Hi

Our main JISCmail service currently has about 4400 lists on it. It is a
standalone server, running Windows 2000 Server (recently upgraded from NT4)
and Apache 2 (recently upgraded from 1.3x) on a dual-Xeon 550, with 512Mb
RAM and a hardware RAID5 disk config.

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the performance of the web
interface.

At peaks times the web interface has always slowed down a bit, but maybe 1-3
times a week it would grind to a halt altogether. At these times, when I
looked at the server, I would find that there were 50 wa.exe processes
running (Presumably 50 instances of a process is an NT/W2K or Apache
limit?).. Now, the processor usage would be fine (say not more than 40-50%)
and there would be 100-250Mb of free physical memory. Disk space is not a
problem. What's more, while the web interface had ground to a halt, other
pages not requiring CGI were perfectly navigable. In other words it only
seemed to be the CGI locked up.

I thought what maybe happening was that as the web interface got a bit
slower at peak time, users would start a process, get impatient, hit their
browser's Stop button, but the process on the server would still be active.
Then they'd try again and cause another wa.exe process to start. Then a
couple of dozen other users would do the same thing and before you know a
jam of processes occured. On some ocassions, to get the web interface going
again, I had to use the NT resource kit's Kill utility to kill all the
wa.exe processes. Not an ideal course of action but it got the web interface
generally working again!

However, I am still no wiser as to what the *cause* of the problem is and
why it only seems to be affecting CGI. I was rather hoping that upgrading to
Win2k/Apache 2 would help solve the problem. While, in the last 2-3 weeks
since the upgrade, we haven't had a case where the processes have built up
to 50, the web interface still can get very slow to the point where it takes
5+ minutes to work, or times out.

We also want to upgrade Listserv to 1.8e, but I am concerned the new
features will exacerbate the problem. Has anyone else here had similar
problems? How do you find performance of the web interface on your servers,
how many lists do you have, what hardware spec etc?

Thanks

--
Spencer Warhurst
Listserv Service Manager

JISCmail -> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk
Mailtalk -> http://www.mailtalk.ac.uk