Troubleshooting a slow website

suas

Our website is very slow to load and change pages at the moment and I've no idea why. http://www.suas.ie

Background
Pings are very respectable 23-6ms, and the problem of slow loading has been reported from many places in Ireland and also in the UK. So, I know it's not my web connection. But I don't know what it could be...

It's an intermittent problem, and has been reported a few times to our hosting company tech support over the last month or two.

At one stage, they came back to say..

"Currently you are hosted on a shared server environment. as such all server resources are shared ac cross the hosted websites. We have found a site using the same database server as you are hosted on which is using more than an acceptable amount of resources. We have contacted the party involved and are working to restore the normal level of server response."

Then shortly afterwards it was fixed. Of course, it's started to happen again, but this time they have told me:

"We have looked into this and have not been able to replicate any occurrences of slowness - the site appears to be performing normally at present.

As I'm sure you're aware, due to the nature of shared hosting where resources are shared amongst users, there can sometimes be times where one user is affecting service for other users - we do monitor for this sort of thing and take action to correct it when we notice it."

Question

Is it possible that something on our website is causing this slowness? We run typo3, vBulletin - but aren't close to any limits in terms of disk quota or traffic.

Are there any known issues in the config of either typo3 or vB that can slow down the whole website that they are attached to? (That might be a stupid question, but I'm just on the edge of what I know)

I will ask my developer, but they give us a charitable rate, so I want to see what I can find out by myself before bothering them.

Any advice appreciated..

CuLT

Do you have shell access to the server where the site is located? If so, running "top" (if it's a *nix machine) should give some further symptoms (high load, etc).

Static files (images, javascript, etc) seem to be loading quite nicely, so yes, it doesn't appear to be a bandwidth/networking issue.

Your problem is most likely at the database end of things. On a shared hosting environment it's almost inevitable that DB intensive applications will slow down appreciably as other sites (or your own) on the same machine become popular. It is at this stage you need to start considering a non-shared (or at least non-traditional shared, such as VPS) environment for your website.

There are various tweaks and changes you may be able to make; static caching might be a possibility for typo3, although I'm not familiar with it myself. After that solutions tend to need increasingly more control over your server environment. Other things you might consider are turning off certain features (like vBulletin's search) or restricting similar database intensive operations. These are obviously only temporary solutions, but may help in the short term.

Providing you're not expecting an exponential boost in traffic, I'd imagine it would be a good idea to look into "VPS" hosting as the next step up. Unfortunately this is not a problem you're going to be able to resolve permanently with normal shared hosting.

It may be that your host offers such a solution and can advise you on how best to proceed, contacting them asking about it would be the speediest way to find out.

ntlbell

sorry was looking at the wrong site

p

You should check if it's problems on the client side. As Cult mentioned, stuff like javascript etc... can cause slow rendering times. If you get Firebug for Firefox it has an add on called YSlow that can give you pretty good analysis from that side of things.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/help/
& further reading
http://www.hostscope.com/templature/understanding-yslow/

On the server side, I hear apache bench is quite auseful tool to test server responsiveness.

suas

Thanks guys.

I would be concerned if we had to move to a different hosting package, as we are only using a small amount of our transfer quota - our hosting package is overspecced, with the main reason being to avoid this kind of thing.

It seems to be running smoothly now, but I'll ask tech support if they can keep an eye on the activity of any shared databases on our server.

Cult - I don't think I have access to a shell (is that the nix equivalent of a cmd prompt? - and yes I'm aware that nix had them before doze!) on the server... though in fairness I've never looked. I'll ask them that as well.

minttea

There is no harm looking at other sites that are hosted on the same server when you start going slow.

To find all the other sites, there is a handy tool over at:
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

Enter in either "suas.ie" or your IP address "79.140.140.8", it may take a while - I get 576 sites.

I don't think that your hosting provider will provide you with shell access, if all the other sites are loading up fine that makes it difficult for you to debug any further.

Your best bet is to check with your provider and get them to check whether it is you or another customer that is using up the resources and see if can they tell you where - ie the web or database server.

If they identify that it is your issue then it's either a case of tweaking your code or else upgrading your hosting package.

Hope that helps..

suas

Thanks.

Interesting to see the list of other sites, and the few that I checked did seem to load fine - as is suas.ie at the moment.

One thing that raised a smile was the fact that my mates site 147online.com is on the same server as ours!

I've asked tech support about shell access and checking db intensive applications and they helpfully replied...

"Do I have shell access to the server?
No we do not allow SSH access to our hosting cluster due to company policy and security reasons.

Is there any way to monitor the performance of database intensive
applications on our server?
We do not provide tools to monitor this with your hosting plan however you may find an alternative through coding which will create reports for connections to your database. This is something we cannot provide support for as we do not provide scripting support.

If something like that was happening, would it produce the symptoms that we have seen and what could I do about it?
Usually when a popular third party application is released loop holes can be found in the security of those applications however I would imagine they would inject information into the site or redirect the sites pages rather than cause speed issues with the software. We cannot provide support on this as we do not provide support for third party applications however I would suggest that you keep your install updated to the latest compatible version of the software."

I've booked in some time with my devlopers to update the typo3 and I'll keep monitoring it. Does anyone know of an automated way to check that a website is loading in a certain amount of time (e.g. 5-10 seconds).

I'm also interested if anyone here would have some code to "create reports for connections to your database" as they mention above. Much appreciated if you could share that with me and my developers if possible.

suas

p wrote: »

You should check if it's problems on the client side. As Cult mentioned, stuff like javascript etc... can cause slow rendering times. If you get Firebug for Firefox it has an add on called YSlow that can give you pretty good analysis from that side of things.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/help/
& further reading
http://www.hostscope.com/templature/understanding-yslow/

On the server side, I hear apache bench is quite auseful tool to test server responsiveness.

Not sure what you mean by client side in this context?

One important thing that I forgot to mention in the post above and was reminded about when re-reading yours is that tech support told me that they restarted Apache on the server, and since then I haven't noticed the slowness. Early days tho'!

minttea

You could use something like http://www.siteuptime.com/ to keep an eye on your site. They will check every 30mins for free of charge. Alert you about downtime and graph response times.

No harm uploading a small static HTML page (with no db connections) just a simple "hello world" page. You should be able to find out quite quickly if it's a DB problem or not.

If they say that they restarted Apache then they must of had some issues...

With regard to DB monitoring, you do not mention what DB you use but there are a number of web interfaces around e.g. for php/mysql you can use www.phpmyadmin.net In the "Processes" tab you can see what queries are running/locked up and how long they are taking.

Only problem with using a web interface to check your web/DB problems is that the DB web interface could also be affected by the slow down..

Oh and client side = web browser

Eoin

Create a page that carries out a few tasks and after each one print a timer out to the page. That might help you find where the bottleneck is occurring.

suas

This problem is happening again. When I am working in the CMS the connection is constantly dropping. Everything is OK on the shared hosting servers - so I'm starting to think it might be something to do with my database.

I don't know how to do either of these things.

minttea wrote:

With regard to DB monitoring, you do not mention what DB you use but there are a number of web interfaces around e.g. for php/mysql you can use www.phpmyadmin.net In the "Processes" tab you can see what queries are running/locked up and how long they are taking.

eoin wrote: »

Create a page that carries out a few tasks and after each one print a timer out to the page. That might help you find where the bottleneck is occurring.

If I was asking my developer to do just one, which would be better?

No harm uploading a small static HTML page (with no db connections) just a simple "hello world" page. You should be able to find out quite quickly if it's a DB problem or not.

Now, this I think I can do. http://www.suas.ie/Helloworld.html

Well that loads in a heartbeat, every time. Does that tell me there's a problem with my database?

ps As far as I know, it's mysql

suas

We're getting intermittent reports from SiteUptime that our site is down, it's a great resource. Thanks minttea!

Of course, we're still confused as to what to do about it. Even during the slow times, the Helloworld pages loads instantly, so does that mean it's a database problem?

My kind developers put in some time but weren't able to get a script running on the machine and are looking for another one. (I'm not sure of the details there).

Would anyone have any diagnostic code that they could share, please, to help us find is there's a problem with the database resources.

Even though the hosts say that there is no problem on their end, it does seem to clear up after every phone call to them, so I would be suspicious that they're doing something to fix it but don't want to take the blame.

Eoin

If you can find a page that's consistently slow, you can just write out the current time in milliseconds to a HTML comment in several places in the page. When you view the source, you will be able to see how long each step takes before it can move on.

There's probably simpler ways to do it, but my brain is fried after a long week.

forbairt

The problem as I see it is ... you're on shared hosting.

For most people this is enough if however things start to get a bit out of control however the system gets sluggish.

As was already stated here there are 500+ websites running on the server. If you considering some of those will be quite popular and getting a lot of hits per second .. then things are going to start crawling ...

For example one hosting provider a year or two back was forced to make a request to all wordpress users to install one of the caching plugins or they'd be forced to take action each load of a wordpress page without caching makes an obscene amount o hits on the database. Magento commerce is even worse I think at one stage a page load was making 300 hits against the database (its a beast) if everyone was running shops on that server the thing would crawl like you can't believe.

Do you have any caching options with Typo3 ? ... as that could greatly take the strain off and you'd be just serving up "static" pages for the most part.

You'll find that most / all hosting providers of shared hosting promise the earth but if you reach a certain level of CPU usage they'll be forced to contact you. Normally you won't really reach your bandwidth / disk space levels in any way but they'll hit you by saying you're eating up too many CPU cycles and that you should move to dedicated systems.

I believe that boards.ie is running on multiple dedicated servers ? (someone may be able to correct me on that) Its a simple vBulletin install with some tweaks you say ? ... yes but there's a hell of a lot of hits on it every second.
There would be no way in hell it could even have a chance of running on the same system you're running on.

Anyways .. Friday afternoon rant over ... ... if it keeps up see about moving away to another hosting provider though maybe talk to them first about your requirements and make sure they will have better service

suas

Thanks, I'm looking into caching in typo3 now, perhaps it will help a bit.

That solution would make the most sense if the slow site was as a result of much more trafffic.

Well that's the odd thing you see - for almost all of 2008 we had no problems at all, and then around December 12th this problem starts, but we didn't have a huge spike in visitors.

For us, a busy time on the site is Nov 4th- Dec 4th, while we're taking applications for the summer volunteer programme, and we have fewer visitors now than we would then... but I get what you're saying about the shared hosting, perhaps it's the other sites. But then, surely the hosting company would have told me if they were having an issue with their server?

This problem is starting to affect our operations. We use the website for people to sign up to an Evening Course. For the past few years, we've had a similar number of people respond to a particular newspaper ad, and this year there are less. I suspect it's because the site is so annoyingly slow.

I'm going to go back to reading about caching, but I don't think there's anything I can do as I'm completely out of my depth and my developer is probably gone home at this stage. Not that I'd blame him, I ought to do the same myself!

suas

I couldn't find anything that I could do about caching with typo3. The site is being troublesome again.

But even as ours was slow, I checked some of the other sites on the same shared hosting server... and everyone that I checked loaded up instantly.

And ours is still locked up.. what if it isn't the hosting platform and I spend time and money moving it only to find out that the problem is still there?

I'd be happy to pay someone for two hours of intensive diagnostic work to get to the bottom of this. Any takers (with references!!)?

(You'd have to be able to investigate this without any help from my hosting companys tech support - I've asked them if it's my database or web server that is locking up and they've ignored the question and sent me a standard PFO about how great things are going to be once they have everything fixed up)

forbairt

would ye not just get back onto the company that designed it for ye and ask them what the issue could be and if they've experienced it before with company X ?

Majority of people won't have worked with Typo3 I would asume

suas

Don't worry, I'm on to them, but they're very busy at the moment. I'm trying to get them to free up the day it will take to move us to a new host, and I hope they'll get back to me soon.

But I'm trying to hedge my bets by getting to the bottom of the problem as well, can anyone help? I just want someone to put 2 hours into it - someone well experienced!

Like I said, what if it's a problem in our database, something borked? Some corrupt file somewhere? A dodgy settting? The hosting company, as frustrating as their tech support is, have charitably donated the hosting to us, so moving to a new host without the time to solicit a donation would cost.

Also, I'm on holidays next week and if moving hosts doesn't fix it, I'll have a more serious problem.

EDIT : Helloworld page edited to include the SiteUptime stat..

http://www.suas.ie/Helloworld.html It was at 93% until I started checking the site every 5 minutes this morning and now it's dropped to 92.4%... gonna get lower I think!

suas

New hosts to the rescue!! We've been offered a hosting package on a VPS, which is very exciting altogether. Just hoping the developers can fit it into their schedule.

The SiteUptime has dropped to 90.96%, seems to be completely unresponsive at the moment, even though ftp and ping are completely normal.

forbairt

Have ye been editing any of the core files recently ? or just making updates via a web interface ?

I've had various problems with one of my hosts the last while and down time and I don't really trust their online status page anymore so I'm in the process of moving everything away from them (its happening gradually though)


One thing I will say ... be careful with the VPS .. unless its a pretty decent one you may find if you're doing a lot of sql hits that having it hosted on the same "machine" VPS ... can cause a pretty big performance hit. I've experienced this with Magento for example.

BTW your site is finally loading for me .. it hasn't been the last few hours

suas

Have ye been editing any of the core files recently ?

Wouldn't know how! Just editing via that typo3 backend.

Thanks for the heads up about the VPS. As a rookie - I'm not sure what a 'decent' spec might be. I see companies offer a range of guaranteed/burstable RAM. What metrics would help me decide?

I'm sure it's not just visitor count. It's probably related to the question that I can't get an answer to from my hosts.... i.e. is there a CPU/RAM resource issue, database?

We had about 7GB of traffic this month so far, even with the problems, and 50k visitors annually. I've taken some sample specs from a UK hosting company... would you be able to say which is more suited to us?

VPS HOSTING SPECIFICATIONS STARTER BUSINESS ENTERPRISE
Hard Drive Space 10 GB 20 GB 30 GB
Monthly Bandwidth 300 GB 400 GB 500 GB
Guaranteed RAM 384 MB 512 MB 640 MB
Burstable RAM 1 GB 2 GB 4 GB
Cpanel / WHM Optional Optional Optional
Fantastico Free Free Free
OpenVZ Free Free Free
Virtuozzo £ 3 £ 3 £ 3
SSL Certificate £ 25.00/Yr £ 25.00/Yr £ 25.00/Yr
Operating System
SSH Root Access
Number of Usable IPs 2 2 2
Connection 100 Mbps 100 Mbps 100 Mbps

EKRIUQ

Don't think it has been suggested yet but is it possible for you to install it on your own computer using something like apache friends www.apachefriends.org. FTP all the files down with a database backup and get it working on your computer and from there you can see the speed of the website and then start tweaking thinks like added modules or scripts that could be causing the slowness.

It would take time but could find the root of the problem and with out website stats it'd difficult to make a proper diagnosis whether it’s the shared hosting but it’s a strong possibility

(I can't see your website and don't know if its up or down as I'm just connected with a dial up connection at the moment but nothing will load bar the favicon and title so that's not good)

suas

A very big thanks to those kindhearted folks over at Digiweb who, despite the cold economic weather, were able to sponsor our charity with a donated Virtual Server and our old site is being transferred as we speak, with the job probably completed by Friday at the latest.

That's just my own guess at how long it'll take, one night for a download, 24h for the config and upload and 48h to propogate through all the DNS servers.

EKRIUQ, thanks for the suggestion, and if I had the tech know how to do that, I would love to try it. I don't even have the time to learn it!

EDIT: Download of old site and upload to new host has been completed, working on configuring the server for typo3 now... typically a bit tricky, my wonderful developers tell me.

suas

So, where I'm at now - the VPS may not be the best product for our needs, my developer doesn't have the experience in setting up the extensive requirements for typo3 on the naked linux server.

My options are to find someone else to do that set up or go for a shared hosting environment.

Any advice?

forbairt

Did you try asking your new company ?

edanto

Yes! But only just now so I'll have to wait and see.

Just wanted to see if someone here would say - 'oh no, you really should go for a dedicated server with the kind of problems you've been having and the typo3 set up you have' or the complete opposite.

I tend to learn something from almost every discussion about this stuff that I read!

forbairt

edanto wrote: »

Yes! But only just now so I'll have to wait and see.

Just wanted to see if someone here would say - 'oh no, you really should go for a dedicated server with the kind of problems you've been having and the typo3 set up you have' or the complete opposite.

I tend to learn something from almost every discussion about this stuff that I read!

Suas ?

Dedicated is going to set you back a pretty penny ... well I think about 1k+ a year. Given that it was running on shared hosting previous to this I'm going to assume either one ... something has broken ... or two .. they are overloading their server ...

I've said it before ... get back onto your developers and see if they can troubleshoot the current system for ye

suas

Yip - I'm also edanto. There are a few of us in the office that share the Suas account for all things Suas-related and then I have my own for all my own stuff.

I've found out something very very helpful about typo3 from my helpful new hosts. It is notorious for the amount of.... eh let me get this right...

thing like the amount of memory a php thread will need to serve Typo3 – its notoriously heavy and the limits we need to put on shared hosting may interfere.

So, this could have been the problem in the previous environment... but now I know exactly what to ask tech support about if it happens again.

Conversation with the developers and the new hosts, and we're off to a shared hosting platform, but enterprise level, to give it a go. Happy days.