Damn slowness

#1

Hello,

I have just switched from another host (after 10 years of fidelity). I thought Dreamhost would be a good solution for my hosting needs. In fact it is… unlimited MySQL databases, subversion repository, multi accounts etc. All of this are great stuff… BUT the SSH / Web transfer are too damn slow !! Really I lost my patience waiting for a simple AJAX requests… and the SSH access gets on my nerves. The account test says my website took more than 5 seconds to respond… and the index.html is only a few bytes !!! it has only the words “under construction”… i cant believe that.

maybe this is a specific issue of my server (aries). anyone else in trouble with it ?

I am considering moving again … is there any 30-days money back guarantee ? how do i take care of that ?

Thank you

#2

DreamHost has a 97 day money-back guarantee (except for the fee for domain registration, which isn’t cancellable).

I find your performance experience odd - simple pages are fast on my server. Have you checked the load on your server?

BTW, what annoys you about the ssh access?

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#3

right now it is:
top - 04:41:26 up 5 days, 21:30, 7 users, load average: 0.73, 0.64, 0.59

but it is pretty fast ATM. usually the load is something around 4.
what annoys me in the SSH access ? man… it is much slower than remotely accessing my Pentium 200MHz/32MB RAM over a different network in the other side of the country. Sometimes it is just impossible to get SSH access on my DH account because I have to wait for, say, 5 minutes to authenticate. Then I get a delay of 1 minute per each key I press… its just impossible to work in an environment like that.

I tried to kindly ask them to move my account to another server but I got no answer so far. Is there any plan with a dedicated server or at least a server shared with less people ?

thank you.

#4

If your load is usually around 4, server loading is not the problem. :wink:

Your ssh situation is also highly unusual…enough so that I seriously doubt the server is the issue.

Do you have any public facing pages that others can test to help determine if there is a routing problem? What does a traceroute show for your domain? Massive packet loss could explain part of what you are seeing.

–rlparker

#5

Yes, I am also hosted with aries and I have exactly the same problem you are reporting.
I notice that it is an intermittent problem.
For example it tends to happen around 11:00 AM to 2:00PM Eastern Time. It has happened more than twice during this time frame.
I suspect it is something with the router or the MYSQL. But it is not my job to find what is the problem.
I have contacted support several times and they say they cannot see anything wrong.
It is really annoying because it slows down my page load so severaly that it gets like stuck and frozen, while my other hosts load up pretty quickly.

When the slowness happens it affects my web page loads, FTP gets slow also (sometimes it doesnt even connect) and SSH sessions also take time to respond back.
It is a real annoyance and I auspect something bad and intermittent is going on with the Aries server !
Luckily my site is not still open, I am still programming and configuring it.
My site is: www.firearms-videos.com

Parabellum

#6

I find my webmail is INCREDIBLY slow, daily, from around 11:30am until about 1pm. Maybe it is too many people accessing at lunchtime, I do not know.
As for overall website slowness, and outages, this past month has been Hell! Email and websites had widespread problems, for the better part of August. Up until then, Dreamhost was really on the ball. I hope what happened in August was an isolated occurrence, and not a harbinger of things to come. I have been with Dreamhost for 5 years or so, and other than the recent issues, they have been great!

Scott

#7

Nice site! It also is loading really well for me at present.

Your comment that the slowness seems to be intermittent, and your anecdotal observation of it happening at a predictable time makes me wonder if some user on your machine might be running some cron-driven process at that time that causes the server load to spike.

Have you checked your server load during the slow periods, to see if this might be happening? If you can document that situation, it would point the support folks in the direction of the problem - it could be that things look fine whenever they check, and they are just “missing” the window of time when the problem is occurring.

–rlparker

#8

Yes, very professional!

Yep, the site loaded nice and fast for me as well.

I agree with rlparker that the problem most likely lies with someone else on the server creating load at that time as well. My SSH connection is really fast - somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds. I do know that when my server was having load problems (because of my neighbor’s out-of-control processes), it took forever to SSH in.

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#9

[quote]but it is pretty fast ATM. usually the load is something around 4.
what annoys me in the SSH access ? man… it is much slower than remotely accessing my Pentium 200MHz/32MB RAM over a different network in the other side of the country. Sometimes it is just impossible to get SSH access on my DH account because I have to wait for, say, 5 minutes to authenticate. Then I get a delay of 1 minute per each key I press… its just impossible to work in an environment like that.[/quote]
I’m in Asia and has SSH access to DH server pretty well, quite fast and login within 10 seconds. It is weird if you have to get it for 5 minutes.

Dino
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#10

Ok this is 19:48 (GMT -3) right now and top shows:

top - 15:48:04 up 19 days, 8:37, 1 user, load average: 3.55, 3.21, 3.58
Tasks: 3 total, 1 running, 2 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 25.0% user, 17.2% system, 0.0% nice, 57.8% idle
Mem: 4136360k total, 3979176k used, 157184k free, 24888k buffers
Swap: 6313512k total, 60096k used, 6253416k free, 2741296k cached

and the server is slowwwwwww again … this is getting on my nerves !!!
how do I request a server change ??

$ traceroute www.novadevel.com
traceroute to www.novadevel.com (208.113.189.130), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 homebase (192.168.10.1) 4.631 ms 2.259 ms 2.304 ms
2 200.217.255.152 (200.217.255.152) 37.603 ms 32.938 ms 32.998 ms
3 200.217.30.25 (200.217.30.25) 30.960 ms 36.083 ms 37.082 ms
4 pos14-0-hga-mg-rotd-04.telemar.net.br (200.216.133.81) 252.180 ms 247.739 ms 247.132 ms
5 gigabitethernet11-0-0-hga-mg-rotn-01.telemar.net.br (200.216.133.5) 264.269 ms 263.270 ms 259.539 ms
6 pos11-0-1-bot-rj-rotn-01.telemar.net.br (200.216.4.89) 280.323 ms * 278.431 ms
7 200.187.128.66 (200.187.128.66) 437.358 ms * 624.315 ms
8 ge-1-2-1.ar3.jfk1.gblx.net (64.215.184.21) 273.520 ms ip-204.246.200.69.gblx.net (204.246.200.69) 415.601 ms ge-1-2-1.ar3.jfk1.gblx.net (64.215.184.21) 247.842 ms
9 new-dream-networks-llc-los-angeles.ge-0-1-0.410.ar1.lax3.gblx.net (64.215.183.50) 469.843 ms 502.472 ms 467.132 ms
10 * apache2-moon.aries.dreamhost.com (208.113.189.130) 487.792 ms 495.601 ms

#11

Well, from those numbers it is pretty apparent that server load is not the issue. You can request a “server change” via the “Contact Support” section of the Control panel, but I would be very very surprised if they will change your server based on that report; there is no indication at all that the server is overloaded.

Your site also loads very fast for me from the Los Angeles area. There was a 50 ms response time and another 380ms to load and render a 102kb PNG - total from “go” to completely rendered page just under .5 seconds … I wish my sites were that fast :wink:

Looking further at your traceroute information makes it pretty clear you have some major latency issues, primarily centered around the telemar.net.br routers. Just look at those numbers!

It looks to me that you have some serious connectivity problems with your ISP’s routing. :wink:

–rlparker

#12

this is really weird as my site/ssh to aries is the only place I have this issue ! also the dreamhost control panel itself says that my site took more than 5secs. to respond ! so I guess the problem is not only here.

#13

Yes, it is weird…as my experience with your site was entirely different.

What does support say when you contact them?

–rlparker

#14

Yeah, Firebug tells me the site responded in 50ms, took 892ms to download and render the image.

The traceroute you posted is interesting. Are those ping times typical for US servers?

BTW, when I say US servers, please watch out for the superbig US sites that may have an edge delivery network.

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#15

emailed a complaint through the control panel one month ago and still didn’t get a reply…

#16

You should send a follow-up. A month ago we were all having problems related to the runaway DNS cleanup process and it’s likely that your problem might have been classified as part of that - or somehow ended up otherwise lost in the confusion.

But if they check out your site and get good performance, it’s likely you’ll have to do more debugging yourself in order to pinpoint the problem to something that’s actionable by them. You don’t want to end up in the dreaded “cannot reproduce” category.

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#17

Like lensman said, it might have fallen through the cracks, but it is also possible that the email response just didn’t reach you (which can sometimes happen for lots of reasons).

Whenever it starts to look like you have not gotten a response on a support ticket, you should always check your support history from the Control Panel -> Support ->Support History page. All responses are “archived” there, including any responses where the email did not get properly delivered or received, and sometimes that “missing response” is recorded there. :wink:

If there is no response there, you should make a new support contact (and possibly point them to this thread) so they can investigate for you. You should also be prepared for an answer that “everything looks good from here”, as the server loads do not appear to be high, both lensman and I (and possibly DreamHost) have no problem loading your site in an acceptable manner, and your traceroute does show significant connectivity problems along your route.

Then again, their investigation may point out a problem they can fix to improve your situation - it never hurts to ask! :slight_smile:

–rlparker