Hard Light Productions Forums

Announcements => Announcements => Topic started by: Fury on July 24, 2006, 01:36:46 pm

Title: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on July 24, 2006, 01:36:46 pm
We've had a flood of technical difficulties today and our host has been contacted about these problems.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on July 31, 2006, 01:04:30 am
As you are most likely aware by now, technical problems were not limited to just one day. To our grave disappointment our host has not contacted us back of these problems. By now we are sure that the problems are not caused by our software setup and must be a problem with either the superserver or the virtual server we are hosted on, either way fixing the problem seems to be out of our reach.

Luckily the major problems were limited to just a few days, but we still had numerous outages all week each lasting approximately five minutes. Not only that, but apparently these problems have been present in a smaller scale at least a month if not longer.

Having technical difficulties is one thing, but ignoring their paying customers is unacceptable. Rest assured however, we are evaluating the situation very carefully and you will hear more from us later this week.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: CP5670 on August 02, 2006, 11:13:15 pm
The site has started going down again. There were two or three brief periods today where I couldn't access it (the last one was a few minutes ago). You guys may want to consider changing hosts if this keeps up.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 03, 2006, 01:30:05 am
It is pretty much set to stone that we'll move since the hosting company decided to completely ignore our problem reports, and we sent three of them. Unfortunately selecting a hosting company and hosting plan is not easy.

The biggest problem is money. I haven't checked lately but at some point average monthly revenue from ads was somewhere $55. Don't fall for overadvertised shared hosting plans such as DreamHost. Even low-end virtual dedicated servers don't have the CPU/RAM, bandwidth or hard drive space HLP needs. Mid-highrange virtual dedicated servers usually have enough resources and low-midrange dedicated servers certainly have. But we cannot afford a server with enough resources for growth with just $55. Good hosting company, good service, good support and good server costs $100-200 per month.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 03, 2006, 05:40:14 am
Whats HLPs monthly bandwidth usage?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 03, 2006, 06:50:03 am
200GB bandwidth to be safe and this is not counting http://downloads.hard-light.net. Hard drive space taken by HLP is 30GB to be safe. This is after we asked all hosted projects to remove unnecessary stuff. Note that a server needs two hard drives in either RAID1 configuration or without RAID but with a scheduled file copy to secondary hard drive. This is only reliable way to prevent data loss should one of the hard drives fail. CPU/RAM wise a server that can handle gzip compression of a 1GB database without noticeable slowdown would be much preferred.

However, none of this has taken into account how much we need in 1, 2 or 3 years. Instead of a short-term solution by going with these safe values, a long-term solution would be much preferred. For a long-term solution the safe values should be doubled.

In fact, I'd have an ideal solution for HLP's next server that could handle even the most ambitious plans of the admins into foreseeable future. (And let me tell you, we have ambitious plans...) But that would require 174 community members (including admins) to donate $10 once a year for the new server. Or 240 community members if you want to get rid of the advertisements. Reasonable? You (the community) decide.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 03, 2006, 07:32:32 am
Until I know what these ambitious plans are, I can't possibly comment. :p
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mefustae on August 03, 2006, 10:19:26 pm
Okay, now i'm getting error messages whenever I try to make a post. It makes the damn post, but gives me the error screen instead of taking me back to the thread. More problems on the horizon, o-great admins?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 03, 2006, 10:53:36 pm
Again? "Can't create/write to file" error fixed, for now. If this error pops up again, post here so we'll know of it sooner.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Dark Hunter on August 03, 2006, 11:38:46 pm
I occaisionally get a "database error" after I post. The site records my post, but it doens't take me there. I also got it when attempting to view Unread Topics.

It said to report it to admins, so here I am: reporting it.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 03, 2006, 11:55:49 pm
Yeah, it's the same cause as "Can't create/write to file" reported above. When it occurs, post here and it will be fixed. Unfortunately the fix is only temporary as it is likely caused by those ~5min outages happening every now and then.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mefustae on August 04, 2006, 10:10:53 am
Looks like it's back. Have you any idea what specifically causes those '~5-minute outages' every now and then, or is it just the cheap server we have?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 04, 2006, 11:31:06 am
Since the host has so far ignored our emails of these problems, we don't have a clue what's causing the problem. We are fairly certain it's not a problem we can solve. Skippy, as good as he is with linux servers is as lost as I am.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Scuddie on August 04, 2006, 12:58:30 pm
Just out of curiosity, what is the hosting company, and what are the specs of the box?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 04, 2006, 01:06:07 pm
Question  - how many stats are being recorded by the server? Might be heavy CPU load thats causing the outages.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 04, 2006, 01:12:11 pm
Just out of curiosity, what is the hosting company, and what are the specs of the box?
Servelocity. Virtual server being served on a dual 3.2GHz Xeon with dynamically allocated RAM up to 4GB. Specs are fine but there is something screwy going on with resource allocation.

Question  - how many stats are being recorded by the server? Might be heavy CPU load thats causing the outages.
It is a resource allocation problem, not CPU usage but RAM. When these outages happens, there's not enough RAM to even execute as simple command as netstat. It takes about five minutes for the server to recover, sometimes even longer. The funny thing is that not even rebooting the virtual server helps or the problem is back in five minutes after a reboot. The problem disappears on its own and comes back later.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Scuddie on August 04, 2006, 02:24:09 pm
I dont know what Servelocity does exactly, but I do know that virtual servers with dynamic load balancing suck major ass.  I would recommend ThePlanet's servermatrix division if you decide to go pure dedicated.  It aint cheap (starting 119.00 up to 260.00), but it has customer support second to none.  I've been working with ThePlanet on several occasions, and they're well worth it.

Although I dont know if this is neccessary for HLPs needs.  Just giving my recommendation if you go down that road ;).

EDIT:  THIS GOD DAMN THING IS GETTING OUT OF HAND!!  It took 5 minutes just to hit the edit button!!
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 04, 2006, 02:55:43 pm
Yes I would prefer a dedicated server as well. But we can't afford a good one without donations. At this time Sandwich is the one who handles financial matters and with the whole Israel conflict going on, I don't know when he can set up a page and donation system. But even then, would the community donate enough to afford a good dedicated server from a good hosting company? Can't find out without setting up donations first though I guess.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Xelion on August 05, 2006, 08:02:36 am
HLP takes up 30GB :eek:, why? A good dedicated server is gonna cost US$300+ month, especially all the things your wanting it for.

I'm with MDWebHosting (http://mdwebhosting.com.au), though I haven't really tested my hosts capabilities yet. MediaTemple (http://www.mediatemple.net) is a pretty good host from what I've heard, but they are really pricey.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Shade on August 05, 2006, 08:13:25 am
Several years worth of forum posts, models/textures/animations/promo videos for every hosted project, the wiki, site art (well, not so much anymore)... it adds up. 30GB is not a lot for a site like this.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 05, 2006, 08:31:39 am
Over 90% of the space is taken by hosted projects of course. There's a bunch of good servers available at $150-$200 price range.

I've been eyeing on SoftLayer's Opteron servers. I got a small discount offer for their Opteron 170 (2.0GHz dual-core), 2GB RAM, 2x250GB HDD, 2TB/10Mbps bandwidth. They don't have smaller HDD's than 250GB, but thanks to that they can offer 250GB's for the same price as most others offer 80GB's, the difference in price small in the retail market as well. There's no RAID as it would increase price by $40, so the other HDD is a backup HDD where data will be mirrored regularly. With 250GB HDD, hosted projects no longer would have to keep their development files compressed to save space, as this can be inconvenient sometimes. This server should be good enough to keep HLP running many years. The Opteron 170 server would cost with the small discount $194 per month, if we forget the backup HDD the price's down to $174.

Hopefully Sandwich will get a donation page up and running today so that we can start saving for a new server.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Xelion on August 05, 2006, 10:01:59 am
Over 90% of the space is taken by hosted projects of course.
I thought as much :nod:

I never heard of SoftLayer but I done a search, all comments so far are positve, customer service via chat is excellent and they certainly seem like a great company. I'll probably switch to them myself once I have enough sites to place on there :D

Great choice Fury :yes:
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: pecenipicek on August 05, 2006, 06:24:44 pm
Over 90% of the space is taken by hosted projects of course. There's a bunch of good servers available at $150-$200 price range.
and most of that by TBP, no? seeming as they're the largest hosted project so far :D
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 05, 2006, 06:40:16 pm
It's an indictment of the level of interest that still exists in FS2. It's also a reason to try and get the tracker running again.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 06, 2006, 02:38:02 am
and most of that by TBP, no? seeming as they're the largest hosted project so far :D
One and half months ago TBP was taking up 61% of the space taken up by hosted projects. Then it was cleaned up and now is one third of its earlier size. Later WCS ftp's were mirrored on HLP and current WCS is taking up nearly three times as much space as TBP is. WCS staff have promised to clean up their ftp though.

It's also a reason to try and get the tracker running again.
Tracker?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Xelion on August 06, 2006, 05:00:37 am
I think vyper is referring to the TBP torrent tracker that use to be around
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 06, 2006, 05:35:39 am
I hosted TBP BT Tracker on my own domain and webhosting. It was very popular but in the end I gave up on it because people simply wouldn't keep seeding, I didn't want to keep seeding TBP torrents forever either.

If he referred to the HLP BT Tracker though, it wasn't ever used despite the fact that it was kept around many months and people never really showed any interest to it. Whether HLP BT Tracker will be resurrected depends on future bandwidth restrictions and if there's any interest to use bittorrent to save bandwidth.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 06, 2006, 06:16:53 am
Erm, the thing you were made an admin for. The BitTorrent tracker.

Edit: never saw your reply to Xelion
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 06, 2006, 06:36:18 am
See my post above yours if you missed the HLP BT Tracker part of the post. The post's edited to make it a seperate paragraph.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mars on August 06, 2006, 06:27:56 pm
I wonder, is the actual size of those projects indicative to their relative fan bases? i.e. do the bigger projects have more fans?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mefustae on August 08, 2006, 10:34:43 pm
Uh, i'm getting warnings about double-posting, when I the post is in fact not posted at all. Is this part of the problem we were experiencing before?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: stinger on August 11, 2006, 08:19:40 pm
sorry to see the site in difficulty  :sigh: - i might be out of line but i suggest you check out dreamhost's offers - theyre not the fastest but they have a great service with heapsa space and bandwidth -

get well soon  :(
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 12, 2006, 01:46:15 am
DreamHost has a bad rep of being unreliable and slow. They've been already checked out and the conclusion is that they are no different from other shared hostings, only grossly overadvertised.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Kosh on August 19, 2006, 05:15:56 am
Too bad someone doesn't build a server just for HLP and we (the users) help pay for it......
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 26, 2006, 06:46:51 am
Alright who enabled guest posting? :p
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Prophet on August 26, 2006, 06:55:02 am
Good question. As far as I understand, that should have not happened. :wtf:
Something creepy is going on...
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mefustae on August 26, 2006, 07:03:28 am
I'm scared.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 26, 2006, 07:05:22 am
This sort of thing always happens after an upgrade...
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 26, 2006, 07:30:19 am
Meh, fixed and the post deleted.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mobius on August 27, 2006, 02:54:51 am
I still have difficulties entering the site.
I have cleared the cokkies and caches,but there's still something wrong,though I've been able to post anyway.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 27, 2006, 03:34:38 am
You might want to be more specific, what exactly is the problem?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mobius on August 27, 2006, 05:45:59 am
You might want to be more specific, what exactly is the problem?

Well,most of my attempts to post and enter the site finish with a "cannot load the page"(I have translated "Impossibile visualizzare la pagina"in a more understandable way).
I tried with other sites...GW is dead for example,but Italian sites work well.
Let's hope I can post it this time....
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 27, 2006, 10:45:07 am
Is there a page in particular which won't load? Does this problem appear only in the forums, or also in the mainpage and the wiki? I suggest you also try another browser, chances are that you can try at least IE, Firefox and Opera.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Freespace Freak on August 28, 2006, 07:08:16 am
When I post from work (yeah I know I'm a slacker and shouldn't be doing it :P), IE shows an error and says something about there being a critical error and shuts down.  I'll post exactly what it says after this post so you can see the error.  There's no problem when I post with Mozilla from home, though.  Stand by.

Code: [Select]
The instruction at "0x77f8381b" referenced at memory at "0x02bf7e15."  The memory could not be "read."

Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program

Now, I already deleted my cookies, files, and cleared history, yet it continues to do this.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 28, 2006, 09:38:25 am
Is it just the forums though? And did it start doing this only AFTER the upgrade? IE crashing shouldn't have anything to do with forums upgrade, it just doesn't make any sense that a website should be able to crash a browser unless there's some malicious code exploiting an unpatched vulnerability, which really isn't the case here. ...I hope. :p I can understand a browser outputting an error and refusing to load a page, but crashing? Very unlikely.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Freespace Freak on August 28, 2006, 10:17:47 am
Unpatched may be the key word.  I don't have administrator privileges so I can't update IE.  It's an old version of IE.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 29, 2006, 02:48:13 am
Before anyone asks; yes the problems reported initially in this topic have returned.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 29, 2006, 12:30:33 pm
Servelocity got any answers?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Tyrian on August 29, 2006, 08:36:21 pm
Over the past couple of days, I couldn't access the site at all.  I tried from three different computers, with different versions of IE and Firefox.  I got the same error, "Page Not Found."  Was it just a random fluke on my end, or were the servers down?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: BS403 on August 29, 2006, 09:25:26 pm
The only time I couldn't access the site was yesterday. It worked fine the day before and works fine now and I have done nothing.  It was working after the upgade but not yesterday night.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Dark Hunter on August 29, 2006, 10:51:34 pm
Ditto for me, I got the "Server is down" error message. Were you guys doing something then?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 30, 2006, 12:26:32 am
As far as I know, the problems appeared sometime around monday and were at least temporarily fixed late yesterday by Skippy, who on my suggestion downgraded Apache to 2.0 from 2.2 after I had noticed that the server worked fine as long as apache wasn't started. Whether this was a coincidence, temporary fix or permanent fix, I cannot say.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mobius on August 30, 2006, 01:21:29 am
Is there a page in particular which won't load? Does this problem appear only in the forums, or also in the mainpage and the wiki? I suggest you also try another browser, chances are that you can try at least IE, Firefox and Opera.

Wow...I'm here..miracle!!!
I don't know if I can modify it....I'm using a mobile phone connected to the PC...
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Fury on August 30, 2006, 04:49:30 am
Whether this was a coincidence, temporary fix or permanent fix, I cannot say.
Now I can; temporary. ffs
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: vyper on August 30, 2006, 09:51:13 am
And once more.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Scuddie on August 30, 2006, 03:28:42 pm
Just out of curiosity, wouldnt a memory allocation problem simply time out a connection instead of actively closing it?  Most of the errors I see now are connection closed.

Odd.
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: BS403 on August 30, 2006, 10:23:16 pm
today I can't get to the mainpage but I can get to the forums... so I'm fine
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: BS403 on August 30, 2006, 10:25:47 pm
when i just posted that it gave me a database error saying to try again, but then when i tryed to post again it said i already had
edit: about every 5 to 15 minutes it stops working for me
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: brandx0 on August 31, 2006, 12:49:58 am
dunno if this helps, but when trying to get to the main HLP page I got this:

« MODx Parse Error »
MODx encountered the following error while attempting to parse the requested resource:
« Execution of a query to the database failed - »
      SQL: SELECT DISTINCT sc.id,sc.pagetitle,sc.description,sc.isfolder,sc.parent,sc.alias,sc.longtitle,sc.menutitle,sc.hidemenu,sc.introtext,sc.content_dispo,sc.contentType,sc.type,sc.template FROM `hlp_main`.modx_site_content sc LEFT JOIN `hlp_main`.modx_document_groups dg on dg.document = sc.id WHERE sc.parent = '0' AND sc.published=1 AND sc.deleted=0 AND (sc.privateweb=0) ORDER BY sc.menuindex ASC;
      [Copy SQL to ClipBoard]
 
Parser timing
  MySQL:  0.0099 s s (4 Requests)
  PHP:  0.2401 s s   
  Total:  0.2500 s s   
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mobius on August 31, 2006, 10:32:34 am
I even posted here: http://www.games-workshop-tilea.com/public/community/index.php?showtopic=11750
....for help...they cut off my thread because it was offtopic...
I had the same problems,every time a different one.One time I couldn't enter HLP because there were too many users connected!!
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: BTAvatar on August 31, 2006, 05:51:44 pm
Yea I had BS403's problem and brandx0's problem too
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mobius on August 31, 2006, 06:06:00 pm
When this hellish situation will finish?
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Kernal on September 02, 2006, 10:05:47 pm
It getting a lot slower. :nervous:
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Mobius on September 03, 2006, 05:21:20 am
uhm not everything is better...Wow!
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: ShivanSpS on October 01, 2006, 12:15:19 am
When I try to attack a file ok 300kb its always say "attach folder its full try which an smaller file or contact administrator" :S
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Tzaichik on November 02, 2006, 12:11:17 am
Um, forgive me for the comment. I am a new user and new to the FSpace Open/SCP.

Hi, to all.

I have an extensive background in IT, and networking, and am not sure if I understand the problems you are having. If the forum on the server you are hosted upon is not playing nice, set another forum up, and move it. You can redirect the URL's for your users temporarily, and be using a more stable forum OS and host in no time at all. You can keep your file hosting where it is for the moment if it suits you.

If this is a stupid comment, I apologise.

TZ
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Pyhrexian_Infiltrator on October 30, 2007, 04:21:39 am
i have really PROBLEM, i want to play Freespace2 in the internet, but i need an account...  T_T

but the site for creating a account has a big error, it doesnt work...  :mad:

???What can I do ????


ps: i have the original freespace2 game, with cd and all...

thx for any help
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Shade on October 30, 2007, 10:29:55 am
My answer here: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,49949.msg1016148.html#msg1016148

For the future, please only post your question in one topic :)
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: Pyhrexian_Infiltrator on October 30, 2007, 12:06:09 pm
thx...   i know^^ 

i was confused and little panic :nod:
Title: Re: Technical difficulties
Post by: colecampbell666 on October 30, 2007, 08:21:48 pm
And especially don't post in a year old topic, but I shouldn't be talking... :nervous: