Was that a crash back there?

gus · September 7, 2004, 7:29am

I just got a report that the website was down. I was here about 10 minutes ago, and all was well.

If you had trouble viewing, please post here or email me (gus [at] forumosa.com). I’d like to know how long you think we were down. This information will be passed along to our webhost

g.

sandman · September 7, 2004, 9:12am

A crash? It wouldn’t surprise me at all, seeing as how it seems to crash almost every day at some point – around 45 minutes yesterday. Very frustrating, so much so that I’ve started using other boards as Forumosa is becoming too unreliable and it’s affecting my blood pressure. Dreamhost sucks.

Dr_Doom · September 7, 2004, 2:02pm

Yeah it’s been up and down like a hooer’s drawers recently.

Yellow_Cartman · September 7, 2004, 5:16pm

What exactly does “website down” mean to you gus? I guess it’s moot since you’re switching providers.

Rackspace is good. What package did you guys end up getting?

You guys might want to consider mirroring the production site (at Rackspace) with your newly built server for backup purposes. At least the investment can still be recouped.

gus · September 8, 2004, 3:46am

Yeah, it is a little moot – unless we encounter the same problems.

By “down” I mean that when you type in forumosa.com in your browser address bar, nothing (nada, zero, zip… I’m talking ‘white space’) shows up. I don’t even get a time out error. Nothing comes up.

Another error (but not what I’m referring to) is the “phpBB Critical something” error. I think this indicates that there are too many connections to MySQL (someone explained it to me, once)

gus · September 8, 2004, 8:25am

Can anyone tell me what the 30 to 70 load part means? Below 1 sounds, well, pretty low.

The new Server will have twice the amount of RAM (512MB). But if we want 1GB of RAM, we’ll need to pony up an extra US$20 per month (NT$ 700)

Dr_Doom · September 9, 2004, 2:53am

Who is taking money off you to run a server with only 256Mb of RAM ? That’s pathetic.

jlick · September 9, 2004, 4:12am

Load average is defined as the number of processes (programs) waiting for or using a CPU. A system running at full capacity with no delay will have a load average equal to the number of CPUs in the system. Thus a single CPU system with load average 1 is at full capacity with no delay. When you go over 2X the number of CPUs in load average, things will get sluggish. Over 10X and you are getting really slow. 30-70 is really really high. That means on average there’s 30-70 things waiting in line to use the CPU.

By the way, CPU speed isn’t the only thing lacking that may result in a high load average. Lack of memory and slow disk are other common causes.

Dr_Doom · September 9, 2004, 6:46am

I’ve got an old ZX81 your web host may be interested in.

Yellow_Cartman · September 9, 2004, 4:28pm

You guys really need to find someone to help you out with server capacity estimation. Jumping from one provider to another isn’t a long-term solution.

To help you understand what you’re looking to find out is:

How many processes the server is initiating when it is being “accessed” or “commanded to do” by a user.
Find out which processes create the most CPU load.
Work with hosting vendor to get the right machine to host.
Check the database to see if there can be anything done to speed that up–performance tuning by improved indexing, partitioning, compression, etc.

Tweaks here and there will result in a better performing website if the bandwidth is constant.

Dreamhost has a good rep in the hosting business but they were ripping you guys off with that machine.