It outright crashed the other day, and my ISP said:
QUOTE
The load average on your server reached about 400, which is extremely high. This seems to be due in a fairly large part to many instances of Movable Type search being called, each one taking up about 6% to 15% of the processor. I reset the system, as I was not able to login locally due to the high load.
There were multiple calls to 'mt-search.cgi' on the system that were hogging up all of the system's resources. Technicians began killing the defunct processes of mt-search.cgi to alleviate the system load - but they
the .cgi would just spawn back several copies again.
After we investigated Apache's activity, we didn't really see much traffic directly to "mt-search.cgi", so we were wondering if you automatically call it when a visitor first bulls up the front page. There was an alarming
amount of calls to the search function. Roughly 400 requests for the main page were backed up because the system was still waiting for mt-search.cgi to terminate.
Once we have the system restored I think you might want to have a look at restricting the search a bit, as you said. We'll keep a close eye on the server once it is back in service, and see if we can suggest anything else to you.
There were multiple calls to 'mt-search.cgi' on the system that were hogging up all of the system's resources. Technicians began killing the defunct processes of mt-search.cgi to alleviate the system load - but they
the .cgi would just spawn back several copies again.
After we investigated Apache's activity, we didn't really see much traffic directly to "mt-search.cgi", so we were wondering if you automatically call it when a visitor first bulls up the front page. There was an alarming
amount of calls to the search function. Roughly 400 requests for the main page were backed up because the system was still waiting for mt-search.cgi to terminate.
Once we have the system restored I think you might want to have a look at restricting the search a bit, as you said. We'll keep a close eye on the server once it is back in service, and see if we can suggest anything else to you.
Right, ok. Apparantly they also had a hardward problem, so this might be partly a smoke screen.
Still, what could cause such a catastophe? I know people use the search function, but I can't image it causes this much chaos.
Facts - I do have MTPAginate on the search template, so it lists all possible results on multiple pages. Should I turn this off? Should I incorporate "lastn=something" on the search template page?
I'm certainly no doing any automatic calls to the search script that I know of, could there be a robot loose doing crazy things?
I'm at a loss, as I have no idea how to diagnose the prob.... many thanks!