I'm trying to figure out why a site keeps crashing. It's a dedicated server with godaddy and it has managed support so they've told our client it's probably a scripting error. I was hoping they'd give more specific information than this:

. During our review we had found that the IOWait was using all the CPU which typically indicates the command is trying to read or write to the hard drive. Unfortunately we were unable to determine where in your code this command is being generated from. In reviewing your access logs the only php script being ran is /sites/all/modules/ad/serve.php. It does not appear this script is being hit any more than previous days

I would have thought that it is because of the image galleries which literally have thousands of images, using views to sort and display them. Some of the images are mass uploaded using node gallery module and imagecache, etc is running to resize thumbnails etc. I would have thought this is the reason it would crash -- but the site traffic is not high and it runs fine on my local machine which doesn't have a great processor. The hard drive on the server actually overheated and died!

Where do I go for help because I'm in over my head!?

Comments

John_B’s picture

This is a big question, and some companies such as 2bits.com specialise in sorting out these things. Godaddy hosting has a bad rep on these forums, not sure if their dedicated uses better engineers, but on the server side you might be looking at the quality of the hardware, and the quality of Godaddy's work on ensuring the tuning of your database suits your site (probably none, managing servers vary wildly in quality and price). On the site level your starting point is Devel module with query log enabled. You can put this on a test copy of the site on the Godaddy server. You can also try debugging with New Relic (I think included in Acquia Developer Network, though you might want to get a copy on the problem server, and buy a license at least temporarily). There is no quick easy answer, and the first issue is to identify the bottleneck.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors

PMorris’s picture

Thanks for the advice. I totally understand why godaddy has that reputation at this point! I just need a starting point to refer them to someone more specialized since I'm more on the design end of it. Aside from tweaking caching and some settings in php.ini, etc I can only do so much.

The Acquia guys were someone I'd recommended too so at least I'd headed in the right direction.