10 replies to this topic

[Brito]

Dramastic has been extremely helpful and made available one of the servers on his network to help balance our network load.

This comes at a time when we are indeed worried about the lack of server resources to meet the recent growth from the last months and a second machine should contribute without doubt to improve our community.

Thank you Dramastic!

[was_jaclaz]

Nuno,
really , it's not my field, but I can see, even from a distance , that this recent "campaign" for bettering responsiveness is NOT giving ANY result.

It seems to me that the approach is wrong , I may be wrong too of course , but as per today it's not been clear WHAT is the cause of the problems, increasing resources may of course help, but if there is a problem in something that is running in the background, php, mysql or whatever, the only thing that we might get as a result is an increased time before having access problems (as opposed to avoiding access problems).

In other words, the help from R1 and expecially from Dramastic , though anyway appreciated and useful, appears to me more like a temporary solution to delay an effective troubleshooting and resolution of the problem.

Probably completely unrelated but recently I happened to read some reports about Apache ( are we running Apache?) having problems with several concurrent connections.
A comparison test:
http://www.sics.se/~...achevsyaws.html


It seems like a solution is using another webserver, Erlang based, called YAWS:
http://yaws.hyber.org/



jaclaz

[Lancelot]

Thank you Dramastic!

[Brito]

I can see, even from a distance that this recent "campaign" for bettering responsiveness is NOT giving ANY result.

You should look a bit closer my friend..

Several things have already improved while moving to a new server.

- Control of the root account on the OS, means that we can install whatever software required. Good to install a configure a firewall, run other webservers, etc.
- True available resources, instead of using a virtual server running at the same machine with other 90 virtual servers
- Sites like winbuilder.net are finally working without the constant error 500 messages
- No costs

And still missing to move boot-land.net and the respective forum to finally feel some "visible" speed improvement.

Over the last months it was a terrible experience to try working on the site and the costs of providing more resources was a bit too prohibitive for my monthly costs.

I also installed nginx (faster than lighttpd so they say)
http://wiki.codemongers.com/Main

It is available at http://boot-land.net:8080 to be used as a winbuilder download server for the LiveXP project but the impact on the server response as been minimal (to say the least).

On linux you can type:

curl -I boot-land.net:8000

to examine the http header.

-------------

Dramastic had volunteered to help some time ago and yesterday completed preparing the machine. It can be used to host other services like mySQL and backup of the sites. He made it available at no costs so it's a good opportunity to use as secondary machine to balance the load and keep the main server speedier.

[Arvy]

... as per today it's not been clear WHAT is the cause of the problems ...

You seem to be suggesting something akin to logical troubleshooting. In my own experience, that's a tough sell.

[was_jaclaz]

Yep, and still, bla... bla... improved.... bla... bla... better... bla... bla... more... bla... bla....

VERY GOOD.

EXCEPTIONALLY WELL DONE. :

....but still WHAT is/are/was/were the cause(s) of such an amount of problems?

Have they been pinpointed to something?

Or, as I suspect, we have bettered EVERYTHING in the hope to also avoid or limit the single (or handful of) causes?

jaclaz


P.S.:
@Arvy
Exactly , glad I found at least another Vulcanian mate.
Yours truly,
Mr. Spock

[Brito]

... as per today it's not been clear WHAT is the cause of the problems ..

Not sure if we can resume it down to simple cause but we have already solved many of the possible causes and at the moment my finger points at DDoS.

Some other possible causes that were addressed.

- Lack of resources for MySQL/PHP - fixed
- Spam bot spidering the portal page - fixed
- Other services that might consume too many server resources
-- Wiki - closed (fixed)
-- Blog - moved to blogspot (fixed)
-- WinBuilder.net moved to new server (fixed)
- Too many spam registrations causing server overload (fixed with external page)
- Improve performance of the forum and respective Database (fixed)
- Use web server other than Apache to save on RAM and add more simultaneous visitors (only fully working on dedicated server)
- Avoid hot linking abuse from downloading too many files - used .htaccess to disallow this abuse
- Automatic IP filtering/ban when a bot exceeds max number of visits (to be implemented)

It seems like a solution is using another webserver, Erlang based, called YAWS:

Good find, I'm reading the documentation and will see how it goes, there's an indication that it can run PHP code: http://yaws.hyber.org/cgi.yaws

I particularly enjoyed reading this:

Our figure shows the performance of a server when subject to parallel load. This kind of load is often generated in a so-called "Distributed denial of service attack".

Apache dies at about 4,000 parallel sessions. Yaws is still functioning at over 80,000 parallel connections.

Running Yaws with PHP might be a good solution to further optimize performance and break away from DDoS.

[amalux]

Dramastic has been extremely helpful and made available one of the servers on his network to help balance our network load.

This comes at a time when we are indeed worried about the lack of server resources to meet the recent growth from the last months and a second machine should contribute without doubt to improve our community.

Thank you Dramastic!

Yes, Thank you Dramastic!, indeed!! This very generous contribution, along with all the great work Nuno is doing is sure to help our ailing forum and is greatly appreciated!!

[TheHive]

[was_jaclaz]

Not sure if we can resume it down to simple cause but we have already solved many of the possible causes and at the moment my finger points at DDoS.

...which translated in Vulcanian sounds like:
[vulcanian]
We started illogically to shoot BIG bullets at anything we've seen moving.
[/vulcanian
:)
Vulcanian comment by Mr.Spock:

Spock: Random chance seems to have operated in our favor.
McCoy: In plain, non-Vulcan English, we've been lucky.
Spock: I believe I said that, Doctor.

Running Yaws with PHP might be a good solution to further optimize performance and break away from DDoS.

:)

Yep, Erlang is an unfortunately misknown GREAT programming language, and though it has it's "queer aspects" it was born for telephone apparatus, and can manage an incredible number of concurrent anything.
As the Authors of the language once put it, Erlang can be seen as either:
1) a branch of mathematics
2) a programming language
unfortunately a number of books on the topic present Erlang as the first aspect, thus driving lots of people to learn more complex (and less efficient) languages like C++ or C#

Our friend TheHive will like doing a test of this :( (yes, entirely written in Erlang):
http://www.wings3d.com/
http://www.wings3d.com/gallery.php

:(

jaclaz

[Brito]

We started illogically to shoot BIG bullets at anything we've seen moving.

<no comments>

unfortunately a number of books on the topic present Erlang as the first aspect, thus driving lots of people to learn more complex (and less efficient) languages like C++ or C#

I've tried it last night but didn't managed to get it running.

Looking around the web for YAWS is also a bit confusing as the few tutorials I stumble upon aren't very clear or the instructions grow outdated.

Nevertheless, it does seem like an interesting approach. Guess I'll have to build from the source and try a few times on virtual machines until I get it right.