Saturn Server Slowdowns?

[Imperial]

Over the past two days, I've noticed our forums load significantly slower. I checked my other HH account's website and it took longer than normal to load. I thought at first it was just my own internet, but forum users posted that it was an issue they were encountering. Pages loaded extremely slowly or they timed out. Is this an issue with the server or the account or something else?

[Tony]

Could not tell you without a ticket to look into the actual account.

But one thing come to mind if you're receiving a lot of traffic you could flood out your PHP pool although unlikely. Or something else weird is going on. I know we did resolve something recently with regards to serving php pages.

[Kaz]

I've had the same problem aswell. Only for periods of time, with ever so slight downtime but I just thought it was maintence being carried out and didn't think much of it but I guess it wasn't.

[Tony]

Well we had some issues this morning that were not related to the occurring problem at random over the last few days. I've made some changes to the web server I believe I know why pages randomly became slow and I hope this change has now fixed it.

I believe the priority at which the web server was running was not high enough. Being an event driven web server it's more sensitive to i/o tasks and when it does not have priority over the tasks causing it then issues start to come up. I have hopefully made so this will no longer be the case.

What's more surprising is this has not affected every machine which is why it was not noticed earlier in deployment. We put it on machines CPU usage went down pages were served faster. Issue being each machine has different usage levels, patterns and the type of usage. A few machines were more CPU bound so they saw drastic improvement where load average dropped under 1 and speeds improved drastically. Others CPU was hurting them but it was not the only cause. We improved CPU usage and load was dropping quite a bit but i/o spikes were spiking load to reasonable levels but hurting the web server.

So I believe it's fixed but I'm going to look for advice on more improvements. I believe our configuration is very unique compared to others who run this type of web server. We are not selling $25/month hosting accounts so obviously we're putting more users per server. So some of the benefits are negated as we're serving many more smaller sites compared to larger sites. But we do have some large sites who suddenly are not using near as much CPU which is great. Of course it still provides us drastic improvements in area's making it well worth it.

I'm very sorry about the trouble the past few days but no ones perfect and we're not going to run at 100% uptime with no slow downs year round it's just not possible. We just try our best to solve issues and always look into any problem a customer may have.

[Kaz]

Exactly what you said about 100 percent uptime. I don't think anyone expects that and like I said I didn't really think much of it at time was only when I saw this post. For my site anyway it was like seconds of downtime and maybe a min or so at a time of it going slow so it wasn't really a huge deal.

Nice to hear its sorted though.

[Imperial]

Mhmm, I don't expect 100% uptime and I certainly don't hold it against the company when you guys get it taken care of as quickly as possible. I was more concerned if my account or someone else's account was draining the system's resources which affects everyone on the server. Good to know that it was something fixable.