Internal Server Errors (a.k.a Getting Settled in at the New Web Host)

[Robbie]

I've been getting reports of Internal Server Errors and seeing them myself. At first I was kinda worried, being on a new host and all, but then I went and checked out their fantastic support system, and they list a bunch of reasons a website may get Internal Server Errors. One of them is that we may be on a smaller or busier server than we should be, which may be the case. They have a system in place for requesting a server change if your site experiences performance problems, and I'll be closely monitoring our performance to determine whether or not we need to move to a bigger server within the hosts structure.

When a new account is created, they randomly assign you to a web server and it may or may not be the right one for you...There's a possibility this one may not be the right one for us, and if that changes, I'll let you guys know what the impact will be of a move...probably nothing. Thanks again for all of your support and encouragement! Keep it coming!

[Redrobes]

Ahh yes, just posted on another thread that I am timing out a lot today. Just seems very sluggish so this is probably why. Looking at the whos online theres about 14 members and 50 guests of which more than half appear to be spiders crawling. Is there a way to limit there usage to say 10 at once max ? Sounds tricky tho.

[tilt]

I've experienced some lagging too.. not much but there every 5-6th loading of threads or so...

[Robbie]

Looks like I forgot to bring over my robots.txt file that limits search engine spiders...Fixed that, but it may take a few hours for it to take effect and register a difference.

[RobA]

At 11ish EST I was getting page load errors every 3 or so pages.

Hope they load balance us better soon...

-Rob A>

[tilt]

I get really slow response times these days, and 3 times when I've pushed "new posts" the site has crashed...

[Steel General]

I haven't encountered to many crashes, but the response is fairly slow (compared to before the provider change), and I'm on a fiber-optic connection.

[tilt]

Got a 20/4 line here - so speed usually isn't a problem.

[Sapiento]

I noticed some slow responses, too. Could this be also the reason for the error messages when you upload a file?

[Redrobes]

Heres a quick ping job:

Ping statistics for www.cartographersguild.com:
Packets: Sent = 164, Received = 164, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 17ms, Maximum = 31ms, Average = 19ms

So after 164 pings ALL of them were within a narrow band of time. I get page timeouts too. This means either that one of the routers on the path between me and guild is caching web pages but sending pings through. I know that to be a fact. But if the cache is timing out then it wont fetch a new page. But since everyone is getting this then its more likely that the machine that the web host is running on is plenty fast enough to service pings but is not fast enough to service the web page which means I reckon that the one machine is serving thousands of web sites concurrently. Also, whenever I look we have about 10 members online and about 40 spiders all sucking down pages and torching the processing used to service member page requests. Are we able to limit spider activity to about 5 of them.

EDIT - Hold on a mo !!! 17ms is 17000000ns which is the time it takes light to go 1700 miles there and back and I know I am at least 5000 miles from the server so this is blatant crap. Someone is most definitely serving ping responses without reaching the host.

EDIT2 - Interesting, if I ping from my router then I get this:
77 packets transmitted, 77 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 180.410/183.192/191.118/1.937 ms

So again, a very stable ping time of 183ms which is a bit more like it. Still a bit quick but at least believable this time. MS ping is a croc as usual.