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[nicholassolutions]

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

[VGR]

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

[nicholassolutions]

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

[VGR]

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.

[nicholassolutions]

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

[coral1]

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

: 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.

[COBOLdinosaur]

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.

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.

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.

[VGR]

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

here's the message :

related to www.expertsrt.com
today at 17:03 GMT+2 I got the delay of 45 seconds to have www.expertsrt.net's webserver at bluehost to accept my HTTP request ("waiting for..." in browser).
This is sent to you following a support contact from our administrator (your customer) Matt Nicholas and answered on Fri Mar 30 2007 11:12AM by support-other@bluehost.com (Jamie) asking specifically to send error reports via "live chat"
I have a fast DSL line and I never "lag" like this even for fareast Asia. I currently measure 4 to 5 seconds lag time on average (with peaks at 10 to 45 s ), while a normal one is < 0.1 second
regards

now chatting, will tell you outcome

[CrYpTiC_MauleR]

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.

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.

[VGR]

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.

[nicholassolutions]

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

[VGR]

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

[nicholassolutions]

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....

[Huntress]

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.  ;-)

[coral1]

Maybe a tad smoother.