Updated 07 Oct 2015
I’m sure you must have noticed the poor performance since the so-called upgrade when the site was moved from the Ramjet to the Thundercracker server six days ago.
When I submitted a support ticket I received this reply:
Performance will take some time to settle down as the new platform uses a multi-tiered SAN – however the SAN needs to tier data according to it’s usage before it performs optimally.
We’re sorry for caused inconveniences.
Server performance will be stabilized soon.
Please hold on.
The next few days showed a small improvement – until today. Then tonight I was advised:
Thundercracker and Snarl are scheduled for RAM upgrades to alleviate performance issues. This will require a reboot which will happen at 8pm tonight (05/10/2015).
It took a while to realise that the server was now back in service and access to the website was being stopped by a different factor. After examining the message “Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: Permission denied in Unknown on line 0 Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required ‘/home/bigdavec/public_html/index.php’ (include_path=’.:/opt/php53/lib/php’) in Unknown on line 0” I decided to look at the index.php file that had been mentioned. It had been unchanged since October 25th 2013, but then I noticed that the file permissions had been set to 0000 which meant that it could not be accessed by anyone. After resetting to the usual value 0f 0644, suddenly the site became available again. I am trying to find out why those values were changed as I certainly didn’t do it.
06 Oct 2015
The following was added to the Evohosting status website today:
Hosting Platform Performance: 11:10 06/10/2015
As customers will be aware, we have recently performed upgrades to the existing Evo Hosting platform onto enterprise class hardware and storage solutions.
Extensive planning and measures were incorporated into the upgrades to minimise any disruption and as a result, the experience has been largely seamless for the majority of customers. However, we have received reports from some customers where they have experienced speed or performance issues since the upgrades.
Please be assured that our engineers and system administrators are aware of this and are currently addressing any issues as a matter of urgency.
Our new platform is more than capable of handling the hosting and email infrastructure, so the main reasons for any performance issues are largely as the new hosts process any of the imported data to assign if the correct tiers and priority levels. This has taken longer than we initially predicted.
To further expedite this process, we are currently adding further resource at a hardware level into the hosting and email cluster to boost overall resources, allowing performance to increase further still. At the same time, our senior network architects are also manually optimising the hosts to ensure they are working more efficiently.
We apologise for any disruption or inconvenience to customers who have experienced speed or performance issues. This is a temporary issue and will be resolved as soon as possible. Once complete, all customers will experience better performance and resilience than before, as part of the overall upgrade and enhancement plan.
We will continue to make updates to this status page with any further time-frames or updates.
Update: 16:35 06/10/2015
Our engineers have completed preliminary updates to the hosting platforms and performance has been increased for many customers.
We are still in the progress of updating all the hardware based performance upgrades, with the remaining tasks scheduled in for tomorrow morning
We are still making performance updates manually in the meantime.
Many customers will have seen speed increases, however if you are still experiencing delays or other performance problems, then these should largly be resolved when our updates are complete.
We will update this page again in the morning following confirmation from our Data Center engineers that the rest of the hardware based updates are live
Update: 13:05 07/10/2015
From approximately 2pm today, there will be brief unavailability to services as we further increase physical memory and other resources to our platforms.
We apologise for any disruption caused, however this will address customers facing performance issues, in particular database driven sites.
Thanks BD and good luck. You must be nearly hairless by now – come back – I miss you all!
When I first tried to send this it told me that it was a duplicate comment – it must be having a laugh – it was the first time that I’ve been able to get anywhere near anything all day.
Loved the addition of the ‘rate this’ at the end of your message, BD! Not exactly sure what you’re asking us to rate, but I’d give 0 out of 10 to everything bar your attempts to get us all back in the fold.
Agreed?
Seconded!!! Thank you BD for everything that you do. Its all much appreciated..
Big Dave, I wish you luck. Their explanations don’t seem to be consistent.
The site seems very slow.
At least it seem to be working – who cares whether anyone is first, second or third – we’re not having a race.
I don’t care about the speed of posting. I know we are not racing. It’s just that when you are trying to do anything on the site, it was very slow. However, it’s back up to speed now.
When I got the message, I thought it was a crossword clue.
Couldn’t parse it though but knew BD would. And he did.
Congratulations
Second time of trying:-
Loved the ‘rate this’ at the end of your comment, BD! Not sure what you’re asking us to rate, but I’ll give 0 out of 10 to everything bar your sterling efforts to get us all back into the fold.
Best of British luck BD. We all appreciate the effort you make.
Thanks BD for all the wonderful effort you put in.
As I said on your Facebook, do hope all will soon be well for you and indeed all us bloggers. BD has become an indispensable part of our lives.
I honestly don’t know how you handle all this aggro, but you do, and it’s all with our entertainment in mind. I can’t begin to thank you enough. Long live Big Dave!!
My problems with Windows 10 pale into insignificance, Dave, and I’m sure that everyone appreciates what a wonderful site this is.
Dear BD Love you to bits, thank you for persevering and hope that things are beginning to sort themselves out. It must be so frustrating have to solve something like this and I, for one, am eternally grateful that you have the know how and patience.
You have my full sympathies.
I run a football-related site, which yesterday reverted to a 2014 edition, confusing all the punters, and me!
Normal service has today been resumed, but there is a parallel site stuck in 2014. I hope all the users stuck there get back to 2015!
Really missed you yesterday BD! Wasn’t sure of what the issue was – I reckon another website I use to help with crosswords must be on the same site as I had a similar message when accessing them!
Typical when I needed some help … Great that you’ve found the problem – we all appreciate the update.
It’s obvious ‘Ramjet’ is a real word whereas ‘Thundercracker’ doesn’t mean anything and has too many syllables anyway – and the combination of Thundercracker and ‘Snarl’ – well that’s got bad karma written all over it!
The old resetting the access limit problem – well-known device to give the Support people a breathing space to let them come up with some sort of explanation for a upgrade balls-up (technical term) – been there, done that, got the tee-shirt although it must have shrunk because it no longer fits!
Oh, by the way seriously, well done for sorting out what must have been an awkward situation, the Bigdave44 site is a class act
Oh yes, me too. The problems come when you get so involved with the coding you forget to reset the access limit. Happened once to one of my staff who promptly went on holiday without updating his log! The company website was down for almost 24 hrs, ever seen a CEO with smoke coming out of the ears?
It’s what’s known in the IT dept as CBS, computer bullshit!
IT, dontcha just lurve it?
Thanks for persevering BD.
The one good thing about problems such as these is that it shows up just how much people appreciate this site. I’ll take the opportunity to add my thanks to BD for all the hard work – you provide a valuable service and have created an amazing community. Just one of those alone would be worth commending.
I agree wholeheartedly – it’s not until you don’t have something that you realise how much you miss it. Good on you BD
The first time I clicked on Performance Problems, it was available ! Thanks for all your hard work .
All that stuff in italics looks a bit like it’s in English but . . .
Classic w**k word bingo Pommers. And a high scoring one.
“To further expedite,” and “Performance has been increased'” is a winning combination.
It’s all gobbledygook to me. I wonder how an architect manually optimises a host?
The site seems to be working fine tonight. Thanks BD for knowing all about this computer stuff!
Wednesday’s DT27926 is far more straightforward!
They obviously want to blind customers with science. Methinks they could take a leaf out of your book, BD, and use rather more plain English or get on and sort their problems. Can imagine what you are going through. Courage mon brave!
And grateful thanks from me too BD
Don’t want to grumble but I’m still getting a lot of ‘timed out’ messages. Anyone else?