Experts Round Table Network

Thanks to everyone who has given a donation -- In order of donation receipt:

Sean    (sean_delaney)
Rod     (rdivilbiss)
Nick      (cryptic_mauler)
Vincent (VGR)
Alf         (Batalf)

Between them and me, we now have $195 - enough to go for another year ($125). With an additional $30, we can get a 2-year package ($225). So, for anyone thinking of donating, every little bit will help, and now would be a great time. There are 29 days left on our hosting contract -- if I get enough donations before then to get the two year package, I will do that. Otherwise, I will get the 1 year package, and give the remaining money to the GC to use how they think is best.

Take care,
Matt

Well the 2 years is covered.  I just did A PP transfer from the bank.  As soon as it clears I'll send the 30 so you can do the 2 years... might as well get the price break.  It takes PP 4 or 5 days to clear so everything should be set by the first of the week.

can we get a 1 year only but with a more resource-steady web server ? ;-))

I agree, ERT is so slow right now. Bluehost does not seem like an adequate host for our needs.

Personally, I have not experienced any slowness, but I've not been visiting that often or during times of heavy traffic. I am not averse to changing hosts if people want to do that, but I think the following are worth considering:

* it will be more expensive, which means we will need more donations sooner
* bluehost has been unusually honest, helpful, and cooperative
* it will require someone to migrate the existing site to a new platform, which will inevitably take time and trouble. I don't have the time to be involved in this; i.e. a qualified individual needs to volunteer to be personally in charge of either copying the site as-is to a new server, or building a new site and migrating data and content. I can tell you from doing this during the move from ERT.com --> ERT.net that it is a time-consuming pain in the ass.
* someone needs to find an alternative, affordable host, and demonstrate that things will definitely be better there. I also have no time for this
* no matter how good a job of migration you do, there will be problems. This will cause users inconvenience, and site managers headaches. This may or may not be worth it compared to whatever problems the site has now.
* other hosts may have fewer avalable features

This is probably something that the GC should consider and decide upon. I have no opinion either way, but we have only 28 days to decide and implement whatever decision is made (alternatively, we could go month-by-month until we find a solution, but this will deplete the budget somewhat). I will wait to renew hosting until this is resolved.

-Matt

PS: Roy, thanks for topping us off ;^)

If you buy a 10 watch you do not expect it to behave like a Rolex.  Low cost hosting (anything under $25 a month) is not going to be perfect.  I have had some problems with the host on .com s well.  I spent a fair bit of time looking at other hosting options.  Some of them look great until you digg around to find people who have experience with them. 

I have yet to run across a low end host who does not have complaints.  Every one of them will have testimonials, and in some cases they have some very happy customers;  all of them also have some unhappy customers.  The biggest problem I had with the .com host was their falilure to communicate, and very long delays getting the help desk to escalate problems.  We have resolved that.  I quit calling them morons, and they started referring my tickets to admins because I raised a lot of hell.

If Bluhost is trying and is responding to complaints, then moving might put us in a worse spot; and we would have to start the communication process all over again.   I have seen some hosts who will buy out any time remaining on your hosting contract if you move to them, so if Bluhost continues to be a problem, we can always move later. 

I am not advocating that we just sit and take whatever they dish up without raising hell, but we want to be carful that if we move we have the professional resourcees available to do all the work necessary to move the site.  It is not a trivial undertaking.

The donations make it clear that we value the site and are committed to keeping it available, so lets be carful that we looking at all the implications and options before we decide to ride it out or chart a new course.

Cd&:
When that stupid check shows up, I can cover at least $20 of that $30.

I will PM you and work it out then.

Later...

I would like to kindly stress out that my remark was not meant to be a suggestion to move hosts, but rather ("pourquoi pas?" one favourite saying of mine) to try to make bluehost respect us a bit more, as since some time now, other people and I do experience veeeerrryyyyyy looooong times of "waiting for..." until the webserver answers and starts sending some data to our browsers.

It wasn't there at the start, it is now, so there ***has been*** an impact from BlueHost itself, and there ***must be*** something bluehost could do about it, especially given we are desiring to renew our hosting subscription.

If they are so "communication prone" s to merit CD&'s compliments, they probably will be keen enough to look at teh server stats/load/health/balancing to put us back in the situation we were in when we (you) signed for Bluehost one year ago. No ?

The situation is far from ideal for me at the time, and I'm reluctant to wait for hours before getting any output.
( to post this message, I waited 30s two times and 10 s the third when clicking from "forum" to "soapbox" and then "reply", and I'm not in a top-lag situation from deep inside Asia or the US. Lag time is usually negligible from here.)
(and I expect to have either 30s delay when posting the message, or a server timeout - timeout rate is also FAR above internet standards, at 2 to 5% as far as I can see using the "serverstats" extension from firefox)

regards

I'm more than happy to complain to bluehost. Let's get a a clear picture together of what is wrong. I'd appreciate it if at least the few people involved in this thread could state their recent experiences. Does the lag happen on every request? How long is it on average? Is it worse at some times than at others? Where are you located? How many different locations have you experienced the problem from, etc., etc., etc......

I'll start: I haven't experienced any significant problems, except the unavailability due to "excessive use of resources". I do notice, however, that the disk usage "Disk sdc1 (/home)" is at 88%, and the CPU usage sometimes goes as high as 13% when I look in the control panel. Memory usage has also been around 35%....my guess is they simply have too many accounts on one machine.

I'll wait for your responses, and then get in touch with them.

-Matt

I just checked my gmail account (only check once a week or so)....here's an email from the owner (6 days ago), so I guess they are aware of the problem and trying to deal with it (and the problem may be network-wide rather than just our server)

Dear Bluehost.com Customer,

I am writing today to let everyone know that we have just
added another GigE circuit for Bluehost customers. I know
bandwidth wise things have been just a little tight over the
last couple of weeks. We now have several hundred Mbit to
spare and things should be speedy again.

I also wanted to briefly mention that we are now totally moved
into our new office space (17,000 ft)! We actually have some
room to move now, and more importanly we have the room to grow.
Thanks to everyone for your patience while we transitioned our
own office to our new location as well as all our servers to
our new data center.

For those that are new please remember that we offer the Bluehost
forum for questions and answers by other Bluehost customers.
The forum can be found at the following URL:

http://www.bluehostforum.com

If you are interested in the personal side of Bluehost you can
also visit my blog at:

http://www.mattheaton.com

I posted two messages in "site operation" some days ago
the "problem" seems not linked to bandwidth (bluehost's message above) nor to user location (people in the US, "near" the server, also reported it, coral1 for instance if I remember right).

corrently I've an average latency" measured at 4 seconds which is HUGE given the problem doesn't occur all the time (or it would be too simpel to spot & fix ;-)

it's trivially a webserver load problem : not enough servicing threads (or the like) either because the server hosts too many sites, or because a newly added site is very CPU consuming, or if the webserver is stuck and has many "zombie" threads that are dead for servicing clients.

as a rough estimate, I would say I come here at least four times a day and experience the problem (10 to 30 s "waiting for www.expertsrt.net") half of the time.

Yeah I am getting around 10-30 secs and sometimes more of waiting time. Earlier I posted a comment to a topic and was waiting strumming my fingers because it was taking forever to submit, I eventually canceled and then went back to the thread, it had been posted but didn't ever redirect me and was taking around ~30secs before I got impatient and pressed 'stop' I know thats something a visitor will not want to have to be burdened with. One of the most common factors of losing visitors to a site is slow load times, people are impatient and want the site to load fast...as I am guilty off =oP.

It is not a geographical issue.  I'm sitting right on a backbone...high speed fiber all the way to the cloud. 60% of time response is < 2 seconds; 25% it is 10-15; 15% is 25+ with occassional timeouts.  For comparison consider Google that generally returns the first page of results in 1 to 1.5 seconds.

If they have just added capacity then they may still be fine tuning, but my experience has been that the squeaky wheel gets teh grease.  Their support would rather not get angry calls so they respond to the noisy customers first.  Most of the time support personel are not very tech oriented and you can get by them to real techies by providing very precious diagnostics in very technical terms.  If they don't understand the tech speak they generally escalate the ticket to real techies, so they don't look like dummies.

If the problems are specific to teh server or cluster we are on then if they get enough heat they might move us to a different server/cluster; or move whatever site is causing the problem.  We just have to kee at them; but without pissing them off because if we cross the line they will just ignore us and then we will get no real help at all.

I haven't really noticed a 'lag', because I am on dial-up, and consider it a good night when I connect at over 40k. My best so far is 46k, average is between 37 - 40k. Tonight is 37333bps.

Some nights it takes 2-3 redials to get over 33.6, but I digress...

It took 20 seconds for the Reply to fully load tonight (seemed about usual).
My first visit to the site on a given night is 30-40 seconds to fully load the first time, and about 20 seconds for the rest of my stay, with a slight stall once in awhile.

Thanks for the responses. I've gotten pretty good at dealing with crappy/incompetent web hosts over the last several years, and bluehost has usually been pretty responsive, so I'll get after them and see what happens.

By the way, I should have asked this earlier, but do you notice the same lags when you visit
http://www.nicholassolutions.com    or
http://www.detejas.com/   or
http://thepenguinposse.com/  or
http://www.homeplansbyholley.com/
 
They're all hosted by bluehost -- it would help to be able to tell them if the problem is isolated to the server, in which case I am 99% certain they'd be happy to just move the account.

-Matt

I tried all four links and clicked one or two links past the home page.
All loaded very fast.
I tried again minutes later and explored beggarware, blog, forum etc pages
I got to "waiting for..." message

A side note: what about an other subscription for coral1 to be able to abandon dial-up ? :D

I wrote BH the following:
------------
Hello,

Several regular visitors to my site, all of whom have cable connections or better (one is located right on an internet backbone), have complained of excessive lags in response time (30 seconds or more) when making HTTP requests. The problems ocurred both before and after the addition of the new GigE circuit. The users are located throughout the world -- the US, Canada, and France -- and they do not experience the same lag issues when visiting other sites hosted by Bluehost, so I am assuming the problem is on the server (or cluster) itself. This makes sense, since the server load is consistently above 10%, and the disk usage is almost 90% -- it seems like there are too many sites on this particular server, or one site that is hogging resources.

If you could fix this problem soon, I would appreciate it -- I'd like to renew hosting with you guys, but the site members are grumbling to look for other options because they are frustrated with the latency. If moving the site to a different machine with less load would fix the problem, I am willing to deal with a short downtime to make that happen.

Thanks very much,
Matt Nicholas
-------------------

Their response:
------------------------------
Fri Mar 30 2007 11:12AM by support-other@bluehost.com
I checked your website and the server status and both appear to be running great! I tried going to your website both inside and outside of our network and everything appeared to be running and loading great. Is there a certain section of your website that seems to run slower? Are things running better now? If things are running better now can you try contacting us via live chat or phone when the slow down occurs again so we can better troubleshoot this issue? We try to avoid moving accounts from one server to another, we try to fix the problem on the server.

Please let me know if you have further questions.

Thanks,

Jamie
BlueHost.com
Support Team
support@bluehost.com
888.401.4678

Most questions can be answered by articles in our knowledgebase or our NEW forum!

Forum: http://www.bluehostforum.com
Knowledgebase: http://helpdesk.bluehost.com/kb/
------------

The next time you come to the site and experience a problem, please go to bluehost.com and click "Live Chat" (lower left) and tell the support person about the problem. Like I said, there haven't been any lag issues for me personally (though if there are I'll get in touch with them when they happen).  I am going to nudge them again regarding the server status, which is not exactly "great" -- the CPU usage is consistently from 10-20%.

Matt

do you want my intimate feeling ?

They probably did it the cowardly way : the techie fixed the problem and nevertheless pretends he/she found the initial situation "great" so that you don't understand they are faillible as are humans.

I don't experience the problem any more. For the moment. I will do as you said if those times come again.

yeah, I had suspected that as well -- but then the CPU usage was still high, and I was actually experiencing a small bit of lag in CPanel. I guess we'll just keep our eye on it for a bit and see -- there are 26 (?) days left, so it should be plenty of time to evaluate (i.e. there is still time to ruin a few more of your visits :D  )

-Matt

: D  You are turning into a regular wise ..mmm.. guy.

Thanks for the thought, but I am waiting for them to finish putting in the Fiberoptics line (the whole area is tore up right now) before I get DSL.

You're going to love the DSL if they do it right with no bottlenecks.


Common among host support people.  Last summer after an "upgrade" of the OS I was having problems with the file manager.  It would not let me copy of move files between directories.  The response from the help desk was that it must be a problem with my browser??????  After I told them the intelligent thing to do would be to check the account permissions, the file manager magically started to work again, but they insisted there was nothing wrong on their end. 

The CPU usage is high but let's see if thing stay stable for the next couple of weeks.

problem is back (record : 45 seconds :/ )
live chat done

here's the message :

now chatting, will tell you outcome

Yeah I've had a similar issue too. My old host had upgraded MySQL, but when I went to phpmyadmin for my account I was able to view the databases of ALL the customers on that server. I reported it to them they said they could not duplicate the problem and asked for more info from me. Of course the problem silently fixed itself, after that I changed hosts and of course changed authentication info that was stored in my database.

the chat outcome : no easy solution and the problem is mysql-load-related.

they have one big root mysqld process for all the sites hosted.

Matt, perhaps you could suggest to them to implement a daemon that kills mysqld threads consuming too much memory or running since too long.
as from MySql AB people, there is no way to limit the (internal) execution time of a query on the mysqld itself ; as I told the BH support, even if the connection dies (30s max execution time) the query will still run to completion on the server and consume a lot of resources for nothing.

a daemon surveying the threads spawned by the mysqld main process would be great.

I think I encountered a unix flavour where it is done automatically for all processes, so that not a single one can "starvate" the others or bring the server to its knees.

Interesting -- how did you find all that out? (usually support isn't willing to tell that much). You don't have a transcript of the chat by any chance? I will get in touch with them again and make the suggestion of the daemon, although I doubt they will be able to implement that quickly, even if they are willing. In the meantime, if anyone experiences delays, please go here:

http://www.expertsrt.net/status/ to get the server status (the "server load" will almost definitely be red)
and then to http://www.bluehost.com and click on the live chat button on the bottom left. If they keep getting a steady flow of complaints, it's more likely they'll do something.

If they cannot fix this in the next several days, I will ask them to move the site to another server. I'm in a good position for bargaining, since I haven't renewed yet.

Matt

well, then I was lucky ;-)
I don't have a copy of the chat (idiot me!)
I don't even remember the first name of the guy (yes, at leas I remember it's a male but that's not of great help to distinguish helpdesk operators)
sorry

looking at the server status (esp the disk usage), it looks like they have moved some accounts ;-)   
Has anyone experienced any problems with delays in the last week or so? If not, then I will renew the account....

No delays here lately.  I was having a lot of problems a couple of weeks ago but it all seems smooth and more consistant now.  Still getting the occasional timeout but it's not that annoying.  ;-)

Maybe a tad smoother.

Sorry i could not contribute.
I guess I'll get a PayPal account sooner or later, and contributing to ERT is the first thing I'll do with it.
<:°)

There are lots of ways to contribute, and I'm sure at some point we'll need donations again - don't sweat it ;-)

Speaking of donations, thanks again to everyone who was able to contribute -- I just renewed the site for another two years.

Cheers,
Matt