*Server Is Under High Stress*

[George Wallace]

Is one or more DSL connection down?

Bell Linemen at work somewhere nearby?

 

[Taoye]

This site's been loading real slow for me, too.

The rest of the Internet is doing fine.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

No technical problems, so I think we're just pushing our connection limits.

 

[PMedMoe]

It's working better for me today than it has the last few days.  No time outs or anything, it's just been slow.

 

[George Wallace]

Did the DSL Connection just go out to a restaurant for dinner?

 

[Old Sweat]

Several times in the last few days, including this morning, I have been unable to log onto the main page. However I have been able to access the site via Current Unread Topics.

 

[geo]

The site is zipping along quite nicely this morning

 

[GAP]

For the last 4 or 5 days the pages have taken forever to load....they load, but sloooowwwww.......

 

[1feral1]

Outragously slow here, so much it has frustrated me beyond hope.

That being said, tomorrow is another day.

OWDU

 

[freakerz]

Staff should check out Slicehost, cheap and awesome! :nod:

Although not Canadian... but most Canadian web hosts aren't worth it, they overcharge so much.

 

[George Wallace]

Staff should check out Slicehost, cheap and awesome! :nod:

Although not Canadian... but most Canadian web hosts aren't worth it, they overcharge so much.

I may suggest that you go back and do some reading of this topic, and get an idea of where the problems actually lie.  I don't think a web host is the problem........more like Bell Service and Bell transmission lines.

 

[freakerz]

It's fast right now, so it's dependent on the time of the day? I'ld say it gets slow from 9AM EST to 2AM EST. During that period there's double (over 250) the amount of users currently (~130) connected.. I keep reading about the DSL connection, is the whole network (Army, Navy, AF, Milnet) powered by DSL connections from Bell? Otherwise, I'm on a university campus so there shouldn't be throttling (downloads or other sites are fast any time of the day).

 

[George Wallace]

If you do some reading about the site, you will discover that Army/Navy/Air Force/Milnet is one site in actual fact, which allows you the options to view in your preferred "Element".  The site owner runs the site off a desktop in his basement connected to two DSL lines in a rural area.  This is not a large conglomerate site with vast resources.

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

freakerz,

Thanks for the info. Offsite hosting seems to be the "best" solution to residential DSL woes, so I'm definitely in the market. It's a matter of being able to afford decent hosted hardware, so disk or memory doesn't become the next bottleneck.

I'll check in to Slicehost...


Cheers
Mike

 

[Nfld Sapper]

Staff should check out Slicehost, cheap and awesome! :nod:

Although not Canadian... but most Canadian web hosts aren't worth it, they overcharge so much.

How about then making a donation to the site to help off set this cost.

 

[Nfld Sapper]

freakerz,

Thanks for the info. Offsite hosting seems to be the "best" solution to residential DSL woes, so I'm definitely in the market. It's a matter of being able to afford decent hosted hardware, so disk or memory doesn't become the next bottleneck.

I'll check in to Slicehost...


Cheers
Mike

Mike from the Slicehost site:

Our Plans
Plan RAM Storage BW Monthly Cost
256 slice 256MB 10GB 100GB $20
512 slice 512MB 20GB 200GB $38 
1GB slice 1024MB 40GB 400GB $70 
2GB slice 2048MB 80GB 800GB $130 
4GB slice 4096MB 160GB 1600GB $250
8GB slice 8192MB 320GB 2000GB $450
15.5GB slice 15872MB 620GB 2000GB $800

Included in Every Slice™
Full root access and rebooting
Choice of Linux distro
Dedicated IP address and Tier-1 redundant bandwidth
RAID-10 disk storage
Reserved RAM
Guaranteed CPU share and more when available
4-core servers running Xen virtualization instances
Slicehost management portal for reboots and software installs
Mobile management portal for smartphones
Ajax console access
Bootable rescue mode
Private IPs for inter-slice communication
HA capabilities via shared IPs
Machines running with fixed usage limits, below full capacity

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Thanks Sapper, I just checked that out. We're running off the equivalent of a 4Gb slice now... so the hardware is quite capable, but the network connection is the bottleneck. It'd be far outside our budget to get comparable hardware with a better connection through Slicehost. A 2Gb slice is closer to our range, so I guess I'd need to figure out if the hardware becomes the bottleneck at that point...

 

[freakerz]

They have a forum too, maybe you can ask other owners, my sites aren't big enough to compare 

What's the load on your server with 4gb of ram... if the forum needs that much, dayum! (unless you run multiple sites or most services)

Also you could go with shared hosting, it's much cheaper, but what's the fun in that?  ;D

 

[Mike Bobbitt]

Yeah we run pretty close to the limit most times. Here's the current snapshot:

MemTotal:      4061812 kB
MemFree:        99312 kB

Now mind you, Linux doesn't deallocate memory until it needs it, so that may be a bit misleading. The big consumer is MySQL and the mail services... once you stack on mimedefang, clamav, spamd etc it all adds up pretty qiuckly. CPU load is almost always low (> 0.7) unless a big job is running (E.G. backup).

 

[George Wallace]

The Gerbils don't have their tag team timing down pat tonight.  The site seems to be running a bit slow at times.  Sporadic.