I think my web server sucks, help me prove it

[elcarter]

Howdy Guys,

I've noticed my sites been flakey and sometimes completely down the last few days and it's a little concerning as some people may be carrying out transactions not to mention I for one don't want to do business with a erratic site nor would you.

I think it's when a couple of people are browsing on the site. The usual culprit for cheaper web service.
I get timed out / slow page loads or your sites not responding 404 crap while Google analytic's indicates there's a few browsing at the same time.

So I guess I'd like your help to prove or even break the site so I can give these guys some proof they haven't' quite come to the party with their promises.
Screen shots would be sweet and maybe timings.

I know it's a lot to ask and your time's precious but if your up for it I'd be grateful.

I'm sure there's some smarter people on here that may have advice or an idea i'm up to listen and learn.

Cheers,

I didn't put the website in the title there's enough of my shameless advertising on here but it's in my sig.

 

[dicko]

Yes you are correct, it is very slow to load and I just went to search stainless fittings and got an error message.

 

[Airgead]

What did you build you site on? Do you use a CMS like Joomla or wordpress for content? Or is it just a simple OpenCart store with nothing else?

 

[Airgead]

BTW - OpenCart is known to have some issues with slow load speeds and timeouts. There are fixes and patches but its fiddly to get right sometimes.

So it may not be your host... it may be opencart its self.

Much as I like free software, with carts you really do get what you pay for.

 

[elcarter]

Its just open cart and I didn't pay much did take lot of time to get my head around it.
Cheers for that info, hate to keep blaming the server when it may be the cart.

The slow load times suck but it's the 404 error and no SMTP mail response that has me thinking the sever's the issue.

 

[zappa]

Even a webserver with minimal resources should be capable of hundreds of transactions per minute. The bottleneck is probably going to be application specific, or the server it is running on has resource contention issues. This often occurs at cheap hosting sites where they are hosting many websites on a single server sharing a single database server or individual websites on virtual machines where they've over subscribed the hypervisor.

Do you have access to the system it is running on? If you do, the correct place to start troubleshooting would be to start gathering system stats for memory utilisation, CPU load and disk service times. These metrics will quickly tell you whether you have a resource contention issue.

 

[elcarter]

Logged onto Cpanel and had a look around,

Found this error log;

[Thu Apr 03 23:32:03 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/503.shtml, referer: http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/Home-Brew-Kegs-/150752/i.html?_pgn=5&_skc=200&rt=nc
[Thu Apr 03 23:32:03 2014] [error] Execute of /home/elcarter/public_html/index.php stopped because of load 114.08
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:55 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/404.shtml
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:55 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/favicon.ico
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:55 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/503.shtml, referer: http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/Home-Brew-Kegs-/150752/i.html?_pgn=5&_skc=200&rt=nc
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:55 2014] [error] Execute of /home/elcarter/public_html/index.php stopped because of load 108.95
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:44 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/503.shtml, referer: http://carterbrewing.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=20_83
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:44 2014] [error] Execute of /home/elcarter/public_html/index.php stopped because of load 108.95
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:41 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/404.shtml
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:41 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/favicon.ico
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:40 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/503.shtml, referer: http://carterbrewing.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=20_83
[Thu Apr 03 23:31:40 2014] [error] Execute of /home/elcarter/public_html/index.php stopped because of load 108.95
[Thu Apr 03 23:29:05 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/404.shtml, referer: http://carterbrewing.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=20_83&product_id=243
[Thu Apr 03 23:29:05 2014] [error] [client 121.218.35.234] File does not exist: /home/elcarter/public_html/catalog/view/theme/simple/image/addTobg1.jpg, referer: http://carterbrewing.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=20_83&product_id=243

I'm no web guru you may see something obvious.

Edit,

This looks more promising,

Successful requests: 266,555 (24,346)
Average successful requests per day: 1,861 (3,477)
Successful requests for pages: 5,028 (474)
Average successful requests for pages per day: 35 (67)
Failed requests: 6,100 (66) <--------
Redirected requests: 3,905 (5)
Distinct files requested: 12,820 (419)
Distinct hosts served: 7,482 (151)
Data transferred: 5.47 gigabytes (509.77 megabytes)
Average data transferred per day: 39.13 megabytes (72.82 megabytes)

 

[zappa]

That's less that 1.5 requests per minute. Anyway ;

[Thu Apr 03 23:32:03 2014] [error] Execute of /home/elcarter/public_html/index.php stopped because of load 114.08

That message is coming from mod_cgi, which has stopped processing of index.php because the system load average was at 114.08. Unless the system your website is running on has 113 CPU cores, that's a serious CPU contention issue. sendmail (SMTP) also stops sending email when system load is high.

So, it's highly unlikely it is Open Cart that's generating the high system load, unless index.php is forking off many child processes. I really wouldn't expect so. If you're able to login to a shell on the system, you could keep an eye on it with "top", or run "top" in batch mode to try and capture the state of running processes. More than likely though, the system you are on is way over subscribed.

 

[elcarter]

This thread and your expertise may be the proof I need,

Thanks mate, really appreciate it.

 

[Airgead]

At the risk of sounding like a gratuitous plug, we could bung a copy of the site on our dev server (which isn't oversubscribed) and have a look at how it performs there....

 

[Edak]

I used cubecart when I developed my father-in-laws online business, it seems to run like a dream.

I don't know whether you look at this nor whether they are compatible in any way.

 

[elcarter]

Cheers all for the info,

Did see cube card at some point but didn't venture into it. It's quite a lot of work to transfer but if that's what it takes.
Open Cart for the price "free" is not a bad option.

The tickets been upgraded and I think a proper tech has had a look and said he's found some issues.

We will see how it goes but if not I may look into Airgeads proposal.

 

[elcarter]

At the risk of sounding like a gratuitous plug, we could bung a copy of the site on our dev server (which isn't oversubscribed) and have a look at how it performs there....

Pm'd I think it's time to part way with Arixive.

 

[Airgead]

PM'd back.

I will say up front that we will not be as cheap as your current host (I just checked). But the only way they can offer what they offer is by massively oversubscribing their hardware. We don't do that. We keep user numbers low so performance is good. It does bump up the cost though. And we provide support.

You gets what you pays for.

Cheers
Dave