[cobalt-developers] handling extreme load

[Matthew Nuzum <cobalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I was just appraised that a customer is making a presentation of a new
application.  They expect the presentation will yield about 3000
simultaneous users into the website directly after.

I'm a little concerned about my server's ability to handle this load.

I have to say that I'm a little skeptical that there will be this high
of a turnout, but at the same time, whenever you say something like
that, Murphy's law is more often right than wrong.

I have a Raq4i with 256MB of Ram.  I run MySQL set to "medium" mode,
meaning I used the my-medium.cnf default config file which is optimized
for systems willing to dedicate about 64MB of RAM to the db.  I use the
MySQL databases for many of the sites on this server.

Unfortunately, this customer's application uses PostgreSQL, so I
upgraded the Postgres to 7.1.2 a while back.  I set the connections to
45, but I use all persistent connections.

I do not use ASP on this server, therefore I've turned it off.  However,
it still runs in the background.  Whenever I turn it off, the cobalt
cron job turns it back on within 45 minutes.  ps aux shows: 
/home/chiliasp/asp-apache-3000/caspd
running a number of times.  I'd like to make this stop running.

I have set the max clients in the httpd.conf file to 50.  I found that
the typical httpd child process uses about 12-14 MB of Ram, of which 9.5
is shared.  Therefore taking the remaining 4.5 MB of RAM, multiplying
that by 50 children process yields an alarming 225 MB of RAM usage. 
(can you believe the server shipped with a default of 300?)

Can anyone make a suggestion on what I can do to help the server hold up
to this load?  Any advise is appreciated.

Matt