Random Image
Latest Interviews
Christa Faust
by Rob Hart
Ed Brubaker
by Garrett Faber
Brian K. Vaughan
by Garrett Faber
John Waters
by Becky Fritter
Our Social Networks
OKAY the day is finally here, the MAY two-zero revamp
THIS IS THE DAY the workshops have been scheduled to be workable again, a day i've been waiting long and hard for. i dont remember if it was clayt or kirk or kar who was heading the workload on that part of the site, but i'm curious what all is going on. excited to get back to work in there.
-kabol
They caught me because of the blood on my fingers and between my teeth. I looked up from my meal on the tile of the kitchen floor and dropped her cold limb with a thud and minor splash and told them it wasn't me.
What is up with with this Drupal install? Ping times and traceroutes look fine, but at times it is slow or just times out. I've run Drupal sites. Howard Dean's '04 campaign was on Drupal (CivicSpace is just nicely packaged Drupal). I'd guess it's either the PHP stack or the something in the MySQL back end, maybe Drupal doesn't scale so well for huge number of posts. If I'm really bored sometime I'll try different OS / browser / ISP and see if that makes a difference. Maybe a PHP cache / accelerator or persistent PHP engine would help.
I'm just gonna accept my loneliness, and I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness, from an even farther more extreme nothingness on my own!
Hmm weird, it COULD be a peering or routing problem somewhere, access via Verio / Cogent was a lot faster for some reason, which seems odd, or could just be the very old version of curl on that host, although wget produced similar result of 5-7 sec. This is starting out with curl command line client just to ignore browser issue for the moment. There does not appear to be any caching happening on the server side (or caching is not helping) seems to take 30-45 sec to download main forum page no matter what.
curl -o /dev/null http://chuckpalahniuk.net/forum
Mac OSX Leopard / Comcast 35 sec
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon amd64 / Speakeasy 45 sec
Red Hat 8.0 / Cogent 5 sec
I'm just gonna accept my loneliness, and I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness, from an even farther more extreme nothingness on my own!
To hazard a guess, and lacking any access to the OS, I'd say all the "guests" could be killing the site (335 guests online?). Boost or Block Cache modules for Drupal might help, then all those "guests" would get static generated HTML pages instead of demanding lots of MySQL queries to the back end, that could help a lot if it is not done that way already.
Here are some good articles on the subject, the last has better description of the nuts and bolts of getting Boost working.
http://www.kinetasystems.com/blog/my-drupal-site-is-slow-what-can-i-do-p...
http://www.kinetasystems.com/blog/my-drupal-site-is-slow-what-can-i-do-p...
http://2bits.com/articles/tips-on-speeding-up-your-drupal-sites.html
http://codesorcery.net/2007/07/23/boost-your-drupal-site/
I'm also not sure about the caching headers on the pages, looks like it may be forcing the client to download and not cache on a lot of stuff, haven't been in the nitty gritty of Drupal for awhile and not sure what are the best settings, can probably be tuned in .htaccess.
I'm just gonna accept my loneliness, and I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness, from an even farther more extreme nothingness on my own!
meatthinker! that's some fantastic brainstorming.
as for glam and cody: no, the workshop is just as bland and quirky as a few days ago. and most of my reviews are still deleted, the nav is still not near up to what it was, and the post new year review "writing" still has no formatting. dont detect any change as of right now..
They caught me because of the blood on my fingers and between my teeth. I looked up from my meal on the tile of the kitchen floor and dropped her cold limb with a thud and minor splash and told them it wasn't me.
To hazard a guess, and lacking any access to the OS, I'd say all the "guests" could be killing the site (335 guests online?). Boost or Block Cache modules for Drupal might help, then all those "guests" would get static generated HTML pages instead of demanding lots of MySQL queries to the back end, that could help a lot if it is not done that way already.
Here are some good articles on the subject, the last has better description of the nuts and bolts of getting Boost working.
http://www.kinetasystems.com/blog/my-drupal-site-is-slow-what-can-i-do-p...
http://www.kinetasystems.com/blog/my-drupal-site-is-slow-what-can-i-do-p...
http://2bits.com/articles/tips-on-speeding-up-your-drupal-sites.html
http://codesorcery.net/2007/07/23/boost-your-drupal-site/
I'm also not sure about the caching headers on the pages, looks like it may be forcing the client to download and not cache on a lot of stuff, haven't been in the nitty gritty of Drupal for awhile and not sure what are the best settings, can probably be tuned in .htaccess.
good stuff. i doubt that guests are making the site slow. 335 i think is a low number in the scheme of all things although i don't know anything about drupal. it doesn't seem to be an effective platform if it can be brought down by a tiny percentage of guests. also, there have been days when the guest count is low but the site is still crawling.
i think you hit the nail on the head about caching. i noticed that when pages load, it takes a while, especially for ads, to load causing the entire site to crawl.
Hey guys, I'm gonna chime in here as at the very least I owe JKabol a response.
As you've determined, I haven't touched the workshop. After all the blah-blah-blah-personal crap, all of my remaining time I've had for the site has been... well, much like this thread. I always start by thinking about the workshop, but performance issues just keep taking over. As I mentioned when I said I was going for 6 weeks, I am pretty damned miserable about it. We're all slated to have a sit-down specifically about the workshop, and it looks like Kirk's going to come in on it and give me a hand, so we'll be able to keep each other focused and roll out some bug-fixes, updates and improvements. (Sadly, everything wrong with it will still undoubtedly be my fault. :P )
Now I'll hijack my own post and reply to meatthinker, as he's clearly motivated and has an interest. So... here's what we're working with. Warning: nerdiness follows.
Server software: PHP is cached with eAccelerator. It uses usually between 70 and 80MB of an allowed 100 to cache ~2500 scripts. With the PHP cache disabled, apache starts choking on its own children in less than five minutes. As an added bonus, the box has to be rebooted, 'cuz under those circustances, even SSH times out. MySQL's query cache is also enabled with similar numbers. The query cache is at least a little helpful everywhere but the forum, particularly General Discussion, which is just too active to be cached effectively at the backend.
Drupal: Boost is installed and working, though stuff like ad loading and the shoutbox are generally unimproved as a result of the uncacheability of javascript content. The advanced cache module is also installed, though not running, as it breaks some other modules and improves performance less than 5% over normal caching while ocassionally (once or twice a day) requiring mysqld to be restarted when it locks a cache table and forgets to unlock it. I presume this is some bug we have as a result of other-module compatibility or something. Either way, it's just not helpful enough in general to spend more time on. As you've probably gathered, drupal's cache and the block cache are both running, though again with the shoutbox, that's not a functionally cachable block. If there are any other blocks uncached, they're not resource intensive.
If you're curious about hardware and the stress put on it, we're on a single AthlonXP 2200+ and I have come to accept a load average around 2 as "low." It's not unheard of for that to climb to as high as 12 at peak times, though I would consider 6-8 more normal. I'm inclined to put the blame here.
If you have any other suggestions, questions or curiosities, I'm always happy to talk shop. :)
Single AthlonXP 2200+? That's a 1.8 GHz 32-bit processor from 2002. Is that the same box that was running the old site? I keep writing and rewriting trying to think of something polite to say, but it's not working. Actually, Yugo with a trailer hitch trying to pull a 75-foot yacht is a pretty apt metaphor. Slapping on a turbo charger and nitrous injection and whatever else is not going to do shit, forget it. The only way to fix this is to get a box that is appropriate for the task.
I'm just gonna accept my loneliness, and I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness, from an even farther more extreme nothingness on my own!
Not to pile on here, but with the sheer amount of crap that needs fixin', would it not be better (especially in light of the new book release) to roll back to the old site until all of the bugs can be ironed out here? That way, with an influx of new readers, the workshops will be accessible and (possibly) more active, etc etc.
Instead of a private server, might it also help to switch to a commercial hosting account at 1and1 or GoDaddy or whatever until hardware issues are resolved? If you can get an account with someone and they guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth, throughput, etc, then the server functionality is THEIR responsibility, leaving you free to spend your time fixing coding issues.
Also, bring Meatthinker into your inner circle. Methinks he knows what he's doing...
thanks for the response, my brother..
if by sit down you mean a conference call, i'd jump at the oppertunity to be involved. i'd probably be silent only, but maybe i could find something to contribute. though i'm no yoda for the tech stuff, i know computers just a hair above minimally
if you mean sit down like meet in one location over coffee and a shared computer screen, then i have no interest. i live in arkansas.
really looking forward to things working out
-kabol
..
They caught me because of the blood on my fingers and between my teeth. I looked up from my meal on the tile of the kitchen floor and dropped her cold limb with a thud and minor splash and told them it wasn't me.
At the OS level, these guys are doing everything right, it's just given the hardware, it is futile. If that's the same box that was running VBulletin before (if so, then VBulletin has gained a lot more respect from me) and you can't / won't replace the box, I'd say the only option is to go back to VBulletin, Drupal is just too greedy to do everything and not just be the wrapper.
I have no idea what the budget looks like, but you might consider Bryght which is basically hosted Drupal with some extra features, it is operated and maintained by people who have specialized in Drupal. They have a 30-day free trial, but I am not sure how much resources you get with the free trial and if it will be enough to power The Cult, at least you could load it up and test it to see what happens.
As for GoDaddy, GoDaddy is cheap for a reason. The reason is that they suck. Kidding aside, some people get lucky and have no problems with GoDaddy, but I have helped a few people sort out some major technical fuckups that happened with GoDaddy and it was a pain in the ass.
I can probably give you a long list of hosting providers to avoid and reasons why, but not so much a hosting provider that I would 100% recommend. With any hosting provider, there are going to be at least a few people who get wonderful results, but there will also be at least a few people who get really shitty results from the same provider. Unless you can spare no expense, have dedicated servers in multiple data centers, some of it just comes down to luck. I would not judge based on a handful of glowing testimonials and anecdotes.
Case in point, I personally haven't had any problems with DreamHost, but I know that The Cult did, I think I have pretty much been lucky, also have not been running any high traffic sites on there. Superb Hosting is one that I am curious about, but might be a bit expensive to provide the level of resources that The Cult requires. There was some VPS hosting that I used as a development site that I would definitely NOT recommend, can't remember the name at the moment, except that it was not Linode--the place I am thinking of rebooted the whole cluster at the dom0 level at least once a week, and once they managed to trash the whole RAID, it was not managed VPS so if you didn't keep your own backups, you would be screwed.
I'm just gonna accept my loneliness, and I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness, from an even farther more extreme nothingness on my own!
We are looking at new hardware, but expense is, as always, the issue. The current debate is between getting another little server to run database replication or a more suitable multi-core box with SATA-2 at least. Unless it turns out my next-door neighbor is running a colo in his basement, or someone gets me at least 10Mbps uptime guaranteed uplink (Fingers crossed).
This box was indeed running VBulletin. Before you have too much respect for VBulletin, though, and if I can say this more with pride than blind arrogance, that was more me than it. Some might remember that about a year ago, all of a sudden the old site started crawling and timing out regularly, and that was on the DreamHost box, which had a little more oomph than this one. Anyway, I put VBulletin on Lighttpd + FastCGI. (I guess it was really more the lighttpd developers than me.) Sadly, our drupal install can't run on lighty because of the lack of .htaccess support. Kirk and I tried for a while, but there are a few things in some of the modules that just can't be faked with mod_rewrite rules.
Also, for the record: I don't have anything against dreamhost, personally, they look like a really good company on their face, to me. The real issue there (other than the whole debacle with the compromised FTP credentials) is and was that they're out of the dedicated hosting business. The closest plan they currently offer that I can tell is nice and well priced, (I'd take a pair of Opterons...) but it's well above budget as I understand it. Plus, I need root! :)
To go totally off topic, what are the odds that the VPS host you're talking about is VPSLink? I've had a VPS through them for about a year and a half and it was a bit touch and go there for a while, as it was kinda in a beta state. I still love them. Aside from the few technological hiccups, I've had nothing but good experiences from sales to support. Anyway, I was reminded because maybe... 8 months ago? the RAID in the box I share crashed (Of course, immediately after I finished writing a web app under contract and stupidly didn't keep any code local... that's what I get for refusing to use anything but vi. Good thing I do the vast majority of my design and more complicated algorithm work on paper before sitting down at a keyboard.) Maybe we shared a blade!
You could put apache on one box and mysql on a 2nd box, 2nd Gb/s NIC with direct crossover between the 2 servers and pass all the mysql traffic that way. I'm not sure which should go on the new box, either apache for a faster processor, or mysql for faster disk access.
Lighty + FastCGI explains a lot, didn't think that would buy you much in the current situation anyway.
I just remembered the VPS host was unixshell.com (I set it up for a demo and testing of eGroupWare for whatever that's worth). They're not accepting any new accounts now anyway.
For 10 Mb/s I'd have to outsource to somebody like Qwest, but customers who ask for that generally have the coin to put out for it and are not on a shoe string. All we got in the shop is a couple T1's.
I'm just gonna accept my loneliness, and I'm gonna go to an even darker place of nothingness, from an even farther more extreme nothingness on my own!
Sorry, but the technical details are irrelevant to users. I'm not uncurious about such things, but bottom line is if you can't make it move as fast as the old Cult, can't make it function as well either, it's five months past time to scrap the whole fucking thing and take the Old Cult back online.
Months. Most of the interesting Culties have quit, as I more or less have. I can't get them back, and neither can this lame-ass 'upgrade.'
Sorry, but the technical details are irrelevant to users. I'm not uncurious about such things, but bottom line is if you can't make it move as fast as the old Cult, can't make it function as well either, it's five months past time to scrap the whole fucking thing and take the Old Cult back online.
Months. Most of the interesting Culties have quit, as I more or less have. I can't get them back, and neither can this lame-ass 'upgrade.'
Gee Chix... Why don't you tell us how you really feel? lol
Everybody thinks their whole life should be at least as much fun as masturbation - Tender Branson
I have to say - I think it's really quite shoddy that we're charging people for membership to a writer's workshop which hasn't worked properly in several months. Can this fee be temporarily waived, or can a warning be included in the sign-up page stating that there are some current glitches that are soon to be ironed out?
[IMG]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b383/kitano/mason.jpg[/IMG]
I have to say - I think it's really quite shoddy that we're charging people for membership to a writer's workshop which hasn't worked properly in several months. Can this fee be temporarily waived, or can a warning be included in the sign-up page stating that there are some current glitches that are soon to be ironed out?
I AGREE.
Copyright 2008 - A Writers Cult, LLC
Joined: 2003-12-03
From: Little Rock, AR