One site slow, the others very fast - what gives?

#1

Good evening everyone,

I’m running into a bit of a snag that I can’t seem to figure out, and can’t quite seem to get an answer from the DreamHost support either, and was wondering if anyone on here has had any similar experiences.

I have a basic hosting plan, and have three different sites (one domain, and two subdomains of the primary one). As of now, there is no content on any of the sites, mainly just directory indexes as I figure out what I need to do in order to get things up and running (playing with Joomla, Gallery, etc). Anyways, one of the sites is extremely slow in downloading files, while the other two are extremely fast. On the two fast sites, I can download files at over 600 KB/s, while on the slow site, files rarely hit 15 KB/s. These speeds are consistent at all times of the day, and from various locations (my home, work, school, and various friends located across the US). All of the sites are located on the same webserver and in the same home directory (/home/myusername).

Does anyone know what might be causing these slow speeds? There isn’t anything wrong with the domain and the nameservers (since the other sites work well) as far as I can see, and simply don’t know what might be causing the issue other than if DreamHost somehow intervened and placed a speed limit on one particular site. Do they do this?

Thanks!

  • PaulR
#2

Interesting. Is there any differences between the domains when you do a traceroute?

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#3

I would have to agree. There is a possibility that there is a difference in the IP Address… If there is, there maybe a routing issue.

Try doing ping tests and traceroutes to those domains.

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#4

I think one reason for different IP addresses depends on the setting for the domain may depend on which version of PHP you’ve selected.

How 'bout just posting the URL’s for your sites? We like to poke around and try to track down problems.

-Scott

#5

You’re absolutely right! I didn’t even think about different IP addresses. I did a ping and they definitely are different addresses.

As for the two sites, here are links to two large (10MB) files you can use for download speed testing:

Slow - http://files.kavefish.com/video/bear.flv [208.113.175.161]
Very fast - http://test.kavefish.com/video/bear.flv [208.97.170.170]

(for the test site, I simply duplicated everything on the files site, just to make the comparisons identical)

On the slow site, I have been playing with Google Ads, to learn how to format them and display them differently. I thought maybe that was what was slowing the actual pages down as they were served to my browser, but these ads shouldn’t affect a direct file download as listed above. Also, if browsing the site (which is a PHP index script), notice how long it takes to load each page. For me, I received the following load times (both using PHP version 4.4.7):

12.8 seconds: http://files.kavefish.com/browse/pictures/collections/pictures_from_the_sky/

0.18 seconds: http://test.kavefish.com/browse/pictures/collections/pictures_from_the_sky/

I appreciate all the help in poking around on the site. Again, these sites are for the most part temporary and for testing purposes, until I can get the main one online.

Thanks!

  • PaulR
#6

I’m seeing the same thing as you, but worse. Your “slow” file is first:

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
1 10.2M 1 179k 0 0 4670 0 0:38:26 0:00:39 0:37:47 4759^C

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
22 10.2M 22 2382k 0 0 254k 0 0:00:41 0:00:09 0:00:32 259k^C

As a test, I tried the same get from my Dreamhost account on garth and got the same type of results. Something’s definitely up with that first server. And you said Support couldn’t help? I’d bug them again seeing how even locally it’s really slow.

I know you said you duplicated everything, but do you have any .htaccess files on either site?

-Scott

#7

Yes, there is a .htaccess to control the renaming for the PHP indexing script files

They are identical among both of the two sites I posted above. I’ll shoot them another email and see if they can help me.

Thanks!