Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.
By eafarris on
Our site, DIYPlanner.com, has been running along for a couple months now, pretty smoothly. We've got almost 650 users and over 400 nodes of content, and were serving about 30K hits per day. That number is down now, because over the last two or maybe three weeks, the site has gotten very slow. We have not seen a dramatic increase in content nor visitors in this time.
The slow downs are intermittent, but prevalent. It's not uncommon for the front page to take more than 40s or even over a minute to load, even when the user block shows less than 200 "visitors" on the site. Some of the things we've tried:
- doing a dump and restore of the db, onto a different host.
- caching on and off
- removing blocks that reference external sites, like Advertising
- playing with throttle settings
When on the web host, a (albeit simple) query like
SELECT nid FROM node WHERE status=1 AND promote=1
will return in about 0.1s. That, to me, rules out MySQL. Lynx will serve the page pretty quickly, usually under 5s but occasionally it will take 20. That almost rules out the code and PHP. What's left?
We're running MySQL 4.0, and PHP 4.4.1 as CGI.
What are some more things that we can try to pinpoint what is causing our slowdown? We're getting quite frustrated, and it's driving our users away.
Comments
Shared or dedicated hosting?
What hosting plan do you have? According to whois.sc (http://www.whois.sc/diyplanner.com) 180 websites are on the same ip-adress. How many / server? What's the server load?
--
Tips for posting to the forums
DIYPlanner hosting and slowdowns
We have the 1and1 Business Pro hosting package, and I have about seven different sites there, mostly WordPress 1.5.x. There's also the Drupal-based DIYPlanner.com, and a few wiki packages that I was experimenting with several months ago. That being said, only DIYPlanner.com is experiencing any slowdown. My WP blog, a million monkeys typing (www.douglasjohnston.net/weblog) gets about 8-16K hits daily (as opposed to the 25-35K of DIYPlanner), but still there's no sign of that site slowing down whatsoever. We even imported the DIYPlanner Drupal tables straight into the same one used for AMMT (same host, same db), and unfortunately it made no difference.
As for load, it's hard to tell. ps, top and w seem to be disabled, and as I mentioned, no other sites on the server are experiencing slowdowns. There have also been no changes to the DIYPlanner code or templates recently, and the content is not much larger than it was when it was speedy.
We *are* getting quite a number of PHP DB cache errors, if that's any indication of a problem. Per another post here, we just modified the bootstrap and MySQL cache table, but that didn't make the problems go away.
The page load times are also quite variable. One minute, I timed the front page at 8s. The next refresh took 97s. It usually takes 20s and up.
Any suggestions of things we might try in order to zero in on the problem?
all my best,
dj
--
D*I*Y Planner : http://www.diyplanner.com
a million monkeys typing : http://www.douglasjohnston.net
Site fast again
Just wanted to let you folks know that our 1and1-hosted site DIYPlanner.com suddenly got fast again, for no apparent reason. Although I *would* really like to know what's been happening, I'm too relieved to complain. I still suspect it was some sort of database problem on the host's end, but we lack enough information to be very sure about it....
all my best,
dj
--
D*I*Y Planner : http://www.diyplanner.com
a million monkeys typing : http://www.douglasjohnston.net