Load on Server Problem

[innerself]

While gtranslate runs fine most of the time, there are periods where it brings the server down and has to be rebooted. First I am sure it is gtranslate. I have narrowed it down to:
1. A script hangs on occasion. I was told it might not be closing properly. ??? I see no evidence myself.
2. Traffic spike (primarily search engines) causes high cpu load.
3. Had a 53 % reading on the disk i/o on one shutdown. I think this is the problem. Are all the little cache files causing an excess i/o load.

I see that APC will not run with ioncube loader. Any alternatives?

I am running about 5000 joomla pages and 6-10,000 non viewed pages a day on the server and about 1,500 front end pages and about 2,000 or so non-viewed through gtranslate. I am using the force translation entry in htaccess.

Dedicated Server at Hostgator running Cpanel, php 5.3 4GB ram, 8 processors. There are about 3,000 pages and 30 languages = 90000 potential pages for search engines to index. The engines can be very aggressive at times when 4 or 5 are on at a time. I am pretty sure this is the spike. It seems like it might also be around the turn of the clock when the quota is reset?? This of course would increase the writing to disk?

Load average is mostly around 4 except when maintenance or mail program is running then about 9-10. When a spike hits and this appears to be search engines the load will jump to about 15 then gradually climbs to 400 or so until shut down. It is like a train crash with engine stopping and the rear cars pancaking ahead.

I really like the program but can't live with it bringing down the server or running where people can't load other pages. My page load time has soared on Google since gtranslate was installed. I am hoping this will come down as things get translated?

Further update: 5/12/2012
After a a high load average session this morning for about 4 hours, it appears the culprit is Baidu Spider. They are calling joomla searches in English and running through gtranslate for results in a different language. It is as if they are asking joomla to create search results for them. I have added this to the robots.txt to block this behavior hopefully.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?*

I would appreciate you advice. regards
bobby

[Yana]

Hi,
You need to change your server with more powerful server which can handle the load or you can consider using our Enterprise service.

[innerself]

I see no point in paying extra money just to accommodate a bad bot.

So I will ask this question differently.
1. Does the gtranslate script hang during heavy use to your knowledge.
2. Does a traffic spike using gtranslate cause a load average rise because of cpu load or i/o read and writes.
3. I see that APC will not run with ioncube loader. Any alternatives to APC?
4. Do you have any knowledge of BaiduSpider calling a joomla english search to be translated.
5. Is a sharp rise in google page load statistics characteristic with normal gtranslate usage. Since google is said to be paying close attention to this for page rankings then to your knowledge is this something to be concerned about with gtranslate usage. Is this average page load time rise your experience.

[Edvard]

1. No, we have no known issues
2. It requires a little CPU to make the translation
3. No, APC is only for saving the script compilation time which is very short. It won't make the process of the translation faster
4. No, you can block it using your .htaccess
5. You can use pingdom and check your original and translated page load times.