I upgraded ubunu 10.04 --> 14.04 on our ancien powermac g4 staging/dev server about a week ago, mainly to get more recent lamp stack running (note it was up > 5-years running 10.04 with very, very few problems).

So far so good.

On Friday I essayed latest stable wordpress even though the stack is still a bit underspec for that, and it installed fine and seems to run ok (in very limited use).

But something's gone south between then and now. When I try to ssh in after it's been running overnight, it's really sluggish and will even timeout before the connection can be made. This has happened twice, even after a mysql tune-up (reduced memory footprint).

Generally the load comes down if I stop the mysql process, but I still had to hit the hw reset button to get it back up to speed, as it would not seem to come back up after a sudo reboot command.

After that it appears to run fine through the day, with no discernible climb in load, cpu or swap use except in response to immediate demands.

Here's a top screen cap 1st thing this morning (after I'd already stopped mysql):


Also attached is a phpsysinfo screen cap after reboot, with sql running, showing it's pretty much 'normal' load while I'm here keeping an eye on it (I've not expanded running processes sections, as you can see they were consuming very few resources so I don't think that would be helpful).

Any ideas what may be causing this issue?

OK, so I gave it a swappiness haircut (60 --> 20), and an apache2 mpm_prefork haircut:

StartServers          3
MinSpareServers       3
MaxSpareServers      3
MaxRequestWorkers          50
MaxRequestsPerChild   750

wordpress still works, though it's noticeably slower (though that could also be down to slow-ass tenfourfox)

Here's a late-afternoon top screencap. I might try to grab a couple more this evening, if I can tear myself away from L4D2, so there's a pretty slim chance of that.

And the load avg ~3.5-hr later is .01 .05 .05

May have this sucker licked...

Yep, made it overnight. Server performance seems good too, even WP.

Absolutely no chance of sticking some more RAM in the old thing?

Looks like you can get 2GB of suitable RAM for $20CAD

(I should really do some work)

That's actually an excellent idea.

If it's truly ancient and requires it, I've got some SD RAM up for grabs...

Thanks, I've sourced some here:

http://www.canadaram.com/apple_powermac_g4.htm

512MB@$25

EBay! You can get a full 2GB for that price (from China)

I might could beat that at some of the shops that sell pulls around here, but not really worth the bother to me or my boss. Better to have something we can return if it doesn't work. We bought ram from them before and it's been good.

No worries!

Ditch Apache and install nginx and PHP5-FPM instead. You'll thank me later.

I am curious, is there a software reason to keep that old thing running or just because it is sitting there?  I am pretty cheap and buy everything from my own pocket, but even I don't have computers that old.

Um, you're talking to a guy shooting film in a 1960's Spotmatic. It horrifies me how much perfectly good gear goes on the scrap heap to make room for the latest shiny (usually not well-made) bauble. Of course then I gets to buy it cheap. So there's that.