Website down - AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[dave_finlayson]

Seems like hosting to me, when I looked earlier it was working fine but 2 minutes later it is giving me a 500 error after waiting for an age for the checkout to load. Then go back again and it is working much quicker but still slow.

Think you definitely need to hassle your hosts, or as Mal says, take Darren up on his trial offer.

[RuralWeb]

As WebFusion says there is a problem in the actinic scripts so it's not really a hosting problem as the same issue has been present on other hosts. I have loads of sites with WebFusion and have never seen this problem before.

Sort the script as WebFusion suggest and see what happens. Changing hosts will not solve this IMO

[Darren B]

OK they are saying yours is a busy site and your basically overloading the server, well your consuming server resources at a rate they would not see as normal.

If your site is that busy then i would really suggest you should be on a dedicated server, there comes a time when you have to make the transition, to many people put cost infront of sound reasoning, how much bandwidth are you consuming a month?

There is the possibility your site needs to be moved, but not to another shared server, it is highly probable that your have corrupted scripts, this can have a serious impact on the server, there are alot of factors involved and a quick fix is not possible, one step at a time.

[Barry]

Ive implemented the changes suggested by Webfusion, the site is running very quickly, at the moment it is anyway!

But, and its a big but, im now getting the Hsbc error that we had twice last week, we couldnt fix this one before, it resolved itself after a few hours. Webfusion, Hsbc and Actinic (who i suspect host the problem on their securehosted page) all said it wasnt them

Heres the details of that problem; http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=25573

If anyone can help us out of this i would be forever grateful

thanks folks

[Barry]

Sorry, no, cancel that last post!

I have just returned to dreamweaver which i used to edit the pm file and saw the message "the file sm000002.pl was edited outside dreamweaver, do you want to reload it"

So, im still trying to edit this .pm file, this time from within actinic

[NormanRouxel]

The file sm000002.pl is generated by Actinic from Session.pm (in your site folder). That's the file to edit. Actinic will create a new sm000002.pl and upload it for you.

Backup first before tinkering with it.

There's a Knowledge Base article that explains the names of the Perl files that Actinic uses, renames and uploads.

[Barry]

Thanks Norman, I was just about to post asking how to do that!

Its uploading now, fingers crossed

[Barry]

well, thats uploaded now, the changes are defo in place now but the error is not fixed

i dont know what to do

[Barry]

I just went into Help > Troubleshooting and clicked on Purge Session Files, Actinic then began to delete over 44,000 session files!

Guccij - thanks for that pointer, i think i will remove that Addthis widget when i get a moment

Mal - Yes i did once try exporting my products only and importing them into a clean site, however i must have some corrupt products as i have approx 70 .cat files that always upload on every upload no matter what, these were transfered to the clean site. I raised 2 support tickets with actinic but alas i had no joy and they stopped replying to my emails!

Upgrading from 7 to 8 was an utter nightmare, we lost hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of man hours plus several thousands of pounds (new hardware and software able to handle the load mainly) i am convinced the whole thing is mangled now, have been for ages

Our error log looks pretty odd too;
http://www.tshirtsville.com/acatalog/error.err

Darren - We are currently doing just under our 50gb bandwidth limit, this is xmas time though. I think you are right about going dedicated, i will try it after chrimbo, for the moment i am happy that this is not a hosting prob

Webfusion said to add this line to the sm000002.pl file;
return "/tmp/";
but they didnt mention if we have to create the folder, this is further complicated by not being able to open the /acatalog folder with any of the ftp software we have!! probably to do with the sheer number of files in there (44,000 session files for starters!) so icant even see inside the folder!!

im going for a lay down now, looks like i picked a bad week to give up drinking meths

thanks for all your time and help guys

barry

[RuralWeb]

The root cause of all your problems I think is a corruped site - actinic support will not help because of all the mods you have made. I would look for professional help to get things sorted out - as you say you lost thousands which would have paid a designer to correctly upgrade the site for you. V9 will speed up the upload if you are not already using it.

[pinbrook]

TBH its probably both a corrupt site and the fact you've got a busy site on a shared server.

But as Mal says you need to sort the site out first, if the site is still slow after it is fixed then look for a dedicated server. For the record i don't think a 50gb site is ever going to perform well on a shared server.

don't forget at this time of year all ecommerces sites are going ten to the dozen so you should find post xmas the server will limp along ok giving you time to rebuild the site.

[RuralWeb]

Webfusion package is Fusion Professional Linux

At 50gb of traffic you are way over the limit for this package and Im surprised webfusion have not been charging excess bandwidth fees. The bandwidth for this package was 25 which has been upped to 50 recently - even at 50 you are over as you need to factor in for busy times such as this.

You are definately on the WRONG package and should upgrade immediately - this could also be the reason that HSBC is failing as you will be overloading the server at the point of transfer.

[grantglendinnin]

Darren - We are currently doing just under our 50gb bandwidth limit, this is xmas time though. I think you are right about going dedicated, i will try it after chrimbo, for the moment i am happy that this is not a hosting prob

That's a crazy amount of bandwidth to be chomping up on a shared server - I'm with Malcolm on this; an upgrade or a dedicated server package is definitely required. Don't know much at all about the HSBC payments, is there any way their support unit could inform you of how much load your traffic is putting on their servers.

[Barry]

I dont get it Mal, according to webfusion we are using about 94% of our allocated bandwidth, if it goes over we get charged by the Mb, we are not over that limit yet.

When i set up the account with webfusion a few weeks ago i explained to them the Uniques we get, the page hits and the transfer we use, they recommended that package

??

[Barry]

I would imagine that the load we put on hasbc is no more than 200 to 300 page hits a day, that is nothing

im confident that the problem lies in all the many many problems we have had over the years with this software, fix these and the load on the servers will be reduced as well im sure

I will be looking at a dedicated server later though, it makes sense, but for now i am hassling actinic to resume some of the support tickets that they stopped responding to for whatever reason, that is my best chance of getting through xmas with my head intact

thanks gents, once again