Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Golfhaus]

Am I the only one that's been getting "Cannot find server or DNS Error" messages when trying to get into achewood.com recently? It doesn't happen all the time, just occasionally, and for varying amounts of time.

[Noah]

no that's never happened to me

[AugustWest]

That happens to me occasionally.  I was having trouble getting on about an hour ago, but it's fine now.

[jough]

Yes, this happens to me when the site is busy.  This probably happens here at the boards too, as my server is HELL OF ROCKING THE HITS.

[CortJstr]

I've given up on access achewood at around noon eastern as it always times out. The blogs are almost as bad. Probably the combination of the east coast being at lunch and the west coast rolling into work and firing up their RSS readers all at the same time.

[Bobby Isosceles]

I've given up on access achewood at around noon eastern as it always times out. The blogs are almost as bad. Probably the combination of the east coast being at lunch and the west coast rolling into work and firing up their RSS readers all at the same time.

Warning: angry geek ranting commences.

There is absolutely no excuse for this behavior. Achewood is almost entirely static content (and the feeds are hosted off of blogspot). A caching server like a BlueCoat or F5 BigIP can cache the image, and multiple caching servers can be deployed to handle this peak load. Whoever Onstad is paying for is screwing him. Most upstream providers should have this functionality (image caching/load balancing) to handle situations like this. If they don't, or aren't providing it full time, then they're ripping him off.

[jough]

Bobby, you can only load balance between two servers - my site(s) get hit pretty hard with load because at the moment I have only the one gigantaserver (TM) but in the future I plan to pick up an extra to handle only SQL calls, which will cut down on load considerably.

I agree, though, that it's probably not the server *load* that's hurting achewood.com (I mean, even though Chris is using PHP to dynamically serve the pages I can't imagine they're doing a whole lot) but probably we're seeing a bandwidth bottleneck.  His host should have a 100/1000 base T connection from the server to the 1000 base T switch, but so many hosts only use an old 10baseT NIC and it really can slow things down - I mean, my DSL modem is 10baseT.  I'd expect more from a professional web host.

[Bobby Isosceles]

Bobby, you can only load balance between two servers - my site(s) get hit pretty hard with load because at the moment I have only the one gigantaserver (TM) but in the future I plan to pick up an extra to handle only SQL calls, which will cut down on load considerably.

I agree, though, that it's probably not the server *load* that's hurting achewood.com (I mean, even though Chris is using PHP to dynamically serve the pages I can't imagine they're doing a whole lot) but probably we're seeing a bandwidth bottleneck.  His host should have a 100/1000 base T connection from the server to the 1000 base T switch, but so many hosts only use an old 10baseT NIC and it really can slow things down - I mean, my DSL modem is 10baseT.  I'd expect more from a professional web host.

We load balance between more than two servers (weighted). Even though PHP is used to dynamically serve the pages, the images will probably be cached. Yet, you're probably right, Onstad probably has a shitty frame relay and is bottlenecked somewhere.

[jough]

I'm thinking Onstad is getting free hosting in exchange for putting a Pop Art ad on his site - he may even know the owner.

Anyway, you get what you pay for.

And you pay for what you get.