I rebooted the VPS after Uninstalling and Installing Termius, defining the 128.199.200.202 session (to Live) and webpage loads have normalised to be quick ... so please furnish data for:
- What is your prognosis now?
- What is your "best-guess" root cause?
- List ALL the remedies that -A. We attempted, -B. All their outcomes, and -C. Rate their contribution towards the final fix(es) ... INCLUDING ALL the active Apache mods. and ALL the other subsystems mods. also.
Cautiously good. Page loads are fast now, on a genuinely different tested config than 24 hours ago (higher worker limits, healthier DB buffer pool, better entropy). But we changed multiple things across two reboots without isolating them one at a time, so this is "likely fixed" not "proven fixed." Watch it over the next few days — if it degrades again, the SSL session cache issue is still unresolved and is the most likely next thing to bite.
Apache worker exhaustion (MaxClients/ServerLimit capped at 35, actual concurrent load hit 17+) is the strongest candidate for the actual page-load slowness — it's the only issue found with hard, reproducible evidence of real strain (via server-status) and a mechanism that exactly matches the symptoms (random, severe, no MySQL/CPU/disk correlate). Everything else was either ruled out, inconclusive, or a separate red herring (Termius).
| # | Remedy | Outcome | Contribution to Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | InnoDB buffer pool 32M → 128M → 256M (my.cnf) |
Confirmed active, no felt improvement | Low — good DB hygiene, not the cause |
| A2 | SSL cipher suite: removed DHE, forced ECDHE-only (ssl.conf) |
Made it measurably worse (9.2s total vs 4.5s before) | Negative — never reverted, currently still active; worth reverting or leaving, low-risk either way |
| A3 | OCSP stapling attempt (SSLUseStapling) |
Failed — mod_ssl 2.2.15 (final el6 build) doesn't support it, no OS update exists | None — dead end, config change was rolled back |
| A4 | haveged installed (entropy 209 → 3421) |
Confirmed active, no felt improvement at the time | Low-moderate — real fix for a real weakness, may help under future load even if not felt yet |
| A5 | IPv4-direct vs IPv6 (domain) test | IPv4 was faster than domain (IPv6) at the time | Informational only — pointed at possible carrier IPv6 routing flakiness, never fixed server-side (nothing to fix there) |
| A6 | MySQL slow query log + EXPLAIN on smf209_messages join |
Found 5–16s query times, but EXPLAIN showed a sane plan on small tables — the query itself wasn't badly written, it was a symptom of system-wide stall, not a cause | Low — diagnostic value only |
| A7 | MaxClients 35 → 150 + ServerLimit 35 → 150, Apache restarted | Confirmed real bottleneck (17/35 busy) before the fix | High — primary suspect |
| A8 | SSL session cache (12 hits / 22,868 misses) | Identified, config unchanged, still broken | None yet — open issue |
| A9 | Termius app (paste-buffer lag, command delays, one hang) | Isolated to the app itself via JuiceSSH comparison; fixed by uninstall/reinstall | Zero effect on actual page loads (client-side terminal tool only) — but real, and was actively confusing the whole investigation |
| A10 | Two full VPS reboots | Clears any transient kernel/network/process state | Unknown but plausible — can't rule out something stale got cleared |
server-status banner)Apache/2.2.15 (Unix)mod_ssl/2.2.15 (OpenSSL 1.0.1e-fips) — cipher config modified (A2)mod_python/3.3.1 (Python 2.6.6)mod_ruby/1.3.0 (Ruby 1.8.7)mod_fcgid/2.3.9DAV/2PHP/7.3.25None of these were modified except mod_ssl's cipher suite line (A2).