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Thread: VPS colo slow?

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Mar 2003
    Posts
    75

    VPS colo slow?

    For the past 2 or so months my vps has been very slow, but it didnt affect much of sites. Most of my pages load after 10 seconds with only 2 banners on it with little text.(internet pages usually load within 2-3 seconds cause im on adsl)

    But since i have installed phpbb on some of my sites, i can see the effects of the delays more clearly. I click new post takes close to 10 secs, same goes to reply. But there might be something wrong with my vps, because i cannot reply for some reson, just giving me a blank page.(No one else on other hosting accounts have this problem)

    Please keep in mind i used to run phpbb long time ago with no problems .

    I got 7 days left, if they cant fix it by then would i be able to cancel?

    Is there like a 10 day notice or something?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
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    If you put in a support ticket someone can definitly have a look for you as it could be something do with Zend and PHP as we've been seeing that recently

    Also the cancellation is 3 days per the TOS
    Rsu
    Russ Foster - Industry Curmudgeon
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    North Yorkshire, UK
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    Could be CPU related, what kind of loads are you seeing on your VPS?
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Dec 2004
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    You may want to do some apache and MySQL optimization for your needs. Run "top" and post what it says.

    Cheers
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  5. #5
    Also are you on a server in the FITX DC, or an outside DC?
    Jay

  6. #6
    I have been noticing extremely long response times on my vpscolo box as well over the last few months. I started out on the smallest plan (VSPCP1: 150+ MHz CPU, 192MB RAM, $38.90/month) and recently upgraded to VPSCP3 (400+ MHz CPU, 384MB RAM, $78.90/month) thinking that would solve the problem. I have not really noticed any improvement at all.

    I host 6 sites on the VPS, all of which I am in charge of. Only 3 receive any traffic to speak of, and that isn't even that much. Here are the per day averages for each of these sites for the month of April:

    Site 1: Hits=1903 , Files=1542 , Pages=297 , Visits=49
    Site 2: Hits=4758 , Files=2822 , Pages=702 , Visits=97
    Site 3: Hits=204 , Files=141 , Pages=79 , Visits=16

    Merely accessing WHM or cpanel on these sites is an exercise in patience. I can be sitting on a low load (around .40) and access WHM, and my load will instantly being to climb. It usually peaks around 4 or 5, then dies back down once WHM is loaded. Meanwhile, WHM (or cpanel) takes 30secs to 2 minutes before the page is fully loaded.

    All of my sites run Mambo CMS (PHP). One has a forum with about 70 users and only 15-20 posts a day. I have been following some of the tutorials on server optimizations found on this site. My settings for apache and mysql were already in line with suggestions. I have not installed mod_perl (which might improve WHM and cpanel, I suppose) or Turck MMCache. Zend Optimizer is installed. I disabled mailman because it was showing up as one of my most utilized programs via WHM "CPU/Memory/MySQL Usage". I ran UnixBench WHT edition late one night with a starting load of .71, and got a score of 10.7 (seems kinda low, but in line with other vpscolo boxes in the unixbench thread)with a peak load of 24.17. And to pre-emptively answer jayglate's question, I don't know which DC I'm on (how can I even find out?)

    I inherited some sites that run on other hosts' Shared plans with cpanel. The performance from these is heads and shoulders above my VPS in terms of cpanel load times and general response times. They are also running Mambo CMS sites, so its a good comparison. What's up with that? No UML overhead? Lightly loaded high powered servers?


    I submitted a ticket to vpscolo recently about the poor performance and received a response that "I believe I found the problem that was causing the slowness"... I assume they fixed that problem. When I probed as to what that problem might be (for my own enligtenment, and so I don't always have to bother tech support), I got nothing back. The sites seemed quicker for a bit, but now it all seems slow again. I've just now re-opened the ticket.

    I'm getting depressed just looking back over these numbers. I've been very happy with the service from vpscolo, but for $80/month I feel I should be getting so much more than a 2 minute cpanel load. I don't have experience with any other VPS providers. ServInt and PowerVPS look nice, but I don't want to switch only to find out this is expected performance from a VPS. I'm anticipating rapid growth on one of my sites, and right now I'm afraid to promote it lest I overload the server and leave customers with a "website cannot be found". I'm starting to look at dedicated, but I'd like to squeeze some more time and value out of my VPS.

    Should I be expecting more?

  7. #7
    Drop me an email to go over your options, as lot of options that are available havn't been fully introduced into the public fold i.e virtuozzo and such.
    Jay

  8. #8
    techsla and moklett tell us how this goes!
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  9. #9
    I'll keep you updated. Rus emailed me last night and is looking at my ticket now.

    Am I right to think that my server shouldn't be this slow? Anyone else having problems like the ones I mentioned above?

  10. #10
    Moklett, i have exactly the same problem. I'm on a plan with 150+MHz cpu and 192MB ram.
    WHM and Cpanel take a very long time to open and the load starts rising...

    I submitted a trouble ticket about this but they couldn't provide a solution except for "it's fine for me" or "we updated cpanel".

    So i'm curious to hear what they told you.

  11. #11
    OK, I solved my problem. Here's what I ended up doing: I switched to a high quality shared plan.

    I was looking carefully at dedicated and decided it just wasn't in the budget at this time. Instead of switching to another VPS provider or getting a bigger plan with vpscolo (I was already paying $80/month), I decided to try shared. And I am certainly happy I did!

    When I got honest with myself, I decided I didn't really need the level of control the VPS provides. My time is better spent not playing sys admin (as much as I enjoy trying). I am not a reseller, I just needed a stable and fast platform to host my sites.

    I went with site5 and I would highly recommend them. I'm not trying to bash vpscolo (though an email back from Jay would have been nice). In my experience, the slice of resources you get with the vps just aren't enough. There never seems to be any burstable resources available. At site5 on the other hand, I'm on a quad machine that is always smoking. And I'm paying 1/4 the price

  12. #12
    Well, I would say you were most likley on the UML VPS, We are seeing much better performance on the Virtuzzo VPS's
    Jay

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Posts
    9,264
    moklett,

    Additional speed shouldn't really be expected on a VPS - I'm not sure where anyone gets the idea that its going to be faster on a VPS compared to shared.

    It's control and additional options - thats where it competes.
    Compared to a reseller account for example.. but in the end 10 people on a VPS sharing a dual xeon or 100 on a shared level but only one set of daemons running.. I personally can't see how a VPS can compete.

    You can obviously tweak it to match or at least be a good contender but I still think a dedicated shared will win out if configured properly.. //my two cents.

    Update: I'm not saying that a unixbench of 10 on a vps is fast btw, in fact it's entirely too slow (by about 30-40 points at least) so I'm not trying to stick up for vpscolo.
    Last edited by David; 06-03-2005 at 01:14 PM.

  14. #14
    Jay, I was indeed on a UML VPS. I have been reading about better performance out of Virtuozzo, so I will check that out if I return to VPS.

    HP-David, point taken about the benefits of VPS. One of the reasons I chose VPS first was for the additional control and options. I never expected it to be faster than shared... I just didn't expect WHM and cpanel to take more than 1 minute to load. Sometimes my sites took > 30 seconds to even begin to load (to even begin to show something on screen). We all know that's above the threshold for your average web surfer.

    Based on what I've read from others, I do think that you can get decent performance out of a middle of the road VPS. I just wasn't, for whatever reason. So for now, I'm fine with shared.

  15. #15
    Join Date
    Jul 2000
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    Colorado Springs, CO
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    2,288
    uml just doesnt compare to the virtuozzo machines although uml does provide a greater deal of flexibility.
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  16. #16
    Originally posted by Jag
    uml just doesnt compare to the virtuozzo machines although uml does provide a greater deal of flexibility.
    Greater deal of flexibility... can you expound? I'd like to know more. Thanks.

  17. #17
    I've bounced back and forth a few times between shared and VPS. Shared was very fast most of the time, however the load levels were less consistent, every once in awhile it would get real slow due to other stuff going on with the server. Plus I didn't like that the server's mailserver IP kept getting on spam blacklists.

    My current Virtuozzo VPS runs very fast, although I don't host anything real demanding. WHM and Cpanel load in about 5 seconds, no complaints there.

  18. #18
    Ugh, spam blacklists. That would be bad. I haven't sent any "mass" emails since getting on the shared server. I'm preparing to send out a new promotional email to our contacts, so we'll see how that goes.

    smoore, do you host any dynamic (php/mysql) sites? Do you mind sharing the name of your host since you seem happy?

  19. #19
    Yeah, check the IP address of their mail server periodically using the spam lookup at http://www.dnsstuff.com especially right before you send as servers can go on and off some of the lists. The shared server I had been on periodically got on Spamcop, which is one of the more aggressive ones. In fact one time I couldn't even e-mail to a friend of mine if I used my domains SMTP server, it just bounced it back due to Spamcop listing. It was a reseller server so I imagine it's hard for the webhosting company to control who gets on the server. I run a bi-weeekly newsletter to nearly 6000 and this was a big concern for me.

    I'm at PowerVPS currently. It's only been a few weeks but everything has been great so far.

    No, I don't run a dynamic site nor resell, my main website is just static HTML with a fair amount of daily traffic.

  20. #20
    Join Date
    Oct 2004
    Location
    LA, CA
    Posts
    1,069
    I too have been noticing slow times on the UML servers lately. I looked at the resources (CPU + RAM Usage) and found that forums like phpBB and Invision took up HUGE ammounts of RAM + CPU. I'm not sure what to make of this or how to fix it, so I just requested to be moved to a Virtuozzo server which they claim they are in the process of doing.

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