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DonRocks

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I just timed how long it takes for View New Content to load-- 57.82 seconds.

This is just not acceptable. I don't know why this *never* happens to me to this extent (and I even switched recently from Safari to Chrome). It "sticks" sometimes for a few seconds, but I almost never get endless waits that others sometimes report.

I put a problem ticket in this morning - I'll see what they say, but I think the time has come to get on a private server. Once I do that, it will be extremely fast - this website has just gotten too big.

And the damning thing is: it's not *that* big; it's just right at the border of needing a private server, and I think it's been that way for awhile now.

That said, did you really time this to the hundredth of a second?! :wacko:

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I put a problem ticket in this morning - I'll see what they say, but I think the time has come to get on a private server. Once I do that, it will be extremely fast - this website has just gotten too big.

Okay, I heard back from Dreamhost. Now, all I have to do is figure out what "Apache" and "traceroute" are.

Um, hey mom and dad, you know that tuition money you spent on my MS in Computer Science? Right. Me neither.

---

Hi Don,

Thank you for contacting DreamHost support.

I've taken a look at your situation, and your web server and MySQL servers look to be in good shape and their recent history looks strong as well. It does look like there was an issue with the Apache service your sites are hosted on, I restarted the service and it cleared up the issue with your apache.

If you are still seeing issues with the site please try clearing your browsers cache and flushing the DNS.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Clear_cache

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Flush_DNS

If that doesn't work, please send us a traceroute.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Traceroute

If the issues continue and you see any errors still popping up, please let me know the details and we'll continue investigating!

Thanks!

Justin H

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I don't know if this should be posted in another forum; if so, please feel free to move it there (but let us know where!).

Indeed, perhaps I shouldn't post it at all, since it's been hashed over before, to no avail . . . but just in case there's some play in the joints . . .

Don, please (pretty please, with sugar on top) reconsider the "multiple listings" policy.  Assuming my usage is at all representative of the Rockwellian norm, it's having really counterproductive effects.  The way I use the Guide, 99% of the time, is that I find myself in, or headed to, a particular neighborhood or town, and depend upon the Guide to inform me of the worthwhile eats there.  Some of the best places are invariably missing (Fishnet ain't even listed in College Park any more!), just because they happen to have one or more locations.  Therefore, they do not become part of my planning, or my conversations with my companions about where to eat.  And, as a result, we miss out on the best a neighborhood has to offer.  At the very least, could you include in the neighborhood listings any spots that you praise with italics or better?  Thanks so much.

 

This gets my vote too - when I've used the Guide, I've often missed places that are in Multiple Locations, which I figure out later would've been better places to go.

I think this has gone on long enough.

Does everyone understand why I haven't done this?

I don't dislike chain restaurants; I just don't care about them one way or the other. An Executive Chef overseeing more than one restaurant is undoubtedly important to a company, but not to me as a customer. The Chef de Cuisine, followed by the Sous Chefs, are the positions I care about the most. This is not an unyielding stance, but it turns out to be true a great majority of the time with me as a diner. Once a restaurant expands, it often intends to keep expanding - into a cold, hard business that means nothing more to me than a bank with all its little branches.

Have you ever noticed how start-up restaurants come on here and post for a year or so, and then they disappear once they open their second location? I suspect I could name a couple dozen times this has happened - by the time a business is adding links to its chain, it has no more use for me, and may even see me as a hindrance (although I have no desire to hinder anyone).

Okay, so that's why I haven't done it. But I can't deny that for years now, people have asked to have it done, so even if it means very little to me personally, I'm willing to do it if our members want it.

If ten people chime in and say, "Do it," I'll do it. It will be rudimentary and crude, but I'll put enough information in one place so that people don't have to worry about whether or not they forgot an important restaurant when examining a neighborhood. As to why I'm asking people to chime in, the last time I implemented a "great idea" without asking anyone, I spent an entire summer working on the Philadelphia Forum which could, and should, be going gangbusters, but won't be unless we get some PR going forward.

Just let me know and I'll get it done.

Cheers,

Rocks

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Am I the only one that never uses the guide? Maybe I should be?

Sometimes I use the Guide and other times I use the Guide, but I think they are two different things and now I can only find one.

The one I can find now has lists of restaurant links broken out geographically by words: "Dupont Circle to Georgetown", "14 St North of G St". The one I can no longer find has an interactive map where you click on a certain neighborhood, "Federal Triangle", "Chinatown" and then you get lists of restaurants.

I'm pretty sure they both used to be accessible through this site, but I don't find the "map" version anymore. Does that one still exist?

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Assuming we get 10 people (and please keep them coming - it's useful to know how many of you use this to better define how I'm going to do this), please go through the Multiple Locations Guide and tell me how many restaurants you'd like to see included in Frederick? 1, 2, 3, or something more than that? I can see any of these being possible, perhaps more (the more you have me include, the more work it's going to be). Within the Multiple Locations Guide, if a chain has two or less links, I list the individual locations; if it has three or more, I list an approximate count without mentioning any locations. To include any of these larger chains in Frederick, I'd need to search every restaurant on the web to see if they have a location there. Am I correct in assuming that since you're using this on your mobile phones, a link to the restaurants' websites is more useful than the link to the discussion threads? Or a link to their Twitter account instead of their website? What about simply listing the restaurants with no links, and including one single link to the Multiple Locations guide nearby so you can have access to everything, including their Twitter accounts? Go ahead and look at Frederick which I've done as an example of how I envision doing this - I think only "significant" restaurants should be included, but others may have a different idea of what "significant" means, and that's why I need people to go through and look at this exact example. How many would you include in Frederick, and which ones would they be?

One last thing: once in a blue moon, someone will mention that a restaurant isn't in the Dining Guide, and it's because we don't have a thread for it. Remember that the only restaurants in the Dining Guides are the ones we have threads for, so if there's a favorite of yours that's missing, please start a thread, and it will automatically flow into the Guides. There was a period of time, several years ago, when several months went by without the Guides being correspondingly updated (it's about two pages worth), and I still haven't gotten to traversing those (I need to go through every single one), but it's on my to do list - the problem is that my pointers were accidentally deleted one day, and so I don't know exactly where those incidences begin or end; I've been methodically working my way backwards in time, figuring I'll get to them at some point (Notice how everything recent is tagged now? That's why.)

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All the links are worthwhile (to me) except links to twitter accounts.

I can see myself wanting links to the restaurant itself to check hours, phone number or the menu and I can see having links to the discussion threads for current info on what to get/avoid. But if I don't see the need for twitter info.

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All the links are worthwhile (to me) except links to twitter accounts.

I can see myself wanting links to the restaurant itself to check hours, phone number or the menu and I can see having links to the discussion threads for current info on what to get/avoid. But if I don't see the need for twitter info.

Okay, but assuming you only had room for one link - I figure it's more useful to link to the website than the discussion thread for the instances where people are in their car, trying to find a place to eat. If the link went to the discussion thread, that would involve multiple clicks, scrolling, reading, etc., so I'm hoping that simply going to the Multiple Locations guide as an extra step won't be too much of a burden for those who wish to see the discussion. (A cardinal rule of database design is: No redundancies! By doing this, I'm creating redundant data (which is why I've resisted for so long), so I'm trying to minimize it - yes, this whole website is just one, gigantic, hierarchical database, believe it or not.

I'm pretty sure they both used to be accessible through this site, but I don't find the "map" version anymore. Does that one still exist?

If you go to dcdiningguide.com, you'll find the map version.

Some day in the future, you'll be able to ... well ... go to the Washington, DC Guide, find West End, and click on "Map."

One last thing since we're all focusing on the Dining Guides - over the years, the neighborhoods were added piecemeal, whenever a thread was created that called for the addition of a neighborhood. The order is very loosely defined as "close-in to far-away," but it hasn't been thought about as a whole, and needs to be re-designed with a top-down approach. If anyone wants to help reorganize our neighborhoods (the ordering of all, and/or the boundaries and contents of each), please let me know - taken as a whole, this is a lot of work, but it's also something where even a small amount of work can help. Obviously, if anyone has an interest in Google Maps and wants to do things similar to what I did with West End, please let me know - it's very easy, but it's time consuming and requires concentration. This actually goes hand-in-hand with the redefining of neighborhood boundaries which requires thought, and is very important - I suspect somewhere on the internet, there's a modernized listing of DC neighborhoods with precise boundaries defined, and I see no need to duplicate someone else's work if I don't have to.

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Slower than a geriatric snail on Vicodin this morning. When I clicked New Content:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@donrockwell.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

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Slower than a geriatric snail on Vicodin this morning. When I clicked New Content:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@donrockwell.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Did this happen now, or at 5 AM? There was a *huge* spike in resource use at 5 AM, for whatever reason.

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It's been bad for a few days, and I couldn't even get the site to load this morning around 8.  I've been hitting the link I want, then I head off to do something else for a while.  It usually loads while I'm working on something else.  Kind of makes me miss dial-up.  (Not.)

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It's been bad for a few days, and I couldn't even get the site to load this morning around 8.  I've been hitting the link I want, then I head off to do something else for a while.  It usually loads while I'm working on something else.  Kind of makes me miss dial-up.  (Not.)

It was *terribly* slow for me last night when working on the dining guides (which have a lot of links in them that need to be resolved each time I update).

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If you are serious about growing the membership for the site, it may be time to upgrade the server.  Long-termers may be willing to wait, but there are a lot of studies out there about site load time and peoples' unwillingness to wait even a few seconds for a page.  It also affects how Google ranks you in search results.  Just a thought.

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If you are serious about growing the membership for the site, it may be time to upgrade the server.  Long-termers may be willing to wait, but there are a lot of studies out there about site load time and peoples' unwillingness to wait even a few seconds for a page.  It also affects how Google ranks you in search results.  Just a thought.

I've already written for an upgrade.

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Happened at 9:30/10am.

I'm leaving DreamHost, and switching back to Invision (who now offers web hosting again, but only for high-volume websites). They were good because they could fix problems related to both server issues and software issues (since they wrote the software). It's in the process. Thanks, all, for your feedback and patience.

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DreamHost's response to my latest letter, and my response to them:

---

Hello Don,

On Wed, 12 Nov 2014, you wrote:

> This happened this morning when we were not busy. Thanks ...
>
> http://www.donrockwell.com/index.php?/topic/207-administrative-announcement-multiple-locations-in-the-dining-guide/?p=282007
>

Thanks for contacting us. I checked your site and it does not appear to
be showing any 500 errors at this time. The server itself also
has not gone down today and is showing a normal load:

root@ps124316:/home/donrockwell/donrockwell.com# uptime
 14:37:07 up 2 days,  9:51,  1 user,  load average: 0.01, 0.12, 0.15

Are you still seeing any issues with your sites? If you still need
further assistance let us know and we will continue to assist you
further.

Best regards,
Jay T

---

Yes, the entire website has been seeing issues, and it's gotten so bad that I'm leaving DreamHost, I'm afraid.

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If you don't have a hosting company in mind, I have used both HostGator and GoDaddy and like GoDaddy much better.  My site is tiny, so it may not be a good comparison, but the load speed is instantaneous, and the software they gave me makes updating the site incredibly easy.  I redid everything myself and didn't have to contact my board member, the web "expert."  Trust me when I say that this is nothing short of miraculous. 

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Accessing the site was easy.  Moving from one category to another was painfully slow.  ie going to recent posts. I believe its been a problem for a while.

To comment upon LPerry's thoughtful comments above: Different kinds of websites deal with different issues.  Small sites don't encounter load speed issues from size or traffic as do larger sites.  Its a different kind of issue.  We operate a group of small business sites.  Unfortunately none of them have the traffic volume or size issues that larger sites face.  I haven't had to deal with the issue.  On the other hand her thoughtful comment about load time being a consideration of site quality and ranking is spot on.  I'd pay attention to it.  Moreover as she referenced people new to the site don't want to wait around for page to load.  Its a great way to lose new visitors.
 
I do see it discussed and encountered from quite a few webmasters though.  The discussions, issues, problems, solutions, and suggested hosts etc are of a different nature and context that we as small site operators see.  I've a request to one of those larger site operators for a host with whom I know he has had very satisfactory results.
 
If I were dealing with these problems, Don, I'd start searching in other areas and forums to read through the variety of issues and possible solutions, including those of best solution providers (hosts) to help you deal with the continued issues.  
 
A lot of the responses from existing hosts are pure bs.  It takes some time to research through the bunk to get to solutions.  Its not my issue, so I'm not going to do the research or take the time, but over many years I've followed these discussions and searches for solutions.  Its worthwhile to get educated a bit.
 
In the meantime I put in a request from somebody I know with a site(s) that are probably many times the size of this and have significantly greater traffic.  The website operator has been satisfied for years.  I'll pass it on when I get it.  I have no idea about costs.

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I'm leaving DreamHost, and switching back to Invision (who now offers web hosting again, but only for high-volume websites). They were good because they could fix problems related to both server issues and software issues (since they wrote the software). It's in the process. Thanks, all, for your feedback and patience.

I'm going back to Invision, whom I never wanted to leave in the first place. They got out of the web-hosting business for a few years, but now they're back in.

They are able to help me simultaneously with both hosting and forum problems, and are the only company in the world that can.

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In the meantime, I just this minute upgraded to 1400 mb of memory - we'll see if it helps. If anyone wants to analyze that article on heavy usage, and give me some suggestions, please write me.

---

Hello,

Sorry to hear about the problems you have been experiencing. At the
moment the sites are up and running. I scanned the logs I noticed that
donrockwell.com  is spawning too many CGI processes. This is indicative
of having too many plugins, heavy traffic, or utilizing a script/plugin
that is not optimized well or using one that requires greater resources.

[Thu Nov 13 11:10:15 2014] [error] mod_fcgid: domain=www.donrockwell.com
too many /dh/cgi-system/php53.cgi processes (current:10, max:10), skip
the spawn request
[Thu Nov 13 11:10:15 2014] [error] mod_fcgid: domain=www.donrockwell.com
too many /dh/cgi-system/php53.cgi processes (current:10, max:10), skip
the spawn request
[Thu Nov 13 11:10:15 2014] [error] mod_fcgid: domain=www.donrockwell.com
too many /dh/cgi-system/php53.cgi processes (current:10, max:10), skip
the spawn request
[Thu Nov 13 11:10:20 2014] [error] mod_fcgid: domain=www.donrockwell.com
too many /dh/cgi-system/php53.cgi processes (current:10, max:10), skip
the spawn request

Hits for today:

58279 [13/Nov/2014

As you can see the site currently has 58,279 hits just today. Currently
the VPS has 800MB of memory is not enough to handle all the traffic and
activity on the forum. Consider upgrading the memory to at least 1024MB.

We have a great article on diagnosing heavy usage problems:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Finding_Causes_of_Heavy_Usage

Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions.

Thanks!
John R

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Maybe it's time to take down that Kim Kardashian Champagne picture down.

I actually notice a dramatic improvement in speed, but only on 4 out of 5 clicks (which is a lot better than it was).

"It" happens on the simplest of operations - when I click to bring up the forum, for example. What that tells me is that it isn't me; it's another user, and I just happen to be clicking at the same time. There is some process (or processes) that are spiraling out of control, and nobody knows how to tell me what they are. Fortunately, I do think the increase in memory has helped - a lot (I almost doubled the memory).

---

But, for example, when I clicked on "Save Changes" just now,  it took about 5 seconds which is about 4.8 seconds too long.

---

And when I just did it again, it was almost instantaneous.

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Pair.com is the name of the host that was recommended to me for larger sites.

I'm aware of at least 3 knowledgeable webmasters that use them, each with a lot of experience with sites and with some larger sites.

2 caveats:

They aren't inexpensive.

They are a bear to work with when installing special software.  Of the webmasters that have worked with them, they all have excellent tech people whom they use.  All the issues have been solved.  dr.com has good ole RWBooneJr.  I bet he could handle any issues. ;).

I'm personally not familiar with that group but the people who are happy with them are very reputable IMHO.

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I just clicked the link to show me all new posts, and it took nearly 2 minutes before it returned the result.

I've searched for results.  I added some comments.   Slow, slower and slowest.  (come to think of it...the movie Dumb and Dumber to is coming out tomorrow).   ;)

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I'm having simple clicks take 20-30 seconds on a regular basis. Invision is now well aware of the problem, and is working on it - I'm going to go ahead and give them one chance to make it right (actually, two - switching to a new server is fine, even if it means being offline for a couple of days).

Hello Don,

Thanks for contacting DreamHost support. It appears that there is heavy
load on your MySQl server that could be causing the slowness. The admins
are working on it as we speak, and it should come back to normal within a
couple of hours. If this continues to be an issue, we could move you to a
different MySQL server, but doing so will require some downtime while the
DB is moved.

Let us know if you have any further concerns,
Rob

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Thanks (I think). That's a YouTube server error, btw, which may or may not have happened while our website was being moved.

This email was sent to me at 12:59 PM, so given the odd nature of this error, it's probably because we're in the middle of switching servers.

---

Hello Don,

Thanks for writing back. I have spoken to a admin, and he is getting the

move started. Your site will probably come down some time soon as the

move begins. The site will be back up when the move is completed. I

cannot say for sure how long the move will take, as it varies due to both

server load, and database size.

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Hello Don,

Thanks for writing back. I have spoken to a admin, and he is getting the

move started. Your site will probably come down some time soon as the

move begins. The site will be back up when the move is completed. I

cannot say for sure how long the move will take, as it varies due to both

server load, and database size.

Well, it seems to be running very quickly for me now, after having been down about an hour, although I haven't tried anything complicated yet, and the members are just now slowly coming back online.

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A little quicker, but still slow.

45 seconds to pull up the new posts page, 10 seconds to resolve any of the pages once I click the link.

Those both used to be nearly instantaneous.

Clear your browser, cache, etc (which is probably pointing to the old server). It's running very quickly for me right now - I keep cringing, waiting for it to take forever, and it hasn't yet. A couple things have taken a few seconds (notably, saving new posts), but so far nothing more than that.

Unfortunately, *everyone* is going to need to clear their browser, cache, cookies, etc. for this to take effect.

Definitely keep kicking and screaming if things don't speed up, but give things a chance to flush out also. I'm not imagining what I'm seeing, of that I'm certain, and I was being brutalized by long waits as much as anyone. I haven't seen speed like this since I temporarily switched to a private server several months ago.

And (assuming this is going to be resolved) thank you to those who spoke up - I would not have known the problem was this severe, although it really seemed to have spiraled downward in the past week, didn't it?

The fact that I'm seeing such quick speeds right now tells me that it's not our website that was causing the delays; it was something else on the server (that, possibly coupled with only using 800mb instead of the 1400mb of memory we're now using). This tells me that in a worst-case situation, a switch to a private server (which is extremely expensive) will most likely take care of any slow speeds should they happen again (and if it does, I'm going to switch not just servers, but hosts, since Invision is the logical place for this website to reside on).

If you picture a CPU as the class water fountain, we were being denied water by people butting in line - that's my best guess. And that can happen again, when our new server obtains additional websites and becomes more populated. (I'm also assuming servers have single CPUs, and we were being queued for CPU time; I don't think it was so much a memory issue because when I nearly doubled it, things didn't get much better). As to whether or not I'm going back down to 800mb of memory, the answer is no for now - not until it's proven that we're needlessly paying for unused memory over the course of several weeks.

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I opened another browser just to be sure.  The index pages load instantly, but the forum pages are still bad.  I couldn't even get the New York forum to load at all before I gave up on it. 

The only times it has been slow for me have been while trying to tap the serve on the shoulder; once you have its attention, the download is nearly instantaneous (with a Chrome browser, you can distinguish between the two).

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I'm looking for some email help. In particular, if anyone out there has done the following, and can help us out with a little volunteer work, please contact me via PM:

1) Setting up a new email account on Gmail.

2) Transferring an existing (soon to be deleted) email account's contents into the Gmail account.

3) Forwarding new incoming email into the Gmail account, setting up pointers, etc.

4) Sending email from the Gmail account as a different address (the reverse of 3)).

5) Explaining it all to me (this will be the most challenging part).

There would need to be a privacy statement signed, so please know that before saying yes. I can't pay you, but will give you a little token of my appreciation.  :)

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I'm looking for some email help. In particular, if anyone out there has done the following, and can help us out with a little volunteer work, please contact me via PM:

1) Setting up a new email account on Gmail.

2) Transferring an existing (soon to be deleted) email account's contents into the Gmail account.

3) Forwarding new incoming email into the Gmail account, setting up pointers, etc.

4) Sending email from the Gmail account as a different address (the reverse of 3)).

5) Explaining it all to me (this will be the most challenging part).

There would need to be a privacy statement signed, so please know that before saying yes. I can't pay you, but will give you a little token of my appreciation.  :)

Is #2 even possible? I'd love to know if it is...

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