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Site Downtime (ongoing)


CaleyD

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Our hosts claim to have found the source of the problem...a couple of rogue users on the same server cluster as us, which they have now removed...I can confirm from looking at our server data that there's fewer users on it, but I'll be waiting till Western USA wakes up and comes online before declaring anything fixed as that's when it usually starts going pear shaped.

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I just had a couple of blips (server error pages) and checked the server load again - it was great up to 6am PST (San Francisco time - where the webhost is ... thats 2pm for you guys), but over the last 15 minutes it has spiked again to 185 which although better than the last few days of 500+ is still 10 times higher than it should be.

Will monitor it as the day goes on and see if it continues to follow the pattern of the last few days where it climbs exponentially from 8 or 9am west coast time throughout the day until we start burping, farting and falling over.

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now spiked to over 300 again so I am unfortunately fairly confident we will experience issues again today .... do you notice a pattern in these images ? Our webhost doesnt seem to !!!

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Wednesdays memory usage is insane!! But if your hosts are claiming they can't see what's going on from those graphs then it's time to change hosts.

Still seems faster than normal for me here (at work) though.

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load is now back down to 5 so the site is definitely quicker at the moment, especially as the whole object of the exercise was to put us on new hardware that is better specced than the old one. However, the acid test will be what happens when it hits 8 or 9am on the west coast of USA.

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yeah speed a little slower but thats because the files are on one host and we are still using the database on the other .... if we were to move everything to this host it should be quicker.

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The only way I can get it to "jump back" to the online version of the URL is if I use one of the links in the master menu at the top....all internal forum/forum generated links are working fine.

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You shouldn't need to use any of the links in the highlighted area for using the forum, so best to avoid them when in "offline" mode.

The workaround put in place is for the forum only. We just have to take the hit on other parts of the site until we get a more permanent solution.

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easy solution - I deleted them on the PLAN B site :angry:

although main site does appear to be working again now.

server load now a little over 100 and as this is a quad core machine that effectively makes it 25 so almost getting down to the acceptable range.

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Logged on to caleythistle ONLINE about fifteen minutes ago but got the server dowen page instead.

Then I went to the offline site and got the "if you are seeing this then the online site is off" etc. So I used the "HERE" link to see what was happening and to my great surprise it immediately came up with the online site 100%. So I tried clicking this link again and the same thing happened and I was in on the online site.

Therefore I went back to my desktop shortcut icon for the ONLINE SITE and sure enough I was in , in a flash.

Trust this is helpful.

Time here is now 12 noon (8 p.m. in te U.K.)

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Logged on to caleythistle ONLINE about fifteen minutes ago but got the server dowen page instead. Then I went to the offline site and got the "if you are seeing this then the online site is off" etc. So I used the "HERE" link to see what was happening and to my great surprise it immediately came up with the online site 100%. So I tried clicking this link again and the same thing happened and I was in on the online site. Therefore I went back to my desktop shortcut icon for the ONLINE SITE and sure enough I was in , in a flash. Trust this is helpful.

Its called hedging our bets :angry: ......

The intention is as follows:

If we know the main site is working normally, we will disable the "emergency" site and you will see a very simple page that directs you back to the main forum. The reason for this is quite simply because the emergency site is, as the name implies, only for those occasions when we have a problem on the main one !!!

When we know the main site is down (and we usually do quite quickly), we will change a couple of files and enable the emergency site so you can use it until the regular site is back up and running and then we will disable it again. There will obviously be some crossover point where both sites are running at the same time but that is no big deal.

Where the "hedging our bets bit" comes in is due to what we have experienced this week ... the site has been up and down so frequently that we will likely leave both running for now until we are sure the problem has passed or - if the problems continue - until we make a decision to move the complete site to the other provider. Hope that explains why both worked :022:

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Site is not very stable today.

E.G. I start typing in this box and end up on the front page .

Access is a bit slow and ,once in , definitely slower to bring up the varieous selected webpages.

Ia have also experienced "flood control enabled " twice in the last few minuters. The first time I saved the typed text as instructed then was unable to understand how to get the saved text onto the thread. So I went back , saw a reply button at the bottom of the thread again and, keeping my fingers crossed, I clicked reply. I do not know whether thiesis the way to actually post a saved entry but it worked somehow--maybe once you save it, however, it works automatically once the flooding is over? Input please.

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Your advices about the "hedging" is noted and understood. Thanks for that.

It doesn't matter to me how many times I have to try or what site I am looking at because, for most people ,it is clear that you are working your self to death to keep the site going and our irritations shrink into nothing compared to your challenges. :angry:

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Site is not very stable today. E.G. I start typing in this box and end up on the front page .

no idea why thats happening to you, cannot reproduce the error.

Access is a bit slow and ,once in , definitely slower to bring up the varieous selected webpages.

I think the reasons for this are well documented in this thread. I also noted earlier in this thread that the emergency site would be a little slow as its getting its files from Montreal but all the database action is coming from San Francisco !

Ia have also experienced "flood control enabled " twice in the last few minuters. The first time I saved the typed text as instructed then was unable to understand how to get the saved text onto the thread. So I went back , saw a reply button at the bottom of the thread again and, keeping my fingers crossed, I clicked reply. I do not know whether thiesis the way to actually post a saved entry but it worked somehow--maybe once you save it, however, it works automatically once the flooding is over? Input please.

Flood control is nothing to do with the site problems. Flood control prevents users from posting (or searching) more than once every 30 seconds. It is designed to stop spambots and double posts but sometimes when a post fails, or the page is slow because of the problems we have had and you press post/reply a second time it can tell you you are flooding the system. again, nothing we can do about it right now as we are not going to turn flood control off.

saving text - I just do it the normal way - highlight the text in the window I want to copy, press ctrl + c to copy and then ctrl + v to paste where I want it. If I want the whole text from a window, its ctrl + a to select all, then ctrl + c to copy and ctrl + v to paste

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Another unfortunate update for everyone .....

we have been experiencing more issues again today and while the forum seems to load most times (albeit slowly), the main part of the site and some of our subsites are not loading. I am adding this note from the "offline" emergency site as I havent been able to get it to post from the main site for a while.

I think the bottom line for me is that I have finally had enough of the ineptitude of our current host. We expect the odd bit of downtime here and there, we even accept that some of it might be sustained in nature but this is just ridiculous.

In the first 9 months of this year, we had a total of 20 notifications that the main front page at CTO was unavailable. Most of this was short term blips somewhere between 1 minute and 30 minutes and for some of the shorter ones may even have been due to internet conditions rather than hosting .... (eg the site was up but internet conditions prevented the monitor from checking it). On only 2 occasions did we actually have a problem that lasted more than an hour.

In October so far, we have had 80 downtime notifications with 18 of them being for an hour or longer and quite a few being for several hours (one of 7 hours duration on Thursday, and today, the current front page outage is sitting at 4 hours and counting).

I will be discussing this with Donald over the next day or two but I think I can safely say - based on our earlier conversations - that moving to a new hosting provider is our only option.

To that end, this little message should serve as advance notice that the site may be completely down for a day or two sometime this week so that we can move everything to the new host. We will give some proper notice of the changeover before we actually flip the switch and we will also try to get the forum back up and running as quickly as we can (probably on caleythistleoffline.com to begin with) but there are certain things beyond our control, or the control of our new host such as DNS replication that can take a few days to kick-in.

more news to come later ........

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