TLS server move progress thread

[Cthulhu]

Also disabled StreamPad, the extension that showed a bar on... well, pretty much everywhere. We're not (entirely) an MP3 site, and it kinda mismatches with the rest of the site. Should speed things up a little too, as it no longer initializes the player.

 

[Cthulhu]

Updated some plugins, why not.

I'm curious now: Google measures page speed as one factor in page ranking, I wonder if page speeds have increased according to them. Will take some time to gather statistics though.

Oh, and I should re-IP ban Baidu & co, fuckers.

 

[Cthulhu]

Bugger me, TLS was unavailable this morning. A shitton of Apache processes were fucking shit up. I'm not sure what's going on, but I restarted it to get a fresh start. After a few minutes, checked the online users list, and there's a shitton of Bing's bots fucking shit up. Upped the limit, but should do more tweaks and optimizations today, see if there's more we can fixx. If not, we'll just need a faster webserver, .

 

[Dashell]

I have to be honest, other than that one little problem with hostgator, I didn't see what was so bad about it. I mean the same thing happened to me and it's all good now. What does your forum do that takes up so much more processes and CPU than mine?... is it just the front page? Vbulletin?

 

[Cthulhu]

It was a peak in activity and a shitty plugin (or more than one), mainly, . I believe I poasted about that elsewhere.

@thread, I tweaked some settings in APC, the PHP cache thing, so it can use more memory (64 MB instead of 32) - the APC cache was full, which would cause more cache misses and fragmentation. Call me weird, but I'd say the forums front page loads faster now. Will keep monitoring and trying, might just be me and because I just restarted the webserver.

Cache stats for geeks

 

[Dashell]

It was a peak in activity and a shitty plugin (or more than one), mainly, . I believe I poasted about that elsewhere.

Yeah, sorry, I think you did but I guess it's just my hostgator bias showing through.

I'm sure you know what you're doing doing better than what I would know by now. And ... I thin the front page is loading faster now actually...

 

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, the front page already did become a lot faster when I installed a cache (so that it's just a static file that gets served, instead of the page getting generated by Wordpress' scripts), and now that we have a faster internet pipeline, the site should use more of your bandwidth to load it. I also did a few tweaks yesterday to better employ browser caching; static files like javascript and images and shit should be cached for a year, for example.

 

[Cthulhu]

APC cache hits / misses

Hits: 26945 (99.0%)
Misses: 282 (1.0%)

I am content. APC uses around 50 MB to cache the .php files, and I think that's all of 'em. Pretty sure bumping that fixes the performance problems. The previous value (32MB) was just too low to cache all the .php files, which caused, effectively, a lot of 'swapping' - files dropping out of the APC cache, needing to be reloaded and re-compiled, re-entering into the cache, etc. This also caused fragmentation in the cache, if that means anything to you.

But now it's perfect. All executable .php files are compiled to bytecode or w/e and stored in-memory, and can be executed directly without first needing to be read from file and interpreted.

 

[Celes Chere]

I cant be arsed to read all this uhh stuff I don't understand

but why is tls so slow now

or maybe it's just me

 

[Dashell]

It's slow for me too sometimes but not always, should we like post in here when it's slow?

 

[Celes Chere]

it's going pretty fast now but like a moment ago I was like 8U WHY YOU NO LOAD

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

It's performing better than it ever has for me right now.

 

[Cthulhu]

It seems performance is just unpredictable. I dunno, lol . If that keeps up - especially during peak hours - I guess we'll just upgrade.

 

[Roger]

Wasn't working for me all day, no it's all going pretty quickly.

 

[Cthulhu]

Righty, sorry for the downtime - again, . I'm pretty sure this and yesterday's downtime is caused by the Baidu spider being a cunt and DOS-ing us. And because I misconfigured the IP block, I fail at wildcards, .

Baidu is just one party though: if we ever get an activity spike, we might experience the same thing again. So I asked on a tech forum if there's other precautions we can take - tweak some settings etc.

Alternatively, I should dive back into nginx, a non-blocking webserver that should be able to handle a lot more connections. I tried to set that up initially, but failed. Apache spawns a new process for every request, iirc, and so it runs out of available 'workers' pretty quickly.

 

[Cthulhu]

Just tweaked the robots.txt file (http://thelifestream.net/robots.txt) so that the bots that do respect this file will no longer attempt to index nonsensical pages like the new reply page (which, apparently, is also available to unregistered members).

 

[Cthulhu]

Guys, request. If any of you is up tomorrow when the server starts to get sluggish and die again, can you take a look at the currently active users and save that (if it's still accessible)? Pretty sure people with admin powerz can get more relevant info like resolved user agent etc.

I'm inclined to believe it's either Bing's bot fucking us up (in which case I either need to ban it too and/or up the robots.txt thing more), or the webhost making a backup of everything and either locking the whole webserver up, or fucking something else.

In either case, there's still more optimizations I should / could do wicba:

* Run PHP in FastCGI mode, instead of as an Apache module (basically have PHP run in its own process instead of as a part of an Apache process)
* Use nginx instead of Apache
* Get more memory or optimize its usage by turning off non-essentials - we're kinda maxing out our 512 MB of memory, which means the thing is swapping like a motherfucker, which means it's slow as shit.

 

[Cthulhu]

Still not sure what causes the overload at 5 AM my time / 10/11 PM your time, activity does peak at those hours, but it also does that six hours earlier (European peak time, lmao), so it doesn't explain it. Nothing suspicious found in the access logs either.

Will do more optimizations, I guess. The main problem is the server's memory usage atm, I think.

 

[CK]

Dunno if this helps at all but there are no database error screens showing up at all like there was with hostgator. All that happens is it either keeps loading or I get a chrome error saying something about no data was loaded or something I forget already lol.

 

[Tifabelle]

I get infinite loading

 

[Cookie Monster]

Yeah, for me it just keeps loading.

 

[Celes Chere]

After some time, Chrome tells me to give the fuck up.

 

[Fangu]

This doesn't look helpful at all (I'm guessing an admin can see more info in the Active Users list?), but anyway, here's the 'guest list' for around 1:30 AM your time, Yop.

I didn't spot any Bing bots all night, just Google and Lycos, really.

Edit: Oh and at the time this was copied, the site was slowing down a little. The only thing I noticed was just more 'normal' users online - the guest count did not shoot for the moon.

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[Cthulhu]

Well this is quaint: I get to work and the site is still online, . Was there any downtime in the last 12 hours or so?

One possible explanation: I upped the robots.txt file to instruct bots to index us less aggressively; perhaps it took a day or two for that change to be picked up.

 

[Tifabelle]

no, sir. it did not go down tonight.