Network Problems

Though I'm replying to Tangle, this is just to continue the chain of messages about website performance.I filed a ticket with our webhost provider on May 30 when the problem became most severe. They made some simple recommendations but nothing revelatory or even that helpful. Other than monitoring I have not done a thing, but I have not since then noticed anything more than the occasional seconds-long load time. Has anyone else experienced persistent problems since then? Naturally I'll continue keeping my eye out for performance issues, but if no one's having performance issues then I have to say that the simultaneity of filing a ticket and the problem going away seems a bit of a suspicious coincidence. I wonder if perhaps, without saying anything in the ticket, that they ran some kind of maintenance software just as a precaution to make sure it wasn't anything on their end, maybe some "network table cleanup" program, who knows. The problem being at their end *does* seem unlikely to me because static webpages from the site are served immediately, but networks are very complicated these days with a lot of active processing, so I don't know...Hopefully the performance issues are gone, but please continue to report problems here.

8:13pm CST got a 503.

Yes, thanks, I experienced that one, too. Investigation revealed a network problem of unknown cause and origin. Ping revealed the outage was actually intermittent, with connectivity to the server reestablishing itself for a few seconds several times a minute. Because of the inconsistent connectivity I was unable to get a helpful tracert, but I was able to connect to the webhosting company's website, which is at the same server facility as our server, so it had to be the webhosting company's own internal network problem and not related to our server. The problem seemed to last about five or ten minutes.

12.18 UK timeThe server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

10:05am CST 503 error.

7:34pm CST 503 error

I'm experiencing slowness right now but no 503 errors, started around 8 AM ET. Server load is low. There's nothing suspicious in the log. A tracert was fine.I've investigated the reports posted above, nothing in the logs. I still suspect something related to the processes/daemons on the server. I'll continue monitoring and hope something eventually turns up.As I finish typing this, response now is fast.

Just to back that up. Logging in around 7am CST took forever. No 503 but really slow. Once things loaded all seemed fine.

1:45 PDT Service Temporarily Unavailable. Same thing happened about an hour ago. Sometimes it's very slow, but sometimes faster, even within this same hour.

Please let us know if these repeated reports are counter-productive. I am currently experiencing repeated 503 messages (starting at 5:16 EST). I don't seem to have any trouble accessing static pages, but it took several attempts for me to reach this forum to post this message.Attempt to post at 5:25: Successful.

The site was totally unusable from around 8am until 2pm UK time

We have been consistently fast for at least a few days. I had filed another ticket with the webhosting company about a week ago, and in reaction to data I provided they blocked a number of IPs, not just from our server but from their entire network. The webhosting company thought the problem similar to a Slow Loris attack, where a number of incomplete requests are submitted to a website causing the server to keep the connections open waiting for the requests to complete. Eventually the number of requests being waited upon overwhelms the server and you begin getting slowness and finally timeouts.These kinds of attacks don't bring any benefit to the hacker, unless their goal is to make a website unresponsive. I don't know why the RIPE network (the originator of all the open connections) would care about us.

Maybe you've looked at this already:https://www.ripe.net/...and-asns/db/faq/faq-hacking-spammingMoose

Not meaning to stoke any paranoia, but an evolution/creationist debate site might well be target worthy to some folks.

Thanks for the above comments. I'm in a bit of a busy period but will continue to monitor performance.