Tag Archive for ‘longren.org’ at T. Longren

Tag Archive for 'longren.org'

Moving Servers At Dreamhost

Published

on December 8, 2006

. 0 Comments Tags: Dreamhost, Internet, longren.org, monitoring, performance, Personal, software, www.

After making this post, I submitted a support ticket to Dreamhost. Justin at Dreamhost replied back with a pretty solid sounding solution:

I did notice a few busy sites on the apaches for 2 of your domains. I started a move to another IP/apache which should complete in a few hours, and we can see if that apache turns out to be more stable. Since the server-status page for the old 2 showed an uptime of about 1 hour, likely the sites were causing that apache instance to time out and need to be restarted, resulting in a bit of downtime. Give it a try for a day and if you still have problems, let me know!

Perfect. Switch my domains over to a new httpd process with less activity. Makes sense. Well, after that was done, not much of an improvement was seen, as you can probably tell.

Today, I received another email from Justin saying he noticed longren.org was still slow to respond. He offered to move me to another server, assuming I was willing to have some downtime. He even asked if there was a time I’d prefer the move to be made. I asked him if 10:00 PST would work, and it did. So, this site is going to be offline for a few hours tonight while it’s being moved to a new server. The actual switch won’t take very long, I’ll just have to wait a few hours for the DNS to start pointing to the new IP.

Hopefully everything will be up and running along nice and smoothly tomorrow morning. Also, Justin at Dreamhost is awesome. He’s been very attentive and always offers possible solutions. Thanks again Justin!

Popularity: 7% [?]

Horrible Repsonse Time

Published

Tyler

on December 4, 2006

in Dreamhost, Internet and Personal

. 1 Comment Tags: Dreamhost, Internet, longren.org, monitoring, performance, Personal, site24x7, software, www.

Longren.org has been really, really slow the last week or so. This site has never been this slow to load, even when I was hosting it out of my house on my cable connection. Granted, I didn’t get the traffic back then that I do now, it still shouldn’t be this slow.

Last time longren.org was being slow as shit, I posted an image of a graph from Site24×7, like I’ve done in this post. The response time in the earlier image is horrible, 4510 ms, but that’s a lot lower than I’m seeing now. As you can see from the image above in this post, the current average response time over the last 7 days is 6614 ms.

This has to be a result of something going on at Dreamhost. I say that because sometimes pages on longren.org will load up in a snap. Most of the time though they take between 15 and 30 seconds to load. Even sending queries to the database is slower than normal. Database queries are usually done being executed within 1 or 2 seconds. Lately, it’s been taking 5 to 9 seconds. Something is definitely up. Perhaps I will submit a support ticket to Dreamhost tomorrow. Yay.

Popularity: 5% [?]

20,000 Unique

Published

Tyler

on November 13, 2006

in Internet, Noteworthy and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: blog, blogging, Internet, longren.org, Personal, stats.

Just a few minutes ago, I saw 20,000 unique visitors here at longren.org. I started tracking about one year ago when I first started using Mint.

I thought it’d be 2+ years before I saw 20,000 unique visitors, guess I was way off. I never anticipated releasing a theme for WordPress or joining some of the blogging communities I’m a member of. Yay for 20,000! I’ll be at 40,000 uniques by early May, hopefully.

Popularity: 6% [?]

More Dreamhost Network Issues

Published

Tyler

on October 1, 2006

in Dreamhost, Internet and Personal

. 0 Comments Tags: Dreamhost, dreamhost-outage, hosting, Internet, longren.org, Personal, WordPress, www.

Dreamhost is recovering from yet another network outage. Apparently a switch had issues and they had to take a few servers off that switch. Supposedly the servers were moved over to another temporary switch so they’d have network access, but I haven’t had access to longren.org for at least 2 hours now.

We have moved the servers in the affected rack to knew switches in other racks temporarily while we get a new switch in place. We are working on recovery efforts now on servers which may be down. The list of affected servers is:

Arrow, mel, caesar, herod, alondra, overland, rossmore, oxnards, cerritos, selma, nala, demeter, jarvis. This is a mix of 3 MySQL servers and the rest webservers.

Longren.org is hosted on oxnard unfortunately, that box seems to have a lot of issues, even when the Dreamhost network is functioning properly. They’ve now managed to replace the problematic switch and are working on bringing servers back online.

Sorry about no timestamp before, it’s 12:36 Pacific time (-0800? I never could keep track of daylight savings time.)

We have completely replaced the switch and are working on getting the servers back online. All networking cables are back in their regularly scheduled switch ports.

I always get a kick out of the angry comments that show up on the Dreamhost Status blog whenever a fairly widespread problem occurs. Of course, Dreamhost hasn’t had great reliability in the last few months. I feel bad for those trying to run a business with Dreamhost.

One quick note, WordPress 2.0.5 should be here soon.

UPDATE: Apparently there’s still trouble. Now Dreamhost is saying the servers affected are still behaving abnormally. This box, oxnard, doesn’t appear to be affected though, for once! They’re still updating that same post at the Dreamhost Status blog:

Wierdness is afoot. The servers are still exhibiting the same problems, we have even moved two of them into our new datacenter and it’s the same deal. It’s only specific servers in half of one of our racks.

UPDATE 2 @ 8:52 PM CST: Dreamhost now says all their problems are over. Which they do appear to be. I believe the K2 site is hosted at Dreamhost, I noticed it was down for a while but has since been revived. Here’s the update from the Dreamhost Status blog:

As of 1700 Pacific time (GMT-0800 or so, 5PM), we think the issues with this rack are behind us. We moved some machines to new hardware and this seems to have fixed the problems. We will be looking in to this more on monday, and doing some extensive testing on that hardware to make sure it was the root cause of the problem.

Hopefully this was just a minor fluke and we don’t see any more problems. Like I said before, Dreamhost has been less than stable these last couple months. Honestly though, I have noticed this site loads much quicker since Dreamhost fought with their network last time. Still, there’s a lot of recent posts categorized as “system outages” at the Dreamhost Status blog.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Site Status From Site24×7

Published

Tyler

on September 18, 2006

in Internet, Noteworthy and Personal

. 2 Comments Tags: longren.org, mon.itor.us, performance, site-monitor, site-status, site24x7.

Notice the new Site Status link at the top of this page? That page shows the current response time of this site and site availability over the last 7 days. It’s really a very simple page. Nothing on it except for an iframe that grabs the site status from the Site24×7 servers.

Previously, Site24×7 only had the option to “Make Public” an entire group of sites being monitored by a given user. Now they’ve added the ability to “Make Public” individual sites within a users profile. So, instead of getting the status for a list of 5 or 6 sites, I can now display the status of this site and this site alone on this page.

I had requested a “Make Public” option on an individual site basis a couple weeks ago. I think they pretty much jumped right on it, I wasn’t expecting to see this feature ready to go so quickly. Nice work guys. :) I’ve also submitted a couple other suggestions to them, which they seemed to like very much. Hopefully I’ll see those implemented too.

Since we’re on the topic of site monitoring, I came across another option besides Site24×7 today. It’s called Mon.itor.us. It looks really nice, but is sort of difficult to use. It’s interface isn’t very straight forward and feels really cluttered. They do have some nice features though such as reporting and a high level of customization.

I’ll be sticking with Site24×7. It’s cleaner, quicker, and they’ve used some of my suggestions. :)

UPDATE: I should have mentioned this before. Creating a “Site Status” page like mine is only possible if your theme will allow it. Some themes are simply too narrow for an effective status page to be created.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Dreamhost Has A Slow Network

Published

Tyler

on September 8, 2006

in Dreamhost, Internet and Personal

. 1 Comment Tags: blog, downtime, Dreamhost, dreamhost-down, dreamhost-outage, longren.org, network, outage, tech.

The issues I spoke about in Poor Site Performance probably aren’t related to any content within this site, as I had previously thought. It’s more likely related to the shabby state of Dreamhosts network.

I am now blaming the Dreamhost network for the poor performance of this site for the following reasons.

1. Intermittence: This one is simple. Sometimes single posts will load in a snap. Other times they take up to 30 seconds to display. Same with the index page, archives, about, and contact pages. The contact and about pages are relatively void of content. There’s really no reason for slowness or lag when loading those pages, there’s not much info to display there.

2. Other Pages: Other pages at the longren.org domain also load slow at times. Take Mint for example. The Mint dashboard fails to load or loads very slowly when this blog is also responding very slowly. It takes up to a minute to refresh some very basic peppers from within Mint.

3. MySQL Is Usually OK: If I’m not mistaken, Dreamhost has it’s MySQL databases on separate servers. In other words, a machine that serves http requests doesn’t server MySQL data at the same time, another entirely separate box would handle the MySQL responses. My thought here is that Dreamhost might have their MySQL serving machines on a different network entirely, one that might not be having issues the rest of their network is experiencing. I could be way off here though, entirely speculation.

The Dreamhost Status site has been unavailable for most of the day. There’s normally a blog hosted there. Currently, there’s simply a few paragraphs of text explaining the current situation:

Network downtime Monday Night (09/11)
Monday night, we will upgrading our core networking equipment, which will result in some downtime of all services lasting approximately 30-45 minutes.
We’re expecting this to put an end to the network problems that were created by the power outages about a month ago..
- Sep. 8, 2006 3:30 p.m.

Oops! Temporary Status Site
We had a little goof and this will be our status site until the other machine can be resuscitated.
- Sep. 8, 2006 11:40 a.m.

So, as you can see, they’re relating this to the downtime experienced a month or so back when a generator caught fire. Hopefully the work they do on this coming Monday will fix the issues we’ve been having. It’s getting real old, real quick. Couldn’t happen at a worse time too, this site is starting to grow by great leaps and bounds. Hopefully growth won’t be affected by this poor performance.

UPDATE: This site was unreachable for about 12 hours lastnight/this morning. Here’s some new items that have been posted to dreamhoststatus.com:

Wilmington Failed Over
Wilmingtons second network card, which carries internet traffic, decided to give up the ghost. The server is on shiny new hardware now and websites are already starting to serve again. Our apologies for the downtime.
- Sep. 9, 2006 1:24 p.m.

Web Control Panel Issue Resolved
The network issues causing slowness for the web control panel for the web control panel have now been resolved. The network overall is more responsive and we will continue to make minor changes to keep everything working as well as possible. The major maintenance on Monday night will be essentially a complete replacement and upgrade of one of our core routers. In the meantime, we have been re-routing as much of our network traffic as possible through our other core router to improve overall performance.
- Sep. 9, 2006 2:48 a.m.

Web Control Panel Slowness
The network issues are also causing problems with the Web Control Panel for several users. We are looking into this and hope to have everything restored shortly.
- Sep. 8, 2006 8:56 p.m.

Network Problems Today
We have been experiencing Network Problems today. These problems are the same problems that have actually been happening since we first reported problems with our network. Unfortunately these problems have gotten worse today and are causing a majority of the downtime and slowness issues you are reporting today. These problems, and our attempts at fixing them, have been an ongoing effort. The maintenance Monday Night will be a big step towards resolving these problems completely. We are currently working on the network and all servers having problems and hope to improve the situation soon. Sorry about the downtime, we hope to have this all resolved soon.
- Sep. 8, 2006 5:45 p.m.

Popularity: 4% [?]