Kyplex

One of my friends works for a company that has very popular website. This company decided to install OpenAds (also know as OpenX and phpAdsNew) to run banner advertising campaign. OpenAds is a great open source tool used manage online ads.

After project launched, it turns out that dedicated server hosting ads is not able to serve all requests. The server load is too heavy. It is a new server with a bunch of CPU cores.

After some phone debugging of the application, he decided to decrease a number of online ads. It didn't helped. He has even disabled all online advertising campaigns. It had no effect on server load. It was still too high.

Finally I got to the following solution. I advised him to disable network resolution motivated by the fact that online advertising application might require DNS resolution of each IP that connects to the application. I used to create a bunch of Internet applications in the past and I know that this DNS resolution could take some time and if you multiply it by a number of users you can get to a high server load. This indeed helped to resolve OpenAds performance issue !!!

In order to disable DNS resolution and improve performance of OnlineAds he had just removed all records from /etc/resolve.conf file. This file is used to store information about DNS server.

In case you connect to another host to perform database requests from OpenAds server, I advise you to use IP address (DNS resolution will not work, right ?).

I hope this information will be valuable for every OpenAds administrator.

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