dropping connections

[anewday]

On my multimedia site, a lot are complaining that their connections are slow and eventually dropped. The server load during that period was high and the port was maxed out, does litespeed do this purposely? Never had this kind of complaint with Apache, it still serves the connection despite the server load the port speed maxed.

 

[mistwang]

Those might be the result of your per client limits configurations, raise the limit a little bit may help.
However, if a user try to make 30 concurrent connections to your server, he should be banned.

 

[anewday]

There is only a limit of 2000 total connections to the server and there are no other limits placed. I did this purposely to test how well litespeed performs on a busy download only site without any restrictions on the number of sessions per IP. And, even if there were limits, why would it disconnect existing connections? Doesn't it affect *new* connections only?

Also, I noticed the load went down a lot when I raised the Memory I/O buffer to 300M, could it have anything to do with the problem at hand? Lastly, whenever the load is high, iowait is at 60-70%. Why is it so high when all it's doing is serving files, not like it's writing to the drive.

 

[mistwang]

No, it will not discount existing connections.
If you serving the download files through PHP streaming, then you should increase your Memory I/O buffer, LSWS will buffer the dynamic content generated by PHP, when the memory I/O buffer used up, it will use swap files as buffer.

If you have control over your code, the best solution would be using our internal redirect method to let lshttpd serve static file directly. Checkout our wiki.

 

[anewday]

It's not using php, just a simple direct download link to a multimedia file.

 

[mistwang]

Memory I/O buffer does not affect direct download.
If we could logon to you server while it is having problem, we might be able to help.