Any Tips to Optimize Server Performance for High-Speed Broadband?

[stormbreaker]

Hi everyone,
I recently upgraded to high-speed broadband and noticed that my server sometimes struggles to keep up, especially during peak usage. I run multiple websites on a dedicated server, and I’m wondering if there are specific settings or tools that can help optimize server performance to handle the increased data flow efficiently.

Has anyone faced similar issues or found effective solutions for improving server speed and reducing latency?

While researching, I came across some resources on dedicated server setups here: https://www.onliveserver.com/. They seem helpful, but I’d love to hear real-world advice from this community.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

[countrypaul]

You need to give more details of what type of web serving you are providing and what software & hardware is in use. For example, is there sufficient RAM to allow optimal caching or is there high I/O due to lack of RAM? If hosting an application using a large Oracle DBMS, then have you put the indexes on separate drives to the data and system. 

Determining where any bottleneck is can be a time consuming process and improving one of the three main HW components (CPU, RAM, I/O) can often just move the problem to the next one.

If the HW is clearly not limiting things, then is the software setup for the number of  simultaneous clients and websites?

Optimising server performance is a process that can often take time and occasionally find unexpected causes.

I remember the cause of one application that was taking several minutes to start I traced to a single file that was fragmented into over 18,000 separate pieces and many file extension headers (this more than 25yrs ago) and when opening the file all the file headers had to be read. A 3600rpm disk with iirc 3Mb/s throughput did not help

[stormbreaker]

Thank you for the detailed response! You're absolutely right—optimizing server performance often requires a thorough review of both hardware and software configurations. Your experience with the fragmented file highlights how even seemingly small issues can create significant bottlenecks, and I can imagine how challenging that must have been with older hardware limitations.

In my case, I am hosting multiple websites on a dedicated server, and the setup includes a combination of dynamic content and static assets. The server has 64GB of RAM and SSDs for storage, so I’ve been leveraging caching mechanisms to reduce I/O, but I suspect that my current bottleneck might be related to how the web server (Apache/Nginx) handles simultaneous client requests during peak loads. I’ve also considered load balancing as an option, but I’m still evaluating if that’s necessary for my current traffic levels.

As for the database, I’m using MySQL with indexes, but I haven’t split the indexes onto separate drives as you suggested. That’s a great idea, and I’ll look into whether that could help optimize performance further.

[countrypaul]

It is worth looking at resource usage when the server is under heavy load. You do not mention which OS is in use but if windows even looking at the default process and performance tabs  can give clues as to what may be happening. For example, if AV software is running and hogging lots of I/O  & CPU it would have a significant detrimental effect o the performance of other software.  If the disk usage is very low then splitting the indexes onto a separate drive might yield no gain. All all the drives within HW RAID configurations?