Server Busy or Unavailable

[paulsherwin]

Yes, it's been a bit sluggish this morning, though I haven't had any actual timeouts.

[HamishBoxer]

1034 the other day

[Geoff 555]

Hi 10.16 onwards.
Cheers.
Geoff.

[Robert Darwent]

Server busy message from when I first attempted to visit today at 10:58am to 11:08am.

[Robert Darwent]

And again immediately after posting message #84 above, server busy message from 11:12am to 11:29am.

[Robert Darwent]

Just noticed that todays timeouts, re posts #84 and #85, are exactly a week on at roughly the same period of the day to those reported by me in post #80.

Edit:
Upon checking I find an earlier timeout reported by me in post #79 is also a Thursday at roughly the same time slot.

[Aub]

Busy on and off between 11am and now.

['LIVEWIRE?']

I found the same thing, too, after I had composed a reply to a post, and uploaded a picture. I was able to post said reply and photo a few minutes ago, but only after having had to rewrite it, and upload the photo a second time. Is there no way that posts which cannot be sent due to 'the server is too busy' can be saved until it is possible to send them?

[Darren-UK]

This server problem is becoming an increasing nuisance and as a Moderator I find it especially so.

Some members type their posts in Word, Notepad or whatever, save it and then copy it to the forum.

What I tend to do, and it may be a simpler method, is to highlight and copy the text before submitting a post and then, if things go belly-up, simply paste the text into the second attempt.

On the image issue, there's no alternative but to reload.

[Paul Stenning]

I think the problems occur when my main client is sending marketing/offer emails to existing customers. The timing seems to fit in with that (I know they often send them on Thursday mornings and Sunday mornings).

Next week the person who does that is away and I will be sending the emails for them. This means that I will know exactly when they are going and can monitor the server load, and if necessary try tweaking the sending rate etc. So hopefully I can improve the situation then. It's never going to be perfect though - 20,000+ emails being sent via the server will have some impact. The aim is to get the balance right.

Keep the reports coming, with the times you had the problems.

Meanwhile I also tend to select and copy text before posting so that I can paste and try again if something goes wrong. I do that on other websites and forums too, not just here, as you never know when a temporary glitch can occur.

[Paul Stenning]

We appear to have had 10 minutes of the server being inaccessible, between 11:26am and 11:36am today. Can anyone confirm this please?

I am asking the hosting company to investigate.

[Robert Darwent]

I can confirm that Paul. I first tried to visit at 11:28am. The website appeared to be trying to load but only extremely slowly and the screen stayed blank. I was able to visit the site normally from about 11:39am onwards.

Regards

[Paul Stenning]

Thanks Robert. The times in "Who's Online" seem to confirm it too.

[Paul Stenning]

Email response from the hosting company.

We have experienced a brief network outage and will be following up with this ticket once our investigations are complete.

Apologies for any inconvenience caused and if you have any further issues then please let us know.

[Robert Darwent]

Thanks for posting the email reply Paul.

It's probably just a coincidence, but it did happened on a Thursday morning again. The period from 10:00am to mid-day on a Thursday does seem to be something of a black-spot for network glitches/server busy issues recently.

Not a criticism or complaint BTW, just an observation.

Regards

[Paul Stenning]

This network outage is unrelated to the "server busy" messages that have happened some other Thursdays though.

I ran the mass email send earlier this morning while monitoring the server load and tweaking settings. The server load never went above 3 and the busy threshold for the forum is now set to 8 so ample headroom there. Likewise with another bigger mass email session last Sunday morning (3.5 was the highest load then).

Previously the forum busy threshold was set to 5 but from other tests that seemed to be too low and 8 is more realistic. Above 8 things are starting to slow down significantly so disallowing this forum to run gives more resources to the main eCommerce websites which pay the bulk of the server cost (and are indirectly the source of my main income).

I do know that on some Thursdays they send two mass email jobs at the same time, and although I haven't tried that it is likely that it would take us quite close to the new threshold value and would certainly have gone over the old one. When I speak to them next week I will emphasise that they must not run more than one mass emailing session at a time as it will affect performance of their websites and others on the server.

I will also ask them to let me know exactly when they are sending mass emails so I can keep an eye on things.

[Robert Darwent]

Thanks for explaining all of that Paul.

Like I said before my comments were in no way intended as a complaint, far from it. I was simply trying to establish some sort of a connection to the various outages so that knowing a particular time period on a particular day when it is more likely to occur you could then tweak the settings perhaps to avoid it.

Of course your paying website customers must have first priority. I think all the forum members appreciate that is the situation and don't have a problem with it, I certainly don't for one. The forum website runs perfectly fine for the vast majority of the time. An odd glitch now and again is more than acceptable.

Regards

[paulsherwin]

I think the important commercial point is that if this forum is slow and unresponsive the commercial sites are likely to be slow too. The mailshots may be saturating the database server process which will have an impact on anything else trying to access it, even if there is plenty of spare CPU time available.

[Paul Stenning]

Actually the database service is scarcely affected - the mailshot code just does a single query from a single table per batch of emails.

The mail is sent either using the php mail() function or with php code that sends via SMTP, so a lot of the load is on the http service (apache) running the php code. The mail services also show a load increase because they are processing all the mail.

The aim is to send the mail in small batches spaced out so as to keep the load reasonable. The scheme that seems to work best at the moment (following tweaks this week) is batches of 10 emails every 3 seconds.

The aim is to keep the server load low enough that the commercial sites are not noticeably affected. If it gets to the point that website performance is affected then shutting off this forum temporarily to allow the commercial sites to have the resources does help.

The aim though of course is to make sure we don't get to the point where any of the websites are significantly affected.

One suggestion I will be making to my main client is sending the emails overnight when access to the commercial sites and forum are much lower (it is rare to get any orders on the commercial websites between midnight and 6am).

[Paul Stenning]

I am aware of a brief glitch between 9:48am and 9:50am today.