My website overloading server!!

[bluedevil]

So i get this email today ...

Heavy server resource consumption of your account

Dear *****,

I was monitoring the server that hosts your account midwestavalancheclub.com and while reviewing the logs noticed that your website was consuming a very high percentage of the server resources, thus endangered the overall performance of all the sites on the server. To keep the server at a normal CPU load, we had to limit the shared server resources your account may use. This may result in occasional "Resource temporary unavailable" error messages shown on your website.

I have conducted a detailed investigation and saw that the reason for the high resource consumption is the number internal links on your index page, which cause the page to load slowly and eventually hogs the server. The slow loading of the index page takes up lots of server CPU time and other processes have to pile up in a queue waiting to get executed. Thus, the server eventually gets overloaded with too many processes in queue.

Currently there are 195 internal and external links on your index page and this results in loading times of approximately 4 seconds seconds. For comparison, normally, a website loads in less than 1 second.

By internal links I mean links that point back to the site. A few examples:

189. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?topic=1369.msg12219#msg12219
190. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?topic=1658.msg14288;topicseen#new
191. http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2149173-10418494
192. http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2149173-10434190
193. http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2149173-10434190
194. http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2149173-10370829
195. http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2149173-10434190

158. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?action=profile;u=148
159. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?action=profile;u=219
160. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?action=profile;u=124
161. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?action=profile;u=245
162. http://www.midwestavalancheclub.com/index.php?action=profile;u=211
163. http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-2149173-10428742
164. http://www.simplemachines.org/
165. http://www.simplemachines.org/about/copyright.php
166. http://www.tinyportal.net/
167. http://www.dzinerstudio.com/
168. http://www.gm.com/
169. http://www.chevrolet.com/
170. http://www.onstar.com/
171. http://www.xmradio.com/

To have this limitation removed, please reduce the number of internal links and external links on your index page. If this problem with your website is not resolved in 7 days we may need to SUSPEND YOUR ACCOUNT.

Please do NOT reply to this email. You can add comments on this issue by logging to your Customer Area (https://www.siteground.com/login_page.htm) and comment the ticket that has been automatically open on your behalf in connection to this case.

Sincerely,

S****
System Administrator
SiteGround.com

What am i going to do?   It took me over a year to make my website look the way it looks now.

[Hairy]

I don't understand how "links" can overload the server, I would start looking at a different host and request these guys to give you a refund on any outstanding fees you have paid.

[IchBin]

I think this is what happens when you start to out grow shared hosting. You'll need to upgrade to a bigger server probably. Just my $.02

[bluedevil]

this was my reply:

It took me over a year to make my website to look the way it looks now.

Does this means that i have to remove all links from the index page? can i move them somewhere else?

I dont understand non of it. Ive seen websites with millions of links and still active

and their reply again:

Thank you for contacting our Help Desk Center!

The problems comes when there are alot of links on a same page. In order to be displayed each link with its a href tags description etc. one or more mysql queries are being sent to your mysql database. When there are many links on a same page your web site produce alot of sql queries which increase the resource usage and endanger the overall server performance and the performance of the other customers web sites on the same server.

By the time we have logged this case a single php process spawned by your account was consuming %71.1 of the CPU resources.

You do not have to remove all links. Kindly decrease the number of links you have on your front page to at most 120 and your web site should perform much faster. You can re-organize your web site to show no more than 120 links on a page. This will boosts your web site performance as well. Thank you for your understanding.

Looking forward to your reply.

[bluedevil]

I think this is what happens when you start to out grow shared hosting. You'll need to upgrade to a bigger server probably. Just my $.02

and i thought they where good...   

geez....i dont know anything about whos better or bigger anymore.

[IchBin]

I think this is what happens when you start to out grow shared hosting. You'll need to upgrade to a bigger server probably. Just my $.02

and i thought they where good...   

geez....i dont know anything about whos better or bigger anymore.

Well I don't know a lot about those load issues, but I wonder if a bigger hosting account is what is needed? Something that will allow you to have this. I mean, is it really out of the norm to have those problems?

[Hairy]

Page created in 0.16 seconds with 45 queries

Thats what it says when I load your page, does not add up with what they are saying. It might be something else?

[Hairy]

geez....i dont know anything about whos better or bigger anymore.

I'm with 1and1.com but they aren't the best.

I've heard good things about http://hostmonster.com might be worth checking out

[jacortina]

Links are nothing but character strings. They are the URL's given above, plus a few bytes of surrounding HTML to note them as links and the text that actually gets clicked on.

They do not consume any resources beyond that used to send any other string of characters a few dozens of characters long. And they use the exact same resources whether they point to an address on your site or any other site.

That having been said, the PHP and MySQL processing which has to take place to get that info and then echo it it out WILL take longer and use more resources the more 'complex' the page is.

But in no way does every link require a database call. That's completely absurd and the sign of someone not at all familiar with how things work.

For instance, click 'Forum' to go to the Tinyportal Boardindex. Down at the bttom it tells you exactly how many queries were required. There are 30 links just between the Recent Posts listing and the 'Upcoming Birthdays' list in that bottom-of-page Info Center. Yet everything on the whole page only requires around 25 queries (this can fluctuate a bit, but that's what it showed when I checked).

[Ianedres]

Sounds to me like they are either trying to convince you to upgrade ($$) or possibly have some type of pre-caching software on the server to load URLs stored on a page...

Nevertheless, if you are utilizing 71% on a normal basis, then you would probably see the traffic on your site at such a level that corresponds to what they say...

[Zetan]

Have you tried this tool:
http://www.simplemachines.org/download/index.php?thanks;filename=status.php

From SMF?

Simply put it in your public folder and direct your browser to it.

From my status.php

MySQL Statistics
MySQL 4.1.x
Connections per second:  1.4179 
Kilobytes received per second:  6.098 
Kilobytes sent per second:  98.5185 
Queries per second:  41.2608 
Percentage of slow queries:  0 
Opened vs. Open tables:
(table_cache)  20209.2813 (should be <= 80) 
Table cache usage:
(table_cache)  1 (should be >= 0.5 and <= 0.9) 
Key buffer read hit rate:
(key_buffer_size)  0.0196 (should be <= 0.01) 
Key buffer write hit rate:
(key_buffer_size)  0.4774 (should be <= 0.5) 
Thread cache hit rate:
(thread_cache_size)  2296.4109 (should be >= 30 ) 
Thread cache usage:
(thread_cache_size)  0.75 (should be >= 0.7 and <= 0.9) 
Temporary table disk usage:
(tmp_table_size)  0.1741 (should be <= 0.5) 
Sort merge pass rate:
(sort_buffer)  0 (should be <= 0.001) 
Query cache enabled:
(query_cache_type)  1 (should be >= 1 and <= 1) 
Query cache miss rate:
(query_cache_limit)  0.3829 (should be <= 0.5) 
Query cache prune rate:
(query_cache_size)  0.3509 (should be <= 0.05) 


etc.. etc..

[bloc]

Can only agree with others here, just links do not create queries. By looking at your index page I see 47 queries used. thats a little over normal, but not unusual since you are using among other things, random gallery images. Some other blocks as well might create more connections. But its not really extreme or anything, since you don't have too many visitors at any time either.

One thing that can contribute to it, is if you are using any mysql calls that DON'T use db_query..as that is NOT calculated into that info down on the page. It may then be quite a few extra..and certainly way too much. But again, for example simple webshop scripts use up to 70-100 connections on a page load, so its really a sign of the need to move to another host imho.

[bluedevil]

Thanx for all the inputs.  I turned off several links,blocks,etc.  The front page is a lot smaller than before.

My reply last night:

I made some changes but not sure if its enuff. Could you test again?

Theirs:

Hello Michaelangelo,

Thank you for following our recommendations.

Please allow us some time to review the current behavior of your web site and we will update this ticket shortly.

Thank you for your patience.

Best Regards,

Valentin
Support Team
SiteGround.com

Theirs:

Hello Michaelangelo,

Your web site performs much better now. Our system administrators reviewd its CPU and memory consumption and now everything seems to be so they removed the limitations from your account. We are now marking your case as resolved.

Should you have any further questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to assist you!

Best Regards,

Valentin
Support Team
SiteGround.com

oh yeah....they offered me a dedicated server.   I think not!

[keith021773]

oh yeah....they offered me a dedicated server.   I think not!

I think that right there tells you what they wanted.       I do have 2 sites thru siteground.   I had my main site there too, but moved it because they started giving me problems..

Glad you got it worked out..

[IchBin]

Good news Blue! But as Keith said, it showed you what they really wanted.

[bluedevil]

You know?    I think i like how it looks now.  Less links in the front page. It doesnt look busy anymore.

I read somewhere that if having too many links in one page,spiders wont crawl it?

any truth to that?

[Ricky.]

Now your page is pretty fine.. .102 sec to create index page..
Can you tell me what actually u did and what was real cause of problem ?

This is becs I am somehw now in same condition but I m not on shared host.. but on dedicated but I have to take care about my server.. isn't ?

[IchBin]

If you read up a couple of posts you'll see that he tells you exactly what he did.

[Ricky.]

Ya .. I read that just after posting !!