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[Sandra]

Is there something wrong with the site CB for the past 3 days the pages have loaded so slowly that I've given up and logged out
I can get to other sites just fine, but I seem to have problems with this one, is it something I'm not doing right,??or is it the site.

[City Builder]

It's likely to be the website host.  I know they were experiencing problems with their filer and they supposedly replaced it, but when they replaced it they knocked off all of their tens of thousands of customers from the servers for about 12 hours.  They finally got everybody back online only now every once in a while they hiccup and the pages refuse to load and I have to press the refresh button to get the page to load.

I contacted their support department and explained the situation and told them that I believe they have too many high usage sites on this particular server and or too many accounts on each MySQL server that they run and maybe it was time for them to cull the herd out so that this wouldn't happen anymore and they had a typical webhost response to me of "we can set you up on your own private virtual server if you like, however it will cost you substantially more than you pay now" to which I almost gave them the directions straight to hades.

So anyway, hopefully when enough of their customers complain about the situation they will look into it further and put less customers on each server and bring us all back to our normal responsiveness in the websites hosted here.

Sorry... They've always been reliable in the past but I guess they've just outgrown themselves now, moved into their fancy new highrise office space and must be having some swinging parties going on durng work hours.

[MaxBeta]

   Sandra..sorry you had to weather any site slowdowns..  Few weeks back it was happening to me regularly.  Now I stay up later ..so hoping for wee hours minimal traffic and so far it's been OK.

CB is right... the hosting services are filling themselves to the brim..leaving very little bandwidth cushion for comfort and good performance to the regular surfin peeps.

Hope you are finally getting Spring...we had a couple of nice days.  I finally mowed the lawn ..would've needed sheep if I waited any longer.   

[Sandra]

Thanks for the reply both
I'm sorry to hear about the server woes CB I wouldn't have mentioned anything if I'd known, I hope they can resolve the issue without too much hassle.
Max...We had a couple of nice days but tomorrow (Saturday) is set to be howling gales and sleet, the weather forecast said that supercooled air was being dragged down to the atmosphere Shades of "The Day after Tomorrow"
I'm staying in, I'm not going anywhere 'til the sun shines again

[City Builder]

Okay it "should" be fixed now.  I contacted the host who found that there was one user using way too much cpu time, from what I gather his scripts were taking up all the CPU power and his account has been disabled until he can rewrite his scripts so that they aren't such hogs.

I did notice immediate improvement right after I got the response from the webhost with regards to our site loading, at the bottom of each page is a load timer, when the site runs like it should the timer will show a negative number to create the page like -2.025 or a low positive number like 1.546 seconds.  When theres a problem and it's running slow then it might show 15.678 or 5.998 

Basically anything above about 3 secnds to load the page means theres a slow down on the server and in this case it was a user running scripts that were not meant to be used on a shared environment.  So hopefully they wont re-enable his account unless he really does bring his scripts into line with using them o a shared environment and not killing everybodys elses sites performance.

Thanks ofr mentioning it else I wouldn't have contacted my webhost again and gotten them to do something about it.

[Sandra]

Yes.. I see a marked improvement now CB, thank you for sorting it out, it's lovely to see the pages loading as they should, and I'll keep in mind the load times at the bottom of the page (this page loaded in 4.196 seconds) a lot faster than the 20-30 seconds (if at all) I was getting.

[katmandu2]

...  there was one user using way too much cpu time, from what I gather his scripts were taking up all the CPU power  ...and in this case it was a user running scripts that were not meant to be used on a shared environment. 

  Good Morning All!

Can you please explain this further, CB?  For those of us who are technically challenged, this is an opportunity to learn...  I don't understand what you mean by "running scripts".  What types of things can cause this, and how can each of us avoid doing this?

Thanks...Kat

[City Builder]

Well nobody here on the forum could do anyting to avoid this.  But a script is a document that is basically a program to a web server, for example when you look at the url to our website, you see the word "index.php?topic=....."  The index.php is a php script, it's what makes our forum work, although with this forum there are literally hundreds and hundreds of these types of scripts that all work together to bring us the whole show.

Someone else on this server might be running a FFA (free for all) links script or someone mighnt be running a chat script, or someone else stil might be running a mailman script.  The possibilities are about as endless as they are for all the programs on all of our computers.

So basically a script is a program that is run on a web server to get the webserver to do a specific thing and only the owners of the accounts can keep it cool by using optimized coding in their scripts and running scripts that are friendly to a shared environment, else they end up basically denying the rest of the customers on the server from using part of the CPU time so in essence they might get errors like slow loading sites, or their own scripts might just time out and spit out an error all because someoene is using more resources then they are supposed to.

The thing that I notice with the load on the server that we are on, is that in the AM (PST, which is where our host is located) the response time from our forums is slower than the rest of the day, this is likely because the hosts are running backups and other maintenance at that time.  Like for me this morning, the page loaded fast, but it still took 3.261 seconds with 40 queries to load up the page, but later this morning into late morning early afternoon that number might actually drop into a negative number, yeah I know how can it take -2.657 seconds to create the web page?  It can't, it's just the way that the script has to calculate and instead of spitting out an error because it was so fast, it spits out a negative number.  but really anything less than about 5 seconds is acceptable, but one must also realize that for me, there are only about 7 requests that my request to see a page in our site has to be routed to so as to get to our webhost being that we are only about 122 miles away from our data center, however for someoen in New Zealand perhaps they might have to make 30 requests  in their route to get to see what they want.

Without getting any more technical than I have to.  The internet is made up (this is the basics only) of customers (you and I) and Routers and Hosts.  The customer sends out a request that he wants to see yahoo.com  this request goes from his computer to his ISP.  His ISP then looks up in their domain name server to which I.P Address Yahoo.com is located at, then they send the request to the first router that they are connected to and says basically, "send this data enclosed here to I.P. address such and such", the router picks that up and sends it to the next router in the chain that brings them that much closer to the end result (yahoo.com), now sometimes this request has to go through tens of routers or hundreds of routers to get to the end target.  So a persons feeling the internet is slowed down, can sometimes be attributed to a bad router along the way, some ISP's adjust for that automatically and fine a new route, others sit on their hands and wait for the router to be fixed.

The wonderous thing is that my request has to go through about 7 to 10 routers to get to my website here, but it does that in about a blink of the eye really.  Just like if I sent data to a website in New York from California, it's still done in just a bit more than a blink of the eye, and it might go through 60 different routers to do it.

That's about as easy as I can explain it, but it's a fascinating subject and one that I recommend people read up on if they are even slight interested to find out how the internet actually works.  "God bless Al Gore for inventing the Internet"  People often joke about that but this read is kind of interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology

[City Builder]

If you want to see how many hops (routes) your request has to go through to get to our server, you can open up a command prompt on your computer (go to start menu, choose Accessories then choose command prompt)  This will bring up a black box on your screen which is the command prompt.

In the command prompt type in tracert www.citybuildergames.com and hit enter. ( the word "tracert" is not a mispelling, it is the traceroute command name)

You will then be shown how your request for each time you want something from our server goes through all the different routers to get there.

For example here is mine: (MY WRITING IS IN RED BELOW)

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.
C:\Documents and Settings\CB>tracert www.citybuildergames.com

Tracing route to www.citybuildergames.com [208.113.162.82]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  cpe-67-49-240-134.dc.res.rr.com [67.49.240.134] (This is the first request from my server to my ISP)

  2     8 ms     7 ms     7 ms  10.52.192.1
  3     7 ms     8 ms     7 ms  cpe-66-74-96-137.dc.rr.com [66.74.96.137]
  4     9 ms     6 ms     8 ms  cpe-66-74-96-133.dc.rr.com [66.74.96.133]
  5    11 ms    17 ms    11 ms  cpe-66-74-96-182.dc.rr.com [66.74.96.182] [ This is the last request of mine that is on my ISP's own network routers]
  6    10 ms    10 ms    10 ms  xe-9-0-0.edge3.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.71.36.105] [From here on, my request goes to the Level 3.net routing system]
  7    12 ms    11 ms    10 ms  ae-12-69.car2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.68.20.4]

  8    11 ms    10 ms    12 ms  INTERNAP-NE.car2.Level3.net [4.71.36.78]
  9    11 ms    11 ms    11 ms  border20.t4-1-bbnet2.lax.pnap.net [216.52.255.101] [ HERE IT is handed off to another companies routers ]
 10    11 ms    11 ms    11 ms  newdream-8.border20.lax.pnap.net [216.52.220.146]HERE IT is handed off to another companies routers ]
 11    12 ms    11 ms    14 ms  ip-66-33-201-67.dreamhost.com [66.33.201.67]  [Here my request finally makes it to my webhost]
 12    11 ms    12 ms    11 ms  apache2-igloo.frappe.dreamhost.com [208.113.162.82]  [AND HERE THE REQUEST HAS FINALLY MADE IT TO MY SPECIFIC WEB SERFER AT MY WEBHOST THAT OUR WEBSITES SIT ON ]
Trace complete.

tHE INTERESTING THING TO NOTE IS THAT while the time to "hop" around from router to router while in my ISP's network is kept to a maximum of 9 milliseconds, once it gets to Level3.net it goes up to 11 milliseconds, and by hop 11 hit has made it up to 12ms  (hop 11 is my webhost). 

Try this yourself and see how many hops it takes you to get to our server, it might be interesting to compare.

After you get the data back from the command prompt, you should right click on it, and choose "select all" this will turn the command window white, then press your Enter key, the data from that window is now copied to the windows clipboard, so create a new message in this thread and simply right click in your message body and choose "paste" and it will paste your traceroute to our sever and we can all see how many hops each of us has to go to get to the end server.


The tracert command is usefull when you can't get a website to load up or it's slow.  If you find a website that is extremely slow or can't be found etc, then do a tracert to that host and you'll likely see where the hold up, you might get to the 30th hop and it times out, or you might get through all the way to the host, but one of the hops along the way put out a response time of 15,856 milliseconds which would indicate that router is the problem along the way and will need to be reset or fixed.  If on the other hand you find that everything is showing low response times, say below 20ms except the last one, then you know it's the host that is causing the problem, and sometimes it may be so bad that one of the routers along the way has completely crapped out, and won't pass any data through it at all, and the tracert will let you know by stopping at that route and saying something about timing out.

When I had road runner cable in Hollywood they had a bad router that was beyond their control, and it kept all of it's hollywood and part of Los Angeles customers off of the internet for about 4 days because they didn't have anybody experienced enough in their organization to reroute the data through another route.  We all ended up getting a free months service for their 4 days of downtime because I wrote the better business beaureau as well as our states governor and a bunch of other officials.  They finally offered me and everybody else a free mnths credit for their bill which I gladly took although it really didn't make up for leaving everybody without internet for 4 days which we have all become quite accustomed to having.

[katmandu2]

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6000]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\MyUserID>tracert www.citybuildergames.com

Tracing route to www.citybuildergames.com [208.113.162.82]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     2 ms     1 ms     1 ms  xxx.xx.x.x
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3  1685 ms  1099 ms  1079 ms  dpc67142140002.direcpc.com [67.142.140.2]
  4  1737 ms  1070 ms  1029 ms  dpc67142131134.direcpc.com [67.142.131.134]
  5  1707 ms  1090 ms  1079 ms  dpc67142131153.direcpc.com [67.142.131.153]
  6  1737 ms  1059 ms  1089 ms  dpc67142128142.direcpc.com [67.142.128.142]
  7  1687 ms  1059 ms  1099 ms  dialup-64.159.109.97.Dial1.Nashville1.Level3.net
 [64.159.109.97]
  8  1737 ms  1049 ms  1069 ms  ge-7-0-0.mpls1.LasVegas1.Level3.net [209.244.27.
65]
  9  1706 ms  1080 ms  1068 ms  so-5-2-0.bbr2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [209.247.11
.53]
 10  1747 ms  1070 ms  1099 ms  ae-32-89.car2.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.68.20.13
2]
 11  1717 ms  1079 ms  1190 ms  unknown.Level3.net [63.208.234.134]
 12  1688 ms  1068 ms  1079 ms  border20.t3-1-bbnet1.lax.pnap.net [216.52.255.37
]
 13   886 ms   989 ms   920 ms  newdream-8.border20.lax.pnap.net [216.52.220.146
]
 14  1277 ms  1140 ms  1339 ms  ip-66-33-201-67.dreamhost.com [66.33.201.67]
 15  1437 ms  1069 ms   978 ms  apache2-igloo.frappe.dreamhost.com [208.113.162.
82]

Trace complete.

  Ok CB...Mine is from Kentucky (via HughesNet Satellite) to CityBuilders site.

Why are my ms's so high compared to yours? So I have 14 hops? It would be interesting to see RhiannOn's or UC's or Giocel's...

Thanks for teaching me, by the way!

kat