Guess what? ANOTHER SERVER MOVE!!

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Dave

Dave

Staff member
Because I'm that fucking lucky. The dedicated server we went to at Arvixe is not up to par.

Let me give the timeline.

1) Kanye West kills the forum.
2) We suffer degraded performance due to Kanye West killing the server.
3) I shell out another $135 for a dedicated server.
4) Dedicated server does not keep up with our forum usage, even though I was assured by Arvixe that it would.
5) I send Arvixe a message asking them for help in figuring out what to do. The following emails are my initial and Arvixe's answer.

Well, we're now on our dedicated server and we're slower than when we were on the business class. When I spoke to you before we made the move I was told any upgrade to a dedicated would be just that - an upgrade, in performance and uptime. We are showing CPU spikes and a serious degradation in performance. We have disabled a lot of addons that we determined were causing issues, but I'm still having serious problems with the basic php calls for viewing threads and new posts, which can not be disabled.

So I'm left with a quandary. My choices are to move back to a business class server (which I don't think is much of an option because of the affect we had on the other businesses), I could upgrade to a better dedicated server (which is out of my price range and so is not an option) or I could leave Arvixe for another host, probably with VPS. This is something I don't want to do but I'm at my wit's end with the whole thing. On the business class servers we were very, VERY happy until we started to grow.

So before I do something rash, I would like to know what ideas you guys have for me. I have used Arvixe for almost a year now and until we got hotlinked virally everything was great. But now we've been experiencing performance issues that is noticeable and annoying.

David Nihsen
www.halforums.com
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Hello,

I have been monitoring your server and I have noticed that the only problem is that the current server is not powerful enough for your forums. Your server has only 512MB RAM and with Intel Celeron 2.0Ghz thats not sufficient enough for high traffic forums. I have been monitoring the server and I see that each PHP process that is executed by the processor utilizes 30% CPU and thats slowing things. I have checked resource usage history and it also shows the same thing that the processor idle time is very low which means its continuously busy. You will experience the same issue at every host if you order a server with similar specs. Your forum gets large number of visits and thats a good sign as you are growing. As the site grows, it requires more resources. On the BusinessClass you were not having this much load issues because it has high CPU and RAM in GBs. If you are familiar with SSH then login to server using SSH as root user and run the command \"top -c -d 1\" to see the real time CPU/RAM usage by your site. You can also check this from WHM >> Server Status >> CPU/Memory/MySQL Usage.

Regards
Zee Shan
http://www.arvixe.com

Arvixe, LLC
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6) No shit, Arvixe, you dipshits.
7) I contact URLJet (http://www.urljet.com/performance-vps-hosting.php) and order VPS #XVPS768 and paid an additional $90.
8) Tonight at some time URLJet will be gaining access to our root panel and moving us over. We MAY see about 20 minutes of downtime for the transfer.

This is a VPS server with twice the bandwidth and up to 4x the CPU of what we have now.

Stay tuned and fuck Arvixe.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
If I'm out the $135 I'm out the $135. Worth it to tell them where to go. It's like paying for the ability to tell someone to fuck off.
 
T

ThatNickGuy

Dave said:
If I'm out the $135 I'm out the $135. Worth it to tell them where to go. It's like paying for the ability to tell someone to fuck off.
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Well, that's how Jon Stewart makes money. :p

Hope the move goes well and we don't have these kind of hiccups, anymore.
 
Krisken

Krisken

Well, that's the neat thing about the internet. Things like screwing with people on the greatest communication tool created by man tend to get around. I'm not saying to tell everyone in the world about it.... Ok, maybe I am. They fucking lied about an improved service on our own server. If they don't offer a refund, I'd explain this to them.

Business is business, after all.
 
Calleja

Calleja

Dude... you didn't pay right out of your pocket, did you?? I thought donations were gonna be opened up for server costs!
 
Siska

Siska

We tried to stick together. But there are forces here, beyond our control, that keep pulling us apart. Perhaps it's a sign we are just not meant to be. I try to be brave, but I can't shake the feeling that we will never see eachother again! :violin:
 
SpecialKO

SpecialKO

Push 'em on getting your money back. It's just poor as hell customer service to convince you to shell out for a dedicated server that's not up to your easily-determined needs.

That's the sort of thing that gets a business reported to the BBB.
 
Thread Necromancer

Thread Necromancer

I've noticed a considerable slow down during the times I have been checking the forum lately, and I've barely been on since the server move.

But when I am, it's been quite noticeable.
 
General Specific

General Specific

Dave said:
Hello,

I have been monitoring your server and I have noticed that the only problem is that the current server is not powerful enough for your forums. Your server has only 512MB RAM and with Intel Celeron 2.0Ghz thats not sufficient enough for high traffic forums.
Click to expand...
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This and more in this month's issue of DUH Magazine.


Seriously, I have a 4-yr-old system at home that is more powerful than that.
 
Calleja

Calleja

The slowness is there at the beginning, like you click a link and it takes sometimes up to 7, 8 seconds to begin loading, but once that's done it loads up fast. It's a bit annoying when you're browsing lots of threads.
 
Calleja

Calleja

Can I host the forum on my laptop? It pretty much doubles the specs of the dedicated server anyway... hell, it quadruples the RAM.
 
I

Iaculus

... Aaand we're back.

I think.

This could just be a hallucination.

Let's keep our options open, mmm?
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Quick note. Yes, we are running slow right now. But that's because we're being redirected and bounced around a little bit. Once the site is fully residing on this VPS we're going to be fine.
 
T

ThatNickGuy

This is like the internet equivilant of Candlejack. I mean, one second, everything's fine and th
 
J

JCM

3-letter word searches dont seem to be working again.... sadly now that Im mostly lurking, its my way of knowing if someone has asked me something or not.
 
Calleja

Calleja

As long as we're putting in requests... is there any theme/mod/whatever that will make the forum more mobile-friendly?

Now that I surf from my phone I've found the forum to be a real pain, even on Opera Mini.... I'd post a hell of a lot more if I could surf the forums while I'm stuck in traffic, y'know?

Not a priority, of course, that the server move is done without a hitch is obviously concern #1... I'm just sayin'
 
KCWM

KCWM

Whenever we considered the move, didn't whoever it was AND arvixe say that this wouldn't be an issue and if we HAD to move, it'd be no issue? Am I remembering that wrong? If so or if not, fuck them up the ass with a broken lead pipe.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
As stated, right now we're going through redirects that still hit the Arvixe server. Once we get that changed we'll be totally on the VPS and should be okay.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
To give you an idea, the amount of traffic hitting Arvixe is exactly the same as it is here. Yet the CPU load at Arvixe is spiking at 23.0 while URLJet is sitting at 0.24. To give you an idea, 1.0 CPU means 100% server load.

Same traffic.

---------- Post added at 08:02 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:57 AM ----------

Just got this from URLJet about changing the URL pointers:

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica]They will send it to the current contact on your domains whois info. You are at the mercy of arvixe to get the transfer done.[/FONT]
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Covar

Covar

Calleja said:
As long as we're putting in requests... is there any theme/mod/whatever that will make the forum more mobile-friendly?

Now that I surf from my phone I've found the forum to be a real pain, even on Opera Mini.... I'd post a hell of a lot more if I could surf the forums while I'm stuck in traffic, y'know?

Not a priority, of course, that the server move is done without a hitch is obviously concern #1... I'm just sayin'
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There's an iPhone app for browsing phpBB forums, would be really awesome if we were still using phpBB. Unfortunately I haven't found anything for vBulletin
 
strawman

strawman

Dave, two points that bear some thought:

1. This thread is over 1.2MB to download completely. It may not seem like much, but every avatar is a new hit to the server which DOES query the DB. So this one page involves not just the first DB query to get the HTML content, but then it requires 5-20 more DB query hits to get the avatars.
2. If an avatar is on another website then it still hits your server to do the DB query, and then hits another server which may or may not be fast. So every single thread is not unlike loading an image heavy thread simply due to avatars.
3. Your liberal avatar policy is nice, but I'm pretty sure people would rather have a fast forum and go back to 150x150 <15k avatars if it meant a very speedy experience.

Does vbulliten have aggressive caching? It should be caching all those avatar URLs (actually I think it should be giving out the avatar URL directly by doing a DB hit the first time the page is loaded, but maybe they have a reason they're doing a forced redirect back to the server)rather than hitting the DB repeatedly for each image.

I haven't inspected the HTTP return codes on these image URLs, but given that they have GET variables I wonder if they are cachable on the browser and ISP side. Either way, you should consider inspecting the entire chain of caching from the PHP script, to apache, to the ISP level caching, to the browser level caching to see why a given web browser hits the website (thus hitting the DB) for each and every avatar.

Caching hides a multitude of performance problems, and switching servers isn't going to change that.

-Adam
 
strawman

strawman

True - but if the new server has similar speed problems it would be a good place to look.

If everything is being redirected through arvixe, though (and as far as I can tell it's not a redirect, but a proxy?!?) then we'll have to wait and see.

Also, a neat HTTP testing tool called wbox has been useful for speed of page load testing. I'm getting 8-25 second page download times just for the home page.

-Adam
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Go to the app store and download "Tapatalk". It's not perfect, but I put Halforums in there and you should be able to access the site with iPhone.
 
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