web app down every three months

Did some simple searches, scanned back a couple of days in this NG, so I guess I haven't done enough homework. And I can't give enough detail yet.

But here's the question anyway, in case the general symptoms ring a bell with someone:

We have a web application installed at a customer's site with apache, Oracle (8), and php on a pair of MSW2k servers. (Oracle, of course, gets its own machine.)

About every three months (rough estimate) the web application starts sending visitors to our "busy" page. (That's the one that catches just about everything but attempts to jump directly to URLs we don't want visitors jumping directly to.) The logs seem to indicate the database is in some strange state, so the customer re-boots the database server. (The customer does not seem to like to re-boot the server.)

I'm inclined to think this is expected behavior for the setup, myself. If I am right, I would sure appreciate a pointer to some material to back me up (and maybe convince my boss to move the database to a Linux box, and apache/php to an openBSD box).

If I'm wrong, and there are some parameters we can look at to tune the database server, I'd appreciate some suggestions.

Joel Rees Received on Fri Jun 21 2002 - 01:46:50 CDT