I've noticed sporadic "hiccups" in the site's performance, i.e., it would be running fine, then a page times out or the server returns a blank page. I traced it down to not enough memory, but the host provider said they could not add more to that particular server. So I've migrated the site to a new server and hopefully that will be the end of the hiccups.

Please let me know if you noticed something not working as expected or missing (e.g., images).

I see that HB migrated to a faster server last night. Maybe Dan could give the old server to Mark at Coffeegeek!

sweaner wrote:I see that HB migrated to a faster server last night. Maybe Dan could give the old server to Mark at Coffeegeek!

I find it amusing that this was already fast and you've chosen to make it faster and CG is is still and has been painfully slow for the whole time I've been visiting both.

Ira

What can I say, I've worked for years in performance analysis / remediation; there's no such thing as too fast.

In all fairness to Coffeegeek, it's custom code that was not originally designed with high traffic in mind. Mark has tossed an insane amount of hardware at it to improve performance; there's only so much you can do if the software doesn't scale. In contrast, HB is based on phpBB version 3, which scales to mega-site traffic with ease. Mark plans a complete rewrite of Coffeegeek and promises lots of new features in addition to scalability.

I'll be paying careful attention to the performance of the site over the next few weeks. It seems zippier, that's for certain, but it's also the weekend. Monday/Tuesday is usually the busiest days of the week. My preference is page displays in 0.2 seconds; 0.5 seconds under load. The weighted average "health stats" are shown at the bottom of each page, e.g.:

Overall speed: fast, current page: 0.2s, avg: 0.2s, max: 1.6s

It covers the last hour of activity.

Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing the specs of your new server? Are you guys on a single server setup? I happen to run a forum for a living (a very, very large one), so I'm always curious about what's behind the scenes.

Hi Dan,
Not sure if this has anything to do with the new servers, but the RSS feed I usually use to view HB doesn't seem to be getting updated. Is there more than one feed? Thanks
Kaelin

Originally HB was on a shared host. Later I upgraded to a virtual dedicated server. Now it's on "grid hosting", i.e., shared hosting that's not tied to a single box. There's less admin flexibility than with a dedicated server, but it's cheap and appears to work faster than the VDS.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that hosting companies were moving in that direction just yet. Sounds nice though, if you don't have a lot of special needs, it's probably a lot more reliable than a VPS. Unfortunately the size of our forums necessitates 10 servers, the largest of which is a Quad Quadcore Xeon w/ 16gb of ram

I wish our hosting plan started at $4.99 a month!

Is it just me or were the forums down earlier today and generating a 403 error?

You're seeing the difference between updated DNS sites and ones that haven't caught up. Here's the pearl of advice from the host support team:

Thank you for contacting Online Support. It appears that your Internet Service Provider is caching the IP address information for your domain. Please note that changes to the settings of a domain take an average of 48 hours to become effective because of the number of networks involved, and because these networks are controlled by several different agencies. This delay applies to all domains with any Registrar. Please allow for this delay when planning web sites or configuring a domain to work with your services.

Please let us know if we can assist you in any other way.

I've added these instructions to the "old" server for those who are stuck. Any network experts out there have better advice? The update was done late Friday evening and I'm still seeing the bogus name resolution for some DNS locations.

Old IP: 208.109.251.127
New IP: 97.74.26.1

__________________________

Home-Barista.com has moved to a faster server. If you are seeing this message, your DNS is pointing to the old server. If you are running Windows, try these steps:

• Close all your browser windows and empty the browser's cache
• Run ipconfig /flushdns from the Command Prompt
• Run arp -d * from the Command Prompt
• Reboot.

Note: If you are running Microsoft Vista, open a command prompt as administrator by selecting the Run as administrator pop-up menu from the Command Prompt shortcut (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt).

If the steps above do not correct the problem, contact your Internet service provider help desk and ask them to refresh their DNS cache for http://www.home-barista.com.

Hi Dan,

thanks for the info (and your email), I will give it a try today.

I'm currently browsing the forum from work and here everything works well and it did so even straight after the server upgrade. At home it works well for some time or doesn't work at all. I will check again after work and report back.

Regards,
dsc.

dsc wrote:At home it works well for some time or doesn't work at all.

It may be worth sending a note to your ISP help desk with the new/old IP. Your ISP may have cached the old IP address in their DNS for performance reasons and they can explicitly refresh it.

Dan, ever since your "You can never be to fast" upgrade, my performance, at least here at work, has plummeted! To give you an idea, going from the "News and Suggestion Box" forum display TO the "You can never be to fast" thread to over 20 seconds (observation on my part and then a look @ the proxy server logs to get real numbers!). According to my proxy server, loading the "You can never be to fast" thread took 20.43 seconds for 260 bytes! This was for the "http://www.home-barista.com/news/you-can-never-be-too-fast-t9441.html link. Now, your script @ the bottom that shows loadtimes, showed the current page as taking 0.3 seconds (I wish!).... I haven't had a chance to really check it @ home (but wait, I'll do that right now! ). Much faster from home... I have rebooted the proxy (due to other issues) and, at present, ONLY Home-Barista is showing this slowdown.

Just some technical specs on my business link:

ATT T-1 link, showing about 30% utilization (was 28.7% when I checked). Proxy server handles 3 people in this office (so it's not a load issue on the proxy). An attempt to "traceroute" to home-barista.com goes thru about 18 intermediate links before hitting a "black hole" where I can no longer get info on intermediate links (just shows that someone has decided their routers won't respond to ICMP QUERY requests.). Before the upgrade I could ping the home-barista.com site and get a response in 28-42 msec. Now it's consistently in the 83-100ms timeframe with the majority in the 80+ms range (i.e. 80.3, 81.9, 80.7, etc...).

Probably NOT an issue with your server. more likely an issue with peering between the multiple ISPs that are handling the traffic...

ntwkgestapo wrote:Dan, ever since your "You can never be to fast" upgrade, my performance, at least here at work, has plummeted!

Maybe it's a corporate conspiracy? The name servers for my employer's VPN are still pointing to the old server. Not much I can think to do about that. I was hoping a "network gestapo" kind of guy would offer me some suggestions.

Sorry about the hassle, I had no idea changing IP addresses was such a big deal. I thought this was the very problem DNS's were designed to solve.

ntwkgestapo wrote:Now, your script @ the bottom that shows loadtimes, showed the current page as taking 0.3 seconds (I wish!)....

That's how long the server took to process your request once it arrived. I assume the remainder of the delay is network problems.

Dan, the DNS is NOT the issue. Nor, I suspect, is the IP address... NOW the hosting facility may be, the network segment WITHIN the hosting facility, the network infrastructure (routers, switches, etc) could be, the "Grid Hosting" COULD be causing issues.... ALL of these and many more CAN be issues, but I really suspect it's outside of your hosting facility... As I get the time, over the next day or so, I will be doing some investigating and we'll just have to see... As most people seem to be enjoying the faster response, I suspect it has to be somewhere between some "peering" point where two or more ISP's interconnect. The big ones are [or at least USED to be, it has been a while...] Mae East, Mae West, Mae North and Mae South. In New Jersey, California, Illinois and Texas. These are, or used to be, the major peering points between "Cat I" ISPs (originally, AT&T, SPRINT, MCI and one more which I forget now) USED to cost about $300K a year just for the ABILITY to interconnect there... THEN you paid for high speed redundant interconnect bandwidth, etc. Nowadays 'tis probably an OC-48 connection @ a minimum (2.5 Gigabits/sec) and more....

But anyway, as I started to say, 'tis probably between one of those peering points and my connection... I'll turn on some monitoring and see what happens... I'll let you know what I find out (assuming I really DO find something! )

Oh, on the Network Gestapo bit.... It's been 12-13 years ago now, but I, as a favor to our site IM Manager, looked @ one of the local executive's laptop about "issues" he was having with it... I was NOT a "PC Repairman" but looked @ it because he'd been having problems getting the local repair group to fix his issues (and he was leaving for a 3-4 week stay in Europe later in the day). Long story short, he'd worn out an IBM Thinkpad! Keyboard was only about 30-40% functional, LCD had entire rows that didn't display at all, etc... I got the repair group to replace his laptop ASAP. I stopped back in shortly before he was heading out on his trip to insure they'd actually fixed it. It had been replaced and was working fine! He asked me who, at the local facility, to contact to basically give me an "atta boy"! I told him that I didn't actually work FOR the local facility, but was on division headquarters staff and I was in Information Security... One of his direct reports was in the office finishing up some stuff and the two of them both asked me what I normally did! When I told them one of the things I did was manage our "Web Content Filtering system" (the system that doesn't let you go to playboy.com!), the sub-manager said "AHH, You're the Network Gestapo!" and it 'stuck'!
While I HAVE done network design (since about 1984), nowadays I do InfoSec Policy, Procedures, etc and I review our Infrastructure and Applications to insure that adequate security controls are in place and operational. I'm also the Compliance "guy" and I work to educate the business on regulatory and statutory compliance (Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS, Export Control Compliance, etc).... There are times when I wish I was back @ the design level! It was much easier!

Indeed, today it's been quite slow. Other days it's been significantly faster than before. Oh well, let it ride a bit longer and if it doesn't settle out, I'll weigh other options. I haven't seen "very slow" in a long, long time:

Overall speed: very slow, current page: 2.8s, avg: 9.8s, max: 55.2s

Ironically, Coffeegeek has been faster the last few days.