desperate cart/ perl problem/ nightmare yuk!

[Barry]

thanks for all the help gents

the upload finished this afternoon, long time! and it seemed like the site was working for a while, orders were coming in. But now the new host mosso is down! not having a lot of luck

Im hoping the outage isnt to do with our dodgy perl scripts! they sure were pulling up thousands of errors per second in their error logs

Mal thats a very generous offer, our snaphot is pretty huge though, are you sure its ok

and as for webfusion, i signed up lasst night but my application for an account hasnt even been replied to, nor is the live chat being answered;

Order Summary Cost (£) Status
1 tshirtsville.com
Fusion Pro Linux (monthly)

Order is being checked prior to setup

so i dont think ill be going with webfusion, if thats the sales dept, what are the tech support like?

really not having a lot of luck

anyone recommened a decent actinic host for a medium busy site (60gb month - 500,000 pages? <10gb disk space)

im considering ditching actinic and going for a bespoke php/ mysql site, we've had sooooo much trouble over the years its looking like a good move

Mike, thansk for the tip, just checked and the acatalog folder was at 777 ! blimey could this have been it? surely the orginal setup routine wouldnt have worked at all?

ive just changed it to 755 and will run the test, ill report back in a tic

thanks once again for the fantastic help gentlemen, dont know what i would do without you

[Barry]

...... test ran fine, as it did when the permissions were at 777, so whats next? surely, please, not another purge and refresh with all the babysitting clicking on continue, cintinue, continue for the next 48 hours

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.....!!!

[pinbrook]

anyone recommened a decent actinic host for a medium busy site (60gb month - 500,000 pages? <10gb disk space)

with that level of usage my recommendation would be a dedicated server.

[RuralWeb]

As for WebFusion they have replied ie they are checking your site - give them a chance they work business hours so you should get a setup email today. You seem to want everything to happen instantly. People are trying to help so stop slagging thier efforts off - obviously my advice is crap so don't bother sending your snapshot.

[Mike Hughes]

Im hoping the outage isnt to do with our dodgy perl scripts! they sure were pulling up thousands of errors per second in their error logs

It still sounds to me as if this is where your problem is. 500,000 pages per month are only 12 pages per minute, or one page every 5 seconds, and the scripts should be running far less often than that (even allowing for variations in traffic).

If I were you I'd try and get some help. What you really need is for someone to put your site on a test system where you can try a couple of things without worrying about the live site.

I'd either get actinic support or one of our professionals here on the case. The small cost of paying someone to get this fixed is going to make your life so much easier.

Mike

[Barry]

Hiya

Thanks Mike, I agree with you completely, I would gladly pay for someones to go over the code professionaly if there are any takers? and thanks for that permissions tip too

it seems like we have a workaround for the time being though, as Actinic support suggested we turned off the warning logging, which took a huge load off the sever and as Norman suggested most of those warnings were to do with inefficient code rather than errors, it seems to be working for the time being anyway.

Actinic support still have the snaphot for testing so we are waiting to see what they say, although we have definitely reverted to factory scripts now so it should be ok no?. We are also currently testing on Heart Internet after testing on Fasthosts and Mosso (who are great by the way)

Im reluctant to go for dedicated simply because of my knowledge Jo, somehow it all seems very daunting, id much rather not have to think about that side of things, am i being to cautious? and can you recommend a good service please?

Sorry Mal if i upset you, im not sure how i did but if it was my critique of webfusion, i think i was justified, ive been with them for 7 years or more and they dont inspire confidence, perhaps you should tip them to remove that live chat plug in as they are never there to answer it. They STILL havent replied to an email i sent them at the time of sign up what 4 days ago now?. They did however send me a request to photcopy my credit card and loads of other hoops to jump through after about 48 hours, (i have been a customer of theirs for 7 years! - not a good sign and after 6 years with Fasthosts, im looking to upgrade my service and not jump from the frying pan into the fire. Im suprised you were offended Mal, i appologise for having done that, your advice is always spot on, i just dont rate webfusion that much is all

anyway, ive had a terrible week but if anyone would like to contact me to give me a price on ironing out all of our problems id be delighted to hear it

thanks again guys for all the help

Barry

[pinbrook]

Im reluctant to go for dedicated simply because of my knowledge Jo, somehow it all seems very daunting, id much rather not have to think about that side of things, am i being to cautious? and can you recommend a good service please?

Well i'm only going to recommend our dedicated servers. Our dedicated servers are managed by us, so you do not have to do any of the server admin.

We upgrade the OS, apply security patches, manage the firewall, look after the antispam filter, install and maintain visitor stats, php, mysql and so on. We supply a control panel via which you add email addresses, set up 404s and so on. You would manage you site in exactly the same way you would if you signed up to our other hosting plans.

Hence you get a dedicated server with none of the admin.

My reason for suggesting dedicated is purely the traffic on the site, you mention you've been with Webfusion, fasthosts and heart - these are hosts that have both business and home sites on the same servers and will tend to fill up servers to capacity. I suspect your site doesn't get the resources it requires all the time as it is having to contend with other sites.

I also suspect if your site starts to hog resources on a shared server your provider will throttle the site.

We would be happy to look the site re the current issues, but only if the site were on our server - thus we can immediately focus on whether the problem is code or hosting.

These are my thoughts, please get in contact if you would like to discuss it any further

[Barry]

Thanks for the info Jo, i will discuss it with the others on Monday and bear it in mind. We are with Mosso now though and so far their support has been very impressive so i want to see this option through first before considering a dedicated - perhaps im just putting off the inevitable but....

I decided to do something drastic as i think our setup for this site is just too mangled, we have been with actinic for about 6 years now, lots of upgrades and tons of problems over the years i think have made it too tricky to continue with it. Problem on problems on corruptions on errors on errors. The upgrade to V8 in particular was so problematic that we have so many many tech issues now with the software that its best to start again

I've long wanted to switch to a css layout, so ive exported all the products from the existing installation and began a new css site and imported the products (i got loads of errors on import but am working through them) its going to be tough but hopefully i will end up with a fresh site without any major problems

i wish i could think of a cleaner way to do it but we have 6000 products, hopefully the problems i have already imported wont be too threatening

wish me luck? .................please? im scared and its nearly Christmas

[Darren B]

wish me luck? .................please? im scared and its nearly Christmas

Reading this thread i think your certainly need it.

If you really dont want to go down a dedicated server then you could look at a VPS solution. But if you decide on dedicated then make sure your pick a managed option

[Barry]

well, its now 1 month to the day that we sent our snapshot into Actinic Support (we pay for actinic cover)

so far the only advice we have had is to turn off the error logging to reduce the load on the servers. That had a positive effect as there were thousands of errors per minute but does not address the issue.

im at a loss really as to what to do now, 4 peoples livlihood depend on this site

perhaps we have just got lost in the system somehow, but actinic support are responding to all gentle prods with "our development team are looking at it" for weeks now and have not responded at all to this and last weeks reminders that we are still anxiously waiting for soem help

does Actinic Support read this board?

desperate times now what with xmas appraoching fast

[Mike Hughes]

does Actinic Support read this board?

They might do occasionally, but this is mainly a forum for astinic users.

so far the only advice we have had is to turn off the error logging to reduce the load on the servers. That had a positive effect as there were thousands of errors per minute but does not address the issue.

What is the outstanding issue and the impact it's having? Is there still a heavy load on the server or is the site running smoothly now?

The difficulty is that if there's a problem due to customisation, then it's not really something you can expect Actinic to take ownership of.

Mike

[Barry]

Thanks Mike

what we are seeing is a large drop in orders, approx 60 to 80% on different days, at some times in the day the orders come in fine and fast, then they stop and the cart and checkout section of the site is crawling. Calls to the host support people get teh response 'it looks fine/ loads fast for us' but for us and our customers, things are not working properly.

this is what was happening on fasthosts, who are not very hot on support but its also now happening on the new hosts, Mosso who are very on the ball with support

fasthosts chucked us off for using too many resources, mosso also said we were using high resources but within their very generous limits (we get about 4000 uniques a day)

at a loss as to what to do now, cant seem to get any tech support company to help or at the moment, even agree there is a problem

anyone else ever experience up and down performance/ response time over long periods of time with different host companies ? baffling for us really and each day that goes my gets more stressful with xmas coming

[Duncan Rounding]

It sounds like you should consider a managed dedicated server perhaps.

I doubt think Actinic support can do much more than they have already, if it's related to your hosting. It's not an issue that has surfaced before as an Actinic software problem that I can remember.

[Mike Hughes]

I guess the way I would approach this is:

1. Make sure the problem is the slow checkout rather than just a drop in visitor numbers. Your stats program should be able to show the trafic pattern during the day.

2. If it is the slow checkout and it's causing a 60-80% drop in orders at times then I would throw server resources at it until it's fixed. If mosso are helpful you could try asking them if the have a lightly used server (or even a new dedicated one) you could use until you solve the problem. Also consider signing up for a dedicated server now as even though you may not really need one yet it certainly isn't going to hurt you and should get you past this difficult patch. Dedicated servers aren't that scary. What you want is a managed server, which will come with a control panel just like a shared server but you'll be the only one using that server.

3. Once the system is stable and running Ok then I'd focus on finding the problem as we discussed before.

Mike

Edit: In checking your site I see that you have a very large javascript file for your navigation. I don't use these and can't tell you which ones are good or not. Some are better than others though so hopefully someone will say whether the one you're using is good or bad.

The other thing is that you're using gzip compression on your files. This is good for reducing bandwidth but bad for server load as you're forcing the server to copmress the files before sending them to the browser. If the server is heavily loaded then I would turn this off.

[Barry]

You guys are really great do you know that?! dont know what i would do without you all!

Duncan - im not convinced that this is a hosting problem, in fact im convinced this is a software problem, but the dedicated server otion is there on the back burner, i think its time probably has come but i need to fix the site first, apprecaite the tip though

Mike (thank you so much!!) -
1 stats are showing no real drop in traffic apart from a total ban from Yahoo which is odd and may well point to the source of the problem, not sure, we get about 4000 uniques and 15,000 to 20,000 pages a day depending on google rank fluctuations.

2 - I have started a brand new, fresh site within actinc business, and imported all the products that i exported from tshirtsville - hopefully this would leave behind most of the problems, ceratinly give me a fresh checkout without any problems (thats the thinking anyway) - ive uploaded to www.eleccy.com for testing (design is very messy at the moment) it seems to work better, but not great, even under no load at all

Good point about the javascript nav, it is very large, its Nortree and is great apart from the size. I have removed it from the checkout just now to see if that improves matters. I can seem to remove it from the Shopping Cart though without removing it from the whole site ?

we are also seeing another error when we try and ad some products to cart;
A General Script Error Occurred

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Error: Error opening ../content/acatalog/80Z38Z89Z58A1217332165B21899.session (Permission denied)

and
A General Script Error Occurred
Error: Error opening ../content/acatalog/80Z38Z89Z58A1218232251B15081.session (Permission denied)

I think this might be part of the overall problem, its only on some products, not all

another problem is that some .cat files are being uploaded every time, even though we dont use New Product lists or anything else that would mean that they need to be uploaded

so, i think that some/ lots of our products are corrupt, if thats the case it would explain the lack of performace improvement of teh fresh site on eleccy.com

I think the only thing using gzip is the google urchin scripts, unless im mistaken, do you know whcih files are using that Mike?

Thanks again for all your help Gents

Barry