crash

Hi all,

I have a problem. Yesterday a very large influx of visitors to our site brought down our server! :( After some investigation we noticed that we had about 10K visitors in a 9min span before our server went down. We were told by our tech support that our server requires more memory (currently at 2GB) and to reduce the phpMemory limit (currently at 128MB) as well the the number of maximum Clients served.

Background: The Drupal 6 site used to work very well on a VPS until a few months ago. However in order to reduce the server cost as well as to improve performance of the site even more, we decided to move to the cloud and Pantheon. We setup a pantheon server and moved a copy of the site on rackspacecloud and tested it using Jmeter with 1000 users and tested continuously for 4 hours and the load never went more than 1. The Jmeter report showed only .4% error(which was normal i think).

We are running our intranet on a webhosting provider. At first, the provider did not have our requirements at all (some Drupal requirements not possible on a shared hosting because it might affect other customers on that hosting). So paid him more to move from a shared hosting to an own server.