Site becomes slow and unavailable at times...

[Hall of Famer]

I wonder why, the bluehost's official site is running perfectly fine for me and I have no idea why my sites wont load. Also there was no hint from bluehost's server status such as CPU reboot, the downtime seems to come from nowhere. I tried on two of my hosting accounts here, neither loaded nicely. The site is either slow, or completely unavailable. I dont understand at all, please explain.

[gixxer188]

I have been having the same problem with box383 and BH Support says it my WordPress installation but I find that highly unlikely. There is 1 domain, 1 mysql db, 1 ftp and 1 WP install and there are zero errors with any of it yet the site has extremely slow response times and they are throttling the CPU on it for no reason at all that I can tell. It's a new site/domain with almost zero bandwidth traffic. I have two other BH accounts where I have 10 domains each between the two with multiple WP installs and mysql db's and none of those site respond slow or are being throttled.

[bobdog]

You probably have a wordpress add-on that is taxing the server. Try disabling them one at a time to find the culprit.

[gixxer188]

You probably have a wordpress add-on that is taxing the server. Try disabling them one at a time to find the culprit.

Nope, already verified with BH Support, no rogue plug-ins, slow queries, etc.

[P_I]

We're hosted on box537 and have been slow responsiveness issues for weeks. We host two (one public, one private) phpBB 3.0.8 forums (stock installations, no mods). On the private phpBB forum, we've changed config.php to set "@define('DEBUG', true);" so that phpBB shows load information, i.e. "Time : 0.320s | 10 Queries | GZIP : On | Load : 78.42". We routinely see load averages north of 100 on our box. We only see slow queries when the load goes high. We've checked our bandwidth use vs. load average and there is no correlation. All along the Bluehost server status page shows load is OK.

I'd be curious to see a sample of load averages from other boxes during mid weekday timeframes to evaluate if our box is overloaded.

[farcaster]

There is an excellent tool available to everyone to help diagnose slowdowns on web sites. Download Firefox - I am currently using the newly released version 4.0 and find it quite nice. There is an add-on called YSlow that will time all aspects of a page retrieval and load and show you where the slow parts are in addition to recommending some possible fixes. There is documentation available for it. Also install Firebug and run the two together. YSlow will show up in the Firebug display area.

[pickpony2]

bluehost-isn't there a DDoS attack presently occurring at bluehost that might explain this slow down? Apparently it's been going on since April 1. When will it be fixed? Why don't you mention it?

[farcaster]

Do you understand that this is a user to user forum and not a Bluehost support site?

[nitrocrzy]

Seriously April 1st????? :P

[cvd6262]

I was wondering if any other users were experiencing the same issues. I had the site become unavailable during a presentation in a meeting. I'm new to Bluehost, so I'm wondering if this is typical.

I finally created a cron job that checks the availability of a tiny page on the domain. So the server itself tries to grab a page from its own public_html directory via HTTP. I get 97% uptime for the last few days, which is OK, but there have been 11 downtimes of 5 minutes or longer during the past 48 hours.

[P_I]

We've been chasing this issue off and on with Bluehost for months. We're dealing with Level III techs on an almost daily basis. Does this look like a healthy box? :rolleyes:

http://www.financialwebring.org/gallery/loadavg2011-04-07.png

Yesterday's maximum load avg (5 minute) was 180.59:mad:

[dkinzer]

I finally created a cron job that checks the availability of a tiny page on the domain.A year or so ago I was having recurring problems with slow response times. I created a cron job that logs the server load data every 15 minutes. I just checked the most recent log (holding data from 27 March to today) and it shows values from low single digits to 50 or so with 8 CPUs. This is on box531, by the way. At the time I was having trouble, I was on a different box with 4 CPUs and was routinely getting load averages in the 200-300 range (i.e. dog slow).

[ronaldcagape]

I was wondering if any other users were experiencing the same issues. I had the site become unavailable during a presentation in a meeting. I'm new to Bluehost, so I'm wondering if this is typical.

I finally created a cron job that checks the availability of a tiny page on the domain. So the server itself tries to grab a page from its own public_html directory via HTTP. I get 97% uptime for the last few days, which is OK, but there have been 11 downtimes of 5 minutes or longer during the past 48 hours.

How do you setup that cron job? Can you share the script with me?

[Schenn]

I am also having this problem, extreme slowdowns / unable to connects. I had to double the timeout on my browser to get around the unable to connects but Cpanel and my site are running extremely slow.

According to a blogpost hosted on bluehost and dated june 1st, 2011, they were informed by bluehost that the server they were on was being ddos'ed. So that is likely what is happening. **shakes fist**


(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.62.8144&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

[adam3000]

I'm having a similar issue with a site I set up yesterday ( Direct IP address removed, please use URLs ).

The client get the "Unable to Connect" or "Connection reset" message in Firefox at their location and we get it too (at our office). Frustrating.

Downloading YSlow now.

[adam3000]

This is frustrating. The server load issue continues.

I've contacted Tech Support on several times but the problem is not fixed.

reports directly from your server:
2012-02-16 10:08am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 203.27, 201.68, 155.04 ... 845% load
2012-02-16 10:02am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 244.51, 171.83, 126.38 ... 1016% load
2012-02-16 09:58am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 153.25, 110.22, 97.50 ... 638% load
2012-02-16 09:56am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 136.85, 94.91, 91.82 ... 570% load
2012-02-16 09:54am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 119.25, 75.40, 85.74 ... 496% load
2012-02-16 09:42am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 55.64, 113.49, 108.94
2012-02-16 09:40am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 63.55, 135.63, 114.94
2012-02-16 09:38am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 174.90, 183.31, 124.14
2012-02-16 09:31am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 254.78, 151.80, 85.90
2012-02-16 09:29am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 184.67, 107.61, 66.14
2012-02-16 09:12am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 33.01, 30.62, 31.93
2012-02-16 09:09am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 31.19, 28.64, 31.74
2012-02-16 09:09am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 22.04, 26.72, 32.91
2012-02-16 08:56am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 34.22, 36.62, 37.82
2012-02-16 08:49am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 38.48, 38.71, 38.56
2012-02-16 08:29am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 38.84, 35.65, 37.65
2012-02-16 08:11am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 41.29, 55.45, 48.71
2012-02-16 07:59am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 28.22, 34.20, 34.77
2012-02-16 07:43am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 31.12, 31.60, 31.48
2012-02-16 07:31am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 32.05, 31.31, 30.93
2012-02-16 07:07am ... 24 CPU ... Server Load Averages: 36.47, 38.22, 35.06