Server Slow?

Is anyone else's site running very slow tonight? FWIW I'm on Korben...

bryan | website

Everything's responding slow for me. HTTP, MySQL, IMAP, and SMTP. As a brand-new user, it's fairly discouraging. I hope this is a transient problem, and not a regular occurrence here.

I'm also on Korben and getting the delay. Traceroute is fast but transferring data is very slow. FTP stalled several times.

I'm running fine right now. DH is doing a lot of hardware upgrades and replacements, so the slowdown is probably related and temporary.

Yes, mine is still running very slow. If it is due to hardware replacement and upgrades, I wish DH would post that announcement somewhere :-. But at least I know it's not limited to just my site right now...

bryan | website

I got an announcement about them replacing a hard drive on one of the MySQL servers a few hours after I'd started noticing some serious MySQL related problems. Minutes after the mail it was all good.

You can set the level of announcements that you'll receive in the web panel > status > announcements

jason

Thanks, I already had them set to e-mail me for all levels. However that announcement is not even in the Announcement section of my panel :(

bryan | website

I was sent to only affected users, perhaps you were not affected :)

jason

New user here also and a bit discouraged with the speed of my site. I've installed the DH-provided WordPress as well as a couple other packages which use PHP and MySQL (Drupal, for example) and there is some kind of latency somewhere during the page loading process. I get the "waiting for blahblah.com" in the browser which just sits there for a second or two and then boom! there is the page. I'm wondering if it's some kind of database connection delay issue or something. I'd point fingers at the Drupal (or whatever) for maybe being inefficient or causing the problem somehow, but since the official WordPress installs do the same thing, I have to assume it's on DH's end. Too bad there's no way for me to really find-out what is going-on while it's sitting there "waiting for blahblah.com"...

I have the same issue, delays at times. Others have said that DH is doing alot of hardware upgrades and hopefully that's the reason for the slower speeds at times and this will all clear up soon.

I run ExpressionEngine which was blazing fast all the time on my old server so I know it's not EE. I'm thinking the mysql servers DH is using is having some speed issues since other sites I have on the web server that are far less db intensive are a bit faster.

bryan | website

You described the exact situation I've experienced here at DreamHost since they've been hosting my site for about 3 weeks now.

My site takes quite a long time to load; I even conducted a polling of my site's users, and 48% (at time of this writing) have indicated the site takes longer than 7 seconds to load. My site is admittedly database-heavy (PostNuke), but at my previous host, it took no longer than 3 seconds to load the entire site.

Here's the poll: http://www.techjapan.com/Poll-15results.html

I likewise did some experimentation. I created an HTML-only test setup in my webspace, and accessed it from my browser. And guess what? It loads in under a second.

I really, really hope this is due to hardware upgrades. I could deal with "a second or two," but nearly half of my site's visitors (myself included) have to wait over 7 seconds. Unacceptable. That 91 day money back guarantee may come in handy.

Do you have any way to test a fresh install of PostNuke? Your installation could have gotten to be corrupt somehow, you could have some large content being loaded, or you could have disabled gzip header compression. Either way, 8 seconds is considered the standard of impatience. Clearly you've never used 56k.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I may try a fresh install and see what happens. Like I said, though, an older (and less optimized) version of PostNuke ran fine on my old server, with the same database, and it was still much faster.

And I used 56k for a number of years :( I think I got onto broadband right around the time the first ever version of MusicMatch came out.

I periodically experience similar agonizing load times, across different sites and apps too (Drupal, pMachine, two Invision Power Boards) so unless they all corrupt themselves and heal spontaneously I'm thinking something else is at play, in the MySql arena.

Interesting - thanks for collecting that data. Have you filed a helpdesk ticket with DH showing them 1) your data and 2) this thread (to show it's not just you)? So far, you're the only one with any real "data" collected that I'm aware of, so perhaps it would be worth contacting their support with the results.

Fortunately, I got-in on a sweet deal (the Crazy plan for $9.24 for the entire year), so I'm not real picky, but if this database problem persists, you can bet that 1) I won't be renewing after the year is up and 2) I won't be using this hosting plan for anything serious like a business.

Mike

Also Crack is running very slow at the moment. Shell input is taking about 2s to echo and POP3 fetch of small messages about 2s each.

I filed a help desk ticket, and I linked this thread. We'll see what happens.

The way I see it, the $10 is a sunk cost. I need my site to function well, and I'll spend my money in other places should it come to that.

Here's the ticket I sent in:

"I know you guys are swamped, so I'll try and keep this short.

My site is very heavily driven by a mySQL database,
database@domain.com.

To put things plainly, my site has been very, very slow. It's not recent -- things were slow since I you began hosting me last month. Things get worse in the evening EST hours.

I've conducted a polling of my site's users:
http://www.techjapan.com/Poll-15results.html
As you can see, about half of my users indicate it takes over 7 seconds for the www.techjapan.com domain to respond.

My site is admittedly database-heavy, but the problem shouldn't be this bad. I guess you guys don't like comparisons, but my previous host served up my pages with a less optimized version of my CMS (PostNuke) in less time.

I'm apparently not the only one with this problem:
http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Num ber=15449&page=1&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=14&part=

So, are you guys in the process of upgrading the database servers, or what? I certainly don't want my site to always be this slow."Edited by zmcnulty on 01/13/05 11:28 PM (server time).

Good wording - it should be very clear to them what's being asked. Now, whether or not they actually read it and follow the link to these forums is another story.

Just for additional data, I started working with my site at about 10:00am today and the speeds were OK -- not fast, but probably about 2 seconds which is acceptable. Now, at noon, however, I'm back to the 7-10+ seconds EVERY load! It makes it extremely frustrating to try to get things done.

FWIW, static pages are very fast, so I honestly believe it's the DB server that is causing the problems. I've tried several DB-driven packages, including the **official WordPress install** and I get the same slowness among them all, so I know it's not the software.

Come-on, DH - lets see some improvement. It's been a month now and I've seen no progress towards this issue...

I've been really disappointed with the speed of my site (just a phpBB forum at the moment) ever since I signed up in late December '04. My web site is on 'zorg' and my mysql database is on 'felix'. When I test raw bandwidth (by downloading a file) it is sometimes slow (like <100 KB/sec) and sometimes fast (like >200 KB/sec). So the issue may be a combination of network bandwidth/latency and server utilization. Compared to my old host (myacen.com) which I always considered so-so, dreamhost kinda sucks so far. I am really disappointed because I was expecting top-notch, premium hosting (after spending near $400 for 24 months of Code Monster)... which it is... other than the performance. I hope they do something to improve this problem, or I might have to take advantage of the money-back guarantee.

Verrrrry slow at times. Sometimes I wait over 20 seconds to get any sort of response. (Drupal)

Once the page starts loading, it's almost instantaneous. But the calls to the database seem to take forever and a day, sometimes. I never see this with static pages on the main server.

I wrote to inquire about this, too, and was told everything was fine on their end. My guess is that their database server(s) need upgrading, or the pipeline needs opening. With shared hosting, sudden bursts of "conueries" from multiple sites probably get backed up.

I'm hoping this will change, soon. I've never experienced such sub-standard performance from Dreamhost servers, until recently.

Just a sideways thought - if you are using the weather module on your Drupal install it often hangs for quite a while, while weatheroom.com times out :( I love that module, but had to take it out because the feed is so unstable. The Mambo one was light years more stable. (I still prefer Drupal, though.)

my website is very slow and I'm not using database, just plain php and takes about 15-20sec each time refresh a page.

Chalk up another one for slow server, with both straight HTML pages and database-driven PHP forums.

I recently conducted tests during one of the busy hours where my sites seem to slow to a crawl, and noticed that while the site's being slow the server holding the site experiences up to 10% packet loss. I tested this from both east and west coast of United States, from several locations with fat pipes to backbone providers. Same results from both coasts. Simultaneous control pings to a few other sites experienced no packet loss, so I'm pretty sure it's a problem with Dreamhost. The more I hear about it, and experiment with it myself, the more I'm inclined to think that DH is running out of server capacity.

Besides the straight HTML page being slow during these peak hours, the database-driven forums get really slow even with zero traffic. The worst I've seen is 12 second page creation time on a virtually empty forum -- and this is pretty efficient forum software.

I've been reluctant to move the high-demand content of ours to Dreamhost hosted sites, and it looks like the caution is paying off. Hopefully DH can get their act together though.

And another here. (cornelius/felix) I ran a split site for a while, the forum software on my old host and the database here, with no speed issues at all, so I'm inclined to say that the problem isn't with the DB server.

I've noticed a rash of mod_gzip errors in my error logs since I moved rest of the site here.

silly me, i started a new thread, here: http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Number=16875&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=14&part=1#Post16876

am having the same slow servers and downtimes. am also running expression engine. (so php / mysql related, it seems).

testing our site on: http://www.websitepulse.com/tools.php3 it took 40 seconds for our page to load. that's just...inexcusable.

i've just sent support another ticket, but am surprised that Dreamhost hasn't already jumped into this thread.

*i* sold dreamhost to the folks as a great webhost, because i've never had trouble with them in the past, and now i'm looking a bit ridiculous. what's up?

My site is again running very slow. It's getting rediculous. I filed a support ticket almost 2 weeks ago on this and am still waiting for resolution.

My suggestion is everyone experiencing this problem, keep submitting tickets, then maybe DreamHost will realize just how annoyed we all are by this issue.

bryan | website

I'm still getting really slow times on my site. Super slow in fact now I can't even connect to my site at all. I tried FTPing in, but all I got was a timeout. This is very frustrating... What the h3ll is going on?

Yes previously the performance was pretty good. I was very happy with DH up until 2005 when everything starts to go bad...

Hey everybody,

Just letting you know that this is currently our top priority. It's weird, there's definitely something _wrong_ ... ie, it's not just that "machines are overloaded" or something like that. Like there's a definite mis-configuration or something.

For example, right now moliu.org is running really really slowly, but the network is fine and the server's not overloaded at all. We're still not sure what it could be, but it may have something to do with recent kernel upgrades we had to make for security patches, or possibly something with our network-attached storage.

I promise this is priority number one right now, and we'll do our best to get these mysterious slowdowns corrected permanently as quickly as we can.

josh!

Ah okay, the problem has been isolated. Our new caching nameservers seem to be having problems with bind crashing, and when it does, dns lookup for mysql hostnames start to take forever, and so if your site has any database stuff, it gets really slow.

Now that we understand the problem, we're going to do our best to make sure this gets resolved permanently asap!

josh!

Thanks for the honest explanation Josh. I look forward to the fix and wish you guys the best of luck doing it :)

bryan | website

Thanks for the heads-up Josh. Any ideas on the ~10% packet loss happening during crunch hours, or why a site with straight HTML sans PHP or database activity gets unresponsive as well?

Thanks for the thought. I am talking about a slowness in the server response, though, not the actual loading of the page.

Thanks for your quick responsse. I hope it can be fixed quickly. Is there any estimates to how long it's going to take to fix? Is it possible to have a page where we can follow the progress of this problem?

I just wanted to add that I too will be interested in this being fixed. I just recently setup my domain and webserver (I waited a month after I signed up), and was shocked at how slow it is.

I hope it is fixed shortly, as I am going to have to chose to switch hosts very shortly if this continues.

this morning, it was still taking 40+ seconds to load the page and now, this evening, we're up to 60+ seconds.

i understand that you all are trying to work the issue and you've always been great in the past; however...

we're going to lose members soon (if we haven't lost them or potential ones already). we can't afford to do that.

*please* tell me that this is not going to take much longer.

What bothers me most is the lack of communication. I look at other hosting providers who are getting hammered with similar problems due to Movable Type and their forums are busy with administrators telling the users what they are doing to solve the problem (and they are fixing the problems quickly). I haven't been with DH too long, I haven't been too impressed with their support. Long time users seem to like it, but I haven't seen it.

I agree that there should be more communication. I should be informed that the server is going to slow or whatever. It isn't that difficult to send a email to everyone informing us of the situation. Anyway, I really do hope this will resolve soon.

The packet loss is still happening.

My site is slow as well. No mySQL just some PHP on the testbed I'm working on.

http://takacs-family.com/album/

Exact same setup on another provider is blazing fast
http://gregtakacs.com/album/

I'm on Nexus FWIW........

okay, it just continues to get worse.

RL tested:
http://members.progressivefocus.org

Status:
Server responded normally to all tests

Server Status:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Server type:
Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) DAV/1.0.3 mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a PHP/4.3.10 mod_ssl/2.8.19 OpenSSL/0.9.6c

Last modified:
Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:25:58 GMT

Response time:
103.5638 seconds


if something isn't done, we're going to have to switch hosts and i seriously don't want to do that.

It has been a couple days since Dreamhost has commented on this problem. Could we get an update?

I'd like one, too.

Chalk me up as another customer with verrry slow (PHP-only and PHP-and-MySQL) sites. Last night it took ages just to download an über-simple, small, text-only file. :-(

I got this response on Sunday:

===========
We finally today figured out the cause of these strange site slowdowns
actually, and now are able to take steps to fix it! Recently we started
using some caching nameservers and they've been having random problems
with bind sometimes taking really long (like 10-15 seconds) to respond to
requests. Restarting bind always fixes it, but we still haven't been able
to figure out the cause. Compounding the problem, our current monitoring
system wasn't noticing the delays.. since bind _was_ technically working,
just really slow.

Today we finally put one and one together and realized the site
slownesses a lot of people have been getting periodically are when one of
the caching nameservers has this problem. If their site uses a mysql
database with us, then the server has to do a nameserver lookup each time
it connects to the mysql host, and these lookups would take like 10+
seconds! Our stop-gap solution put into effect today is to populate the
/etc/hosts file on all our web servers with the ip addresses for all the
mysql hostnames for that machine.. so even if the caching nameservers
continue to act up, it won't cause this slowness anymore.

Of course, now we're going to continue to try to get to the bottom of why
bind is being so flakey on these new machines! Hopefully we'll be able to
figure that out soon as well. In the meantime, at least it won't be
causing slowness on people's http requests anymore!

Please let me know if you have any more slowness issues like this, or
need anything else, and my apologies for this service degredation! Things
should really be okay from here on out..
=========

and when I asked when we might see better performance, I got this response:

=========
We are working getting this implemented on all of our servers by the end
of the week you should notice a difference. If there is anything else I
can help you with just let me know.
=========

to which I replied:

=========
"If there is anything else I can help you with just let me know."

Please be more active in the forums, let your customers know what is
happening and how you are fixing it. I can't tell you how frustrating
it is to have a problem like this go on for so long without hearing
anything.

It seems like Dreamhost does not take care of things very quickly. I
see from the forums that people are waiting days to get domains set
up. Have you oversold your product to the point that you can not
offer customer service in a timely manner? It it clear that you are
not meeting your 24 hour response time to customer inquiries.

What type of client are you catering to? Clearly I am not a large
business client, but I do expect that my sites should be accessible
and that I will get information in a timely manner.
========

If Dreamhost wont show up in the forums, maybe we can pass along whatever information we do get from them so that so many users aren't left in the dark. I really find this to be unacceptable customer service.

They sent me the same canned message, twice. First when I inquired why the servers are slow, and the next time when I asked why a non-PHP using, non-MySQL using pure-HTML page is being slow and whether the 10% packet loss might have something to do with it.

I'm still curious on how a page that doesn't use PHP, MySQL, or Perl gets slowed down by this snafu with DNS.

To DH's credit, the obscene 15 second slowdowns with database-driven sites are gone for us. The empty forums that we're using to test DH's hosting account are, however, still on average 700% slower than they were when we signed up with them a month ago -- so something strange is still going on. The ping times to the server have also grown from ~28 milliseconds to over 50 milliseconds -- though sometimes you do get 26 millisecond pings.

If DreamHost employees spent more time in the forums, it would take them even longer to setup domains, respond to support requests, etc.

I have several sites that are php and database driven and haven't seen this, what servers are you on? I have been checking my sites almost every day, but haven't had any issues with load time. Is this a server by server incident, or is there something else going on?

Our sites are on zorg.

And yeah, I'd rather have DH people finding problems and doing general maintenance than browsing the boards all the time.

I have sites on web servers arkanoid, dawber, zim, pernod, cordial, hillmont, absinthe, ellipsis, galaga, happy, karnov, tetris and leeoo. Anyone have problems with php and mysql on these servers?

If so, I can have you look at my sites and maybe we can figure out what is going on.

http://www.naaco.info is hosted on arkanoid, yes? I tried pinging it and a site on zorg at the same time. www.naaco.info @ arkanoid had no packet loss and pings average around 30 millisecond, and a site on zorg had 7% packet loss and 47 millisecond average ping.

I don't expect DH to cruise the forums at all times, but they could monitor topics and provide feedback. Maybe I have just been spoiled by previous hosting companies, but forum interaction seems much more efficient than fielding the same question by multiple users. Customers would not be opening trouble tickets if the information was already available.

Here is the latest response I got:

========
The problem is that we experienced a large increase in customers in a
very short time period. We are in the process of hiring new support
technicians to help out with the high support loads. Generally we cater
to the small buisness/personal hosting customer, but we do have very
large dedicated customers. Most large businesses go with dedicated
hosting plans so their sites are not affected by other customers sites.
We apologize for the outage and we are constantly working to make our
server more reliable for the customer.
========

From this comment, it does sound like DH has oversold its capabilities and that it is not just a technical problem, but also a staffing issue.

What's the difference between "cruise the forums at all times" and "monitor topics and provide feedback"?

To me, "cruise the forums at all times" implies that someone is constantly reading through the forums, taking a lot of time. Monitoring the forums, to me, would imply that they are watching forum feeds (if available) and updating important topics such as site availability and slow downs.

I'm happy to email anyone examples of other hosts which provide this type of service, I don't think it is appropriate to post links to those sites on DH forums. Like I said, maybe I am expecting a service that DH doesn't provide, which is fine. I do think that it is important to keep customers informed of what is going on with the service they are paying for.

I used to see occurrences of that here, but before DH went overboard on customers and became under-staffed. Perhaps that will return when they hire more support employees.

hey all,
i´m im the process of selecting a host for a client and was happy to suggest DH. But last week things have gone crazy. My sites are ridiculously slow. Things only start on the server after a 5 to 10 seconds stall. Will this thing be fixed? Or this is just the way things will be from now on? My confidence on them is totally crushed. So disapointed. These guys used to rock... I´m now seriously thinking of reccomending another host to my client. I would appreciate some private mail with suggestions. Cheers, D.

w/r/t monitoring forums, read the disclaimer on the front of the forums. Employee participation here is voluntary, though usually we are reading (and sometimes responding to) threads here. We provide official responses via announcements and via customer support.

Regarding this specific problem, we're spending a lot of time looking into this. I know the silence is annoying, but at this point, all I can say is that there are a few different things we're looking at, and we have at least been able to isolate some common threads.

In reply to:

---

when they hire more support employees.

---

And, in case I didn't mention it elsewhere, that is in the works (and if you're in Southern Cali and want to submit your resume, feel free). But yes - we are super duper swamped this week, and everyone's chipping in to reduce the overload.

I am also on korben, I've been going slow for a while. WP's been taking around 10-50x as long to load pages, and Gallery's really starting to crawl too.

Even uploading to the server is incredibly slow (on the order of 2-3 K/s). I was able to work around this by setting up a httpd on my computer, then using wget on korben to "pull" the files I wanted to upload. When that was done, the files transferred around 150-200 K/s.

http://beoba.net

> We provide official responses via announcements and via customer support.
> ... I know the silence is annoying,

Then may I politely ask why DH has made no announcement of this problem?

I am willing to give DH through the weekend to fix this, which makes the slow down over a week. I would plead with DH to make an effort to keep its customers informed of what is going on during times like this. A little bit of transparency can really go a long way.

I sent in a ticket, the problem was reported to be related the the recent kernel upgrades. Since last night when I first noticed that this was not a problem on my end, the problem seems to have gotten worse. Rather than slow loading times, I'm starting to get problems along the lines of pages that time out entirely.

http://beoba.net

I'm wondering if there's any updates on the problem. I'm still getting pretty slow performance when it comes to mysql. It seems that my site has a 1 minute lag before it starts loading? I'm assuming this is the nameservers again?

my sites have been terribly slow as well, especially the MYSQL parts!!! so slow you cant even load the page.

then today i have been getting the same emails from dreamhost over and over:

----start

This is an automated message to let you know that your data has been restored for some or all of your users and your site(s) and mail should be up shortly.

Again, we're very sorry for the delay and the downtime it has caused.

I suspect that the mysql nameservers aren't fixed yet, or the problem has recurred? I really hope that dreamhost get to the bottom of it fast. I mean these day, almost all CMS uses mysql. I really hope the mysql nameservers start functioning properly!

Regarding those emails, I've been getting them as well. I think I've got at least 3 of them today. I wonder what's with those emails?

yeah... I´ve got the same message a number of times... tough times for DH I guess. And no, I´m not bringing my client this time. I´ll be waiting for some stability.

i just checked dreamhost's emergency site:
http://status.dreamhost.com/

here's the info:
---start

This page is only updated if our primary system is unavailable.

One of our central filers failed this morning, we will be sending out additional announcements to those affected (and those unaffected) shortly.

Please visit our normal announcements page for more information about system status.

----end

Well, that doesn't explain the slow mysql response time. the mysql problem has been there for at least a week already. I think it's a separate problem...

just today's been slower than most days this year! and this past week has been terribly slow overall compared to normal!

now it's taking a long time to log into dreamhost's control panel...just stalls and goes into "page cannot be displayed." other websites load fine for me.

i've been with dreamhost since 2000...as each year passes, dreamhost seems to be getting busier, slower hosting and more problematic. at least their support is still kind though. ha! but sure makes me stressed out!!

I'm having a terrible time accessing my site.
I can't get into my FTP either.

FTP seems to be down for my sites this morning as well, although it was working fine for me just yesterday.

Ahhh, well,
:-)
Kristen

Addendum - spoke too soon - FTP is now working for me again - D'OH!

today is still terribly slow...WTF is going on!!! why isn't dreamhost sending out emails to caution it's users? instead we're going into a blind panic...well, i can only speak for myself. i'm really starting ot dislike dreamhost for it's infrequent downtimes because it's ruining the supposedly good reputation i thought dreamhost had.

Im the same problem:( Here's what I got from DH just today:

if you find a good host, please let me know! i've been thinking of changing too...

Just another new user chiming in to say that things are unacceptably slow right now and I would love to see this problem resolved as soon as possible.

Just after I posted that, I checked back at my site and it seems faster. Apparently posting here works! ;)

It's still not quite as quick as I would like, but getting better...

//edit: Scratch that. Still slow.
Edited by root2 on 02/08/05 02:52 AM (server time).

2. MySQL DNS isn't an issue since
a) The've entered each and every mysql.mysite.com into /etc/hosts (not that it's a reliable solution but still better than nothing)
b) I've tried replacing name with IP from /etc/hosts and haven'tt noticed any difference.

It's obviously not the whole issue, but it was the problem on the machine I'm hosted on. My site has been zipping along nicely since they bypassed the DNS.

This sort of process is like peeling away the layers of an onion. Keeping everyone informed would go a long way toward relieving anxiety, though.

I'm thinking about this one here: http://www.hostinglite.com/
Just have to find some descent feedbacks ....

Here's what people say about it: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=71362d748e7252067d9f7305e1b09a54&threadid=367839&highlight=HostingliteEdited by jurassic on 02/08/05 08:38 AM (server time).