like > you describe are most certainly due to a problem, usually hardware. On the other hand, mysql isn't particularly bright about optimizing queries, so if you do something like join data from three tables while sorting by something in one of them you can expect things to crunch as the tables grow to the point where it has to write temp files to hold things before the sort. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com