The “bender” Web server experienced intermittently high load between about 7:40 and 10:15 AM Pacific time this morning, February 18. This resulted in slow or even inaccessible Web sites on that server. (Some e-mail was also delayed before being properly delivered.) Other servers were not affected.
This server had similar high load symptoms (but much more briefly) earlier this week. We took some steps to reduce the load then, but it appears those weren’t sufficient. We’re now taking much stronger action to ensure that this does not happen again.
We sincerely apologize to customers affected by this problem. We don’t consider it normal or acceptable, and we will make sure this isn’t a recurring issue.
Our business offices will be closed on Monday, February 15 to observe the US legal holiday. As always, we’ll provide same-day support for time-sensitive issues via our ticket and e-mail systems. However, questions that aren’t time-sensitive (including most billing matters) may not be answered until the next day, and telephone support (via callbacks) will be available only for urgent problems.
After upgrading our systems to PHP 5.2.6, we received reports of an incompatibility with Joomla. Some URLs do not work when Joomla is configured to use “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, but to not have “Use Apache mod_rewrite” turned on.
We’ve investigated this, and it’s caused by Joomla assuming that PHP has a bug that makes it work incorrectly, when in fact it’s supposed to work differently (and is clearly documented to work differently). Older versions of PHP had this bug, but the new version doesn’t.
To help our customers work around this, we’ve “patched” PHP to intentionally reintroduce the old bug for now, thus keeping it “compatible” with Joomla. If you were having trouble with Joomla’s “Search Engine Friendly URLs”, it should be fixed.
We’ll provide more technical details (and a more robust long-term solution) in the near future.
Update: We’ve also reported this problem to the Joomla developers and suggested a solution.
Due to software updates on our servers, Web hosting customers will experience about seven minutes of scheduled maintenance downtime between 11 PM and 1 AM Pacific time starting on one of the following nights, depending on which server your site is on:
- Thursday, February 4 (servers beginning with the letter “L”, such as “lrrr”)
- Friday, February 5 (all other servers beginning with letters “F-Z”, such as “farnsworth”)
- Saturday, February 6 (servers beginning with letters “A-E”, such as “amy”)
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We’ve got a lot of customers running WordPress, and we definitely recommend running WP Super Cache to improve performance. It can help dramatically!
But recently we’ve seen a number of our customers getting hammered by a ton of requests from FeedBurner. Usually the request is of this form:
/somepost?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=SomeCampaignString
We’ve also seen FeedBurner going crazy and making thousands of duplicate requests. One of the sites we host has gotten 45,000 simple status requests (HTTP “HEAD” requests) from FeedBurner today, for no good reason that we can see.
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Many Web sites write data to a database. Usually, the data absolutely must be properly saved, so the default way of adding records (using an SQL “INSERT” statement) ensures that the data is permanently stored on the server’s disks. Doing that takes a relatively long time in computer terms — it’s much slower than most things computers do.
In some cases, you might be storing data that’s not quite so important. And if it means your application can run much faster, you might be willing to risk a very small chance of data loss. That’s where MySQL’s “INSERT DELAYED” statement, which works with MyISAM table types (but not InnoDB tables), can be useful. (Tables are created as type MyISAM by default, so most tables are eligible to benefit from this tip.)
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We’ve finished upgrading our network so that all of our customer Web hosting and mail servers have full, direct gigabit links to Internet peering points, with no 100 megabit Ethernet segments anywhere. This involved replacing old Ethernet switches and retiring old servers, and now we’re more than ready for the future.
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If you use the WP Super Cache WordPress plugin (and you should, if you use WordPress), it has a settings page section titled “Expiry Time & Garbage Collection”. It sets the “Cache Timeout” to 3600 seconds by default, and warns that you should set it lower on a busy site.
That advice makes sense if you have a sudden surge of traffic to a single page. However, if your site is generally very busy across all pages (for example, if you have an archive of hundreds or thousands of posts that are constantly being indexed by search engines), we’ve found that you should do the opposite to improve performance: set it much higher. We recommend setting it to 172800 seconds (which is 48 hours). This can cut your CPU usage in half, which will speed up your site.
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On Friday, a problem made our “My Account” control panel system unavailable for about three hours, and caused some other problems as well. We promised we’d follow up with more details.
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At approximately 10:00 PM Pacific time tonight, January 16, the “amy” Web server will be restarted.
As a result, for customers on the “amy” server (only), Web site service and the ability to read incoming e-mail will be unavailable for approximately five minutes. Customers on other servers will not be affected.
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