New Server Software Upgrade...

[Wayne 962]

Originally posted by Quicksilver
I really started to notice it over the last week or week and a half. I've seen it a couple times tonight.

I am also getting a tendancy for it to give me "Connection refused..." popups. (once tonight about an hour ago) If I pop up Google it will load the page but if I then go to forums.pelicanparts.com it will refuse the connection until I completely close Mozilla and reopen it. Not sure if that has anything to do with your server but I have never seen it with any other server.

I was planning to try hacking my XP to allow unlimited connections (an SP2 limitation) to see if that changes it. Really odd.

BTW, are the forums on a single server or is it spread across multiple boxes?

Wayne

Hmm, that's odd. I've never gotten that message - I'm on a DSL connection from home that is on a totally different backbone. The only problems I've seen are IIS tie-ups with PHP and/or MySQL queries that seem to take forever and lockup the database. So far, both problems seem to be mitigated with the new versions of PHP and MySQL. It's important to note that they only started happening recently, as traffic has increased 20-40% over last year.

The server is a single box, a P4 running Win2K server with 2 Gig of RAM. One strange thing with the server though, no matter what I try to configure, it has never used more than 500K of RAM - the other Gig and a half is almost always unused. This is despite setting MySQL to explicitly use all available RAM. Weird.

-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

Originally posted by Quicksilver
Clarification: Once it gives me a 'connection refused' message it will continue to do so until the browser is closed and reopened. I'm assuming there is a problem with lost TCP connections not being discarded or timing out. If it is on your server's side it could explain it choking for no reason.

With Microsoft's 'wonderful' server tools it will be a pain to look at.

Wayne

I doubt it's server related. It may have something to do with our firewall, which I also have had many problems with in the past...

-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

Originally posted by MysticLlama
Wayne...

We had a lot of problems with this with Win2k / IIS5.

It wasn't any fault of the server itself, but the software we had running on top of it, it has lots of problems and just stalled out here and there for no reason.

Our software still sucks, but moving to Win2k3 / IIS6 has actually solved most of the problems. It's a lot more efficient and heals itself most of the time that things like that happen.

You should give it a shot.

I actually have a few extra sealed / unregistered copies of Win2k3 Web Edition (just won't act as a DC, full windows other than that), if you want to try one out for a while and/or trade me a gift cert for one.

Just PM me if you have any questions about it, it's totally worth the upgrade.

I have a full license of Win2003 slated for this server, but I like to try the easy things first (like upgrading MySQL and PHP first). The Win2003 server version I have is also the web edition, which I unfortunately found out doesn't run SQL Server (they didn't tell me that in advance).

One day soon, I will upgrade to Win2003 on this box. Still, if it's running okay now, there's no real need to mess with it again until something bad happens. The server load seems to be reduced quite a bit now...

-Wayne

[MysticLlama]

True, I forget that doing Windows isn't typically the easy first thing on the list.

We have all of our web servers set to exactly the same config, and with IIS6 you just save the config to file and move it to another server. I can reload Windows and have a new server up and running in just a few hours. It also helps to have extra servers laying around so that there is no downtime, I spoil myself I suppose.

I also forgot about that SQL limitation for Web Edition, our db servers have been separate machines for almost as long as I can remember, even before they needed to be. That isn't listed as obviously as it could be either.

Seems for the most part that despite the odd hangup, the mySQL / PHP combo seems to work pretty well on your Windows box, I don't have a lot of experience in that combo, it's usually ASP/ASP.net/CF and SQL Server on the Windows boxes and PHP/Perl/mySQL/PostgreSQL on Linux on the machines that I'm around.

And to all the people that seem to hate Windows, I've had my 7 webservers running for close to a year now without a non-scheduled (i.e. for a patch or upgrade) restart except for just IIS when our webserver software happens to completely crash it (and even then it still serves static pages / images just fine)

It really works fine when you know what you're doing with it, the problem is that Windows is too easy to set up IIS on for people that don't know.

P.S. - 20-40% is a nice increase in traffic over the last year, hopefully sales are keeping up at near the same rate.

[911Luvr]

I agree with MysticLlama and your comments, Wayne. The problem is most likely stemming from a software related issue rather than the server itself. Most times it is the DB queries that cause a type of hang whereby incoming requests tend to get blocked by a longer running query.

However I do recommend, if you haven't already, read the whitepaper written by George Reilly (IIS Performance Team Guru). I've provided the link for you below:


The Art and Science of Web Server Tuning with Internet Information Services 5.0

This will give you some very good optimization tips with your increased load from a server perspective.

Good luck!

[thrown_hammer]

Even though the pic upload pop-up tells me I can load a photo of any size I keep getting "its too big" errors and have to resize them myself....

[CBRacerX]

Shawn,

I think Wayne just hasn't changed the verbage on the upload dialog, he mentioned earlier that people were sending massive images to be resized so he had to nix that feature.

Chris

[randywebb]

I think it was the high definition video of which way to turn a nut that was clogging up the system...

(apologies to Griot's Garage.... who used to feature that as a tech tip)

[Wayne 962]

Hi all. The software upgrade made the image resize program stop working momentarily - I fixed that.

So far so good. I doubt that anyone here is on this BBS as much as I am. I used to see a slowdown or two per day, but I haven't seen a single one since I installed the new software. Hopefully, the problem is fixed, and we can all get back to chatting about which wheels look best on our 911s.

-Wayne

[randywebb]

Thx Wayne.

Is your hookup external? i.e. do you look like the rest of the users to the bbs?

Fuchs, BTW!!

[Wayne 962]

Originally posted by randywebb
Thx Wayne.

Is your hookup external? i.e. do you look like the rest of the users to the bbs?

Fuchs, BTW!!

Yes, I see what you see...

-Wayne

[fryardds]

Wayne,

I apologize if this has been mentioned before, but starting yesterday I am unable to open a link that has been placed in a post. It used to open a new window now nothing happens. I have changed nothing on my computer and it only happens on the Pelican BB.

[CBRacerX]

Must be your system, as links are opening fine for others. See if you have blocked "popups" from the Pelican site (using Google Toolbar, etc).

Chris

[Wayne 962]

Originally posted by fryardds
Wayne,

I apologize if this has been mentioned before, but starting yesterday I am unable to open a link that has been placed in a post. It used to open a new window now nothing happens. I have changed nothing on my computer and it only happens on the Pelican BB.

Yes, it must be something you installed on your own machine. Everything is fine here.

On a side note, the server has been running non-stop for 3 days, and over that time, it has only encountered 19 slow queries which took more than 10 seconds to fill. On the old software, there were hundreds per day.

Looks like all is working better than I ever expected!

-Wayne