Intermittent slow downs

[baldeagle]

Ever played that game "2 Truths & A Lie"? :)

There was a router problem at virtbiz.com (used to be CI Host).
traceroute to texaschlforum.com (208.77.216.52), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets

Um.... nope and nope. No router problem.
And our only affiliation with the above mentioned former provider is we've rescued PLENTY of their former customers. That place was a pit.

I'm not sure why you felt compelled to accuse me of lying. You obviously know I would have no visibility inside your facilities, but the traceroute shows that traffic was not flowing past your border router. So, whether it was a cut line, a switch inadvertently flipped or malfeasance on the part of an employee is irrelevant. From the outside, you had a problem.

If you'd like to get our real story, it's on our website here:
http://www.virtbiz.com/about/

Real story of the outage????? Not hardly. Please don't try to game an old pro.

However, when I look at the site on Web Page Test the TTFB (Time To First Byte) is pretty high (over 3 seconds which is about 10 times what it should be.) They also don't have compression enabled on the web server, which would help speed up the response.

Correct. I monitor our support ticket system and as has been mentioned, our techs are "on it." There are some issues with regard to the loading of the database and overall optimization. Many of the issues could best be handled via some site administration, and as the site has grown, so too has the overhead. And yes, gzip is recommended, and can be turned on with a little .htaccess work. Our techs have consulted on it and provided some feedback, and that's about what I feel is appropriate for posting in that regard.

Charles knows where to reach us (or me) if/when needed. If we can be of assistance to anyone else, just holler.

Wow! So you're going to blame Charles for the problems? Is that what passes for customer service in your world? You'd have been a lot better off by beginning with an apology for the outage, followed by taking full responsibility for it and for getting it fixed. Then, if there were things Charles could do to help, you should have addressed those privately with Charles, not here in an open forum.

BTW, all you would have to do is configure your servers to compress files in the httpd.conf file, and the customers wouldn't have to learn .htaccess syntax and dive into areas they might not be familiar with. That should not even be a site-configurable option if you care about performance.

After all, Charles is a lawyer. You guys are supposed to be the IT tech experts.

[baldeagle]

Ahh yes, a fellow techie. Good day, bald eagle.

Retired techie. After twenty years in the game, I'm now retired and do it for free. :D

[mojo84]

Maybe some training will help. viewtopic.php?f=16&t=79131

[virtbiz]

I'm not sure why you felt compelled to accuse me of lying. You obviously know I would have no visibility inside your facilities, but the traceroute shows that traffic was not flowing past your border router.

Sorry if my attempt at being funny was not as easily interpreted as I had intended. I wasn't accusing you of lying. The trouble with writing sometimes is that it lacks the audible and visual clues necessary to properly convey humorous intent. Honestly, I'm on your side. Mea culpa?

Just to clarify, traffic was flowing past the border. It just didn't get to the intended target. Potato, Po-tah-to... perhaps. But if I'm looking to be very exact, then I have to say that there was no routing problem whatsoever. It was a webserver issue, a few layers down. Read on if you want more details. Bail on this post now if it'll put you to sleep.

So, whether it was a cut line, a switch inadvertently flipped or malfeasance on the part of an employee is irrelevant. From the outside, you had a problem.

It was none of those, actually. But in the interest of clearing things up, I've reviewed the case this morning. Here's more detail than anyone asked for....

After some software upgrades to this forum the MySQL database wound up with a lot of chaff (fragmentation). On a small board it probably would not be much of an issue. However you may notice that the posts on this board go back a LONG way. And there are a LOT of posts. That means a BIG database, and the database has to get parsed each time a request is made of this website (such as clicking to read a post, making a reply, etc.) The posts table had roughly half a gigabyte in fragmentation and that was causing the site to really chew on itself.

Again, on a small site, maybe that's not a big deal. The entire database on most of the phpBB sites we see don't total the size of just the fragmentation that was in effect as of yesterday. Add that to the site getting hit with peak traffic, then couple that with the fact that the site is just one of many on a virtual host, and that means that the load is already pretty heavy, and the server load spun up quite high.

In working the support ticket that Charles opened with us, our techs identified the issue and pulled the site off the network for a couple of minutes so that it would not be continually hit, which allowed resources to free up again and we performed an optimization on the database.

So it was not a router failure, a cut line, a switch inadvertently flipped, or malfeasance on the part of an employee. The site was simply pulled for a couple of minutes in order to get it back into "fighting shape" again.

If you'd like to get our real story, it's on our website here:
http://www.virtbiz.com/about/

Real story of the outage????? Not hardly. Please don't try to game an old pro.

Real story of VIRTBIZ. We're not CI Host. Never have been. Never been anyone but who we are, and I thought I'd post the link to our history for anyone who might be interested. That said, if you've found something out there that posits some sort of link between us and and the aforementioned other place, hip me to it, brother! Because that means there's some misinformation floating around out there.

Wow! So you're going to blame Charles for the problems?

Hardly! Again, perhaps I was not as clear as I had intended to be. I was mentioning that we were working together with Charles to help so that improvements can be made to the website and this sort of thing can be avoided going forward.

By the way, and not to put a spin on it, but I think it's worth mentioning that this site generates a bunch of traffic. I said before that the site has grown a lot since it first hit our network. That's pretty exciting! Of course, it also means that a little attention may have to be given to ensure that things are running as smoothly for everybody as possible. Unfortunately here, the growth has really made itself noticeable with the little blip from yesterday. And that sucked for a little while. We've made ourselves available to provide assistance and support for Charles as he navigates forward and hopefully he has been pleased with our level of response.

On a personal note, although we have customers who pay us less than $10/month all the way through to customers who pay us tens of thousands of dollars per month, we got our start in webhosting. That's where we got our start, and it's on that business that we've built a sustainable business that puts the food on the table for a good little handful of people. I've got a soft spot for webhosting, which is why we continue to stay in that game in the face of other companies consolidating, independent shops falling and the rise of the monolithic providers. I care about texaschlforum.com. I care about all the sites we host. Not because I'm worried about getting paid for another month of hosting, but because I really love what I do. Even after 20 years in the webhosting business, I'm still an enthusiast.

So there you have it. And with all that said, I'll wrap it up here. Sorry to have ruffled any feathers. Especially those of a "baldeagle."

[Charles L. Cotton]

Virtbiz has provided great service since our move here a few years ago. The migration to a new company was not trouble-free and Virtbiz took care of a lot of issues without a fee that they could have charged. The recent software upgrade was more of a migration and it too caused problems that were mentioned in the posts by Virtbiz. I have been in contact with tech support and not only did they fix the problems caused by the upgrade, they optimized the database as well, also without charge. I've also consulted with them about other things to streamline the Forum and those will be fee-based and I'm fine with that.

As mentioned, our DB is quite large. The Board is closing in on 11 years in operation with almost 1 million posts. Many boards would delete/prune posts after a certain time period, but in many ways the Forum is a great source for historical information concerning guns, gun laws, political campaigns, legislative sessions and much more. I simply cannot prune the database without losing this important information. Undoubtedly there are a large number of posts that could be deleted without deleting our "history" information, but reading and culling 1 million posts is not something I or anyone else is going to do.

I'm very happy with Virtbiz. If the day comes that this changes, then the Forum will move, but those folks deserve a lot of credit for keeping a large board online at minimal cost.
Chas.