Stability of APC and MySQL

Oh, I'd also like to add to this that it seems at least once per day, my primary and secondary menu's dissapear. I've been going in, disabling one menu item, re-enabling it, and the problem is fixed. But that also seems pretty odd to me.

I have a somewhat unusual situation (more than 400 vhosts on the box) so my configs are likely an edge case, but I have my apc.shm_size set to 768. I see a little bit of fragmentation, but it seems to be happy and stable for the week or more that I can usually make it before I have to bounce apache (for a new vhost or config change, not due to instability).

What version of APC are you on? There have been some improvements regarding fragmentation in recent versions (3.1.3, especially). Also, what is your apc.rfc1867_freq set to? If it's the default ("0"), your file uploads may be hammering the crap out of the cache with way too frequent updates.

This problem has been resolved for me. It seems that no matter what I tried, the server I was running on just didn't have the memory to handle the caching I needed to do.

I upgraded to a new server with 4x the RAM and 4x the CPU for $5 a month more (I sure wish they offered that package when I started this site) and now it's screaming fast. Memcache runs great, APC has zero fragmentation, and life is good.

There are probably a few more things I could do to really speed things up, but we're talking about a 1million page view per month site here, not 1 million per day, so additional tweaking to shave a few ms off the load time probably isn't worth the additional effort.

Thanks for the help everyone.

I'm using Godaddy due to cost vs. performance.

for example, with godaddy shared hosting, the servers are hampered with lack of APC (something common, but not undoable in my opinion, since providers could require customers to set in on manually, hence less users actually using it).
if you select godaddy older shared hosting, still available, the server lags tremendously.

for the DB part, it's mediocre. typical small sites can run fast enough though.
for the web server part, either they are overselling too much, or their apache and php configuration just plain sucks, as it's tad slow.

for American users, i'd say try host gator. it doesn't seems bad and has a decent control panel (cpanel instead of godaddy limited hosting manager).

for European users, forget about renting any kind of server from godaddy in their US datacenter (texas?). You're way better off with the Euro center (germany?) (and vice-versa). The latencies and speeds are horrible between the continents.
on the other hand, for the price they provide, i don't know any comparable competitors in Europe (for shared hosting).

as for VPS and dedicated servers - the server specs are way way way LOW compared to other providers.
they rent you a fiat, when you can have a lamborghini for the same money somewhere else.
also, anywhere and everywhere i've searched, i only found bad reviews of their VPS and dedis.

i don't have much knowledge of good VPS/dedi providers (much less for Europe), but i can say safely that LayeredTech is a good one, albeit, expensive.

finally, to conclude bashing godaddy... their stock default settings for php, are really bad. as soon as you rent from them, you'll find yourself changing those. they even provide you an almost useless phpmyadmin interface, hampered by the 2MB upload limit!!! (which you can't override in your php.ini as it's located in another server) and constant logging out. It's also really outdated (2.6.x), to keep compatibility with PHP4. To resolve those issues, just install manually your phpmyadmin, on a per domain/site basis.

on the other hand, their support works and they do allow you to change a lot of settings on shared hosting (changeable at the php.ini level, which is great).
their domain service is also great, one of the best around with competitive prices.

but there's worse, like 1and1 (for both domains and hosting).

this comes from a previous customer of 1and1 VPS (US), LayeredTech dedi (US), Godaddy shared hosting (US); currently Godaddy shared hosting (EU) customer.
my complaint to the EU shared hosting server is mainly lack of APC. had i had enough money, i would go dedi all the way... but definitely not at godaddy :P

cheers

Well, while i'm in here,

Please some one point some good VPS / dedi hosts in Europe :D
language isn't a constraint unless it's an eastern country.

UK, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, etc would be fine for me.
best price / quality factor. decent support, not extreme or non-existant.
not past 50€ for VPS and not past 150€ for dedi. that with proper hardware, not crappy Pentium III and Celerons...

to my knowledge, the best are in Sweden and other nordic countries.
i'm sure english customers will get along fine with them, with or without google translate ^^

thanks!