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Weird Behaviour


BeeDev

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Hiya,

 

I wonder if anyone's come across such an issue or behaviour that's affecting me currently. It's quite a long story.

 

We (our company) re-designed our website, and it was first hosted on a completely different webspace (But same hosting company, same hosting package, same config, same everything) for testing purposes. Everything worked fine and we decided to make the website Live. Downloaded the whole site from the test hosting and moved it to the normal one.

 

However the next day, we noticed the site stopped working and we received an e-mail from the hosting company that they have moved our website to their "probation server" because it was "using up 80% of the CPU" on the old server. They then moved on to say that they will not be providing any more information about the problem and we should fix the problem before they can put us back on normal hosting.

 

So we called up our hosting company to see if they had any logs or anything they had to help us analyze what the issue, as we had absolutely no clue as to what went wrong, but they just plainly refused to help.

 

So we deleted the newly uploaded site and uploaded the original (old) one which we had backed up luckily. And they have moved us back to the normal servers after some phone calls.

 

So bear with me now... We have then uploaded the new site into a sub-folder on the same domain that the old site is now(/draft/). Everything worked perfectly, pages loaded fine etc. We waited few days to see if they will move us to the probation server. They haven't. So we then decided to make this site live again and moved all the files over to the root folder. After 1min of doing so the site became really slow, none of the pages would load.

 

Playing around with my Web Developer toolbar I disabled all cookies and tried to load the pages again and it seems to go through now, which is weird.

 

Now after about 1 hour of trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with it (Same files were working absolutely fine in a sub-folder, but stop working when its moved to the root folder) we noticed the website was moved again to the probation server.

 

Has anyone had any issues like this? I for one am completely baffled.

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BeeDev,

 

That certainly qualifies as a 'weird one' (almost worthy of "The Daily WTF"!).

 

I'm staggered that your ISP aren't prepared to help you by way of logs or indeed ANY info. I would be tempted to look for a new ISP simply on that basis...

 

...but let's just check a couple of things.

 

  1. Does your ISP offer different hosting types (Linux/Windows)?
  2. Does your site use any server-side databases? If so, are these Microsoft DBs or (e.g.) MySQL/PostGRE SQL?
  3. Does your site depend on PHP on any other specific technologies like ASP, Java, etc.?
  4. Does your site have a large number of animations, audio, or video?
  5. Is there any other thing about your site which might cause a huge amount of server-side activity (ASP pages, AJAX, RubyOnRails, Actinic Catalog, etc.)?

I expect your team have thought of most/all of this already, but it would help to know a bit more about your site. Is it commercial? Does it use any kind of 'shopping software,' for example?

 

And finally ... are you sure that your 'new' site is on the same physical server at your ISP as your 'old' site was?

 

And, I for one would love to know what the answer to your problem is, once you finally work it out!

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Hi Cad, thanks for your reply.

 

1. Our ISP does offer different hosting packages. Windows & Linux packages. Our new site uses ASP so it's currently on a Windows hosting (Shared hosting environment hence the move to probation servers).

 

2. The site currently uses a MSSQL 2008 server (Also shared - no problems with other websites using the same server).

 

3. The site currently depends on Classic ASP CMS which we've written ourselves (And exactly the same system that the old site was using), with an addition of front-end Javascript (some jQuery slideshow, and a background switcher which uses Cookies to save the selection(!!) )

 

4. The site doesnt have any Video or Audio elements. Only some jQuery slideshow which we've used on hundreds of sites before.

 

5. There is no other technology being used except Javascript, ASP and MS-SQL.

 

6. it's not an e-commerce site and it's not using any shopping cart software, and we're certain it's on the exact same physical server that the old site resided on. It was on the same domain/webspace but in a sub-folder but as soon as it's moved to the root folder it starts using up 100% of the server's CPU and crashes the whole shared server.

 

At first we thought it might have something to do with the background switcher and Cookies since when I disabled cookies on my browser the pages seemed to load fine. But we've renamed the whole Javascript folder to see if it was causing problems but it hasn't fixed the issue.

 

We're currently talking to our hosting company trying to resolve the issue, but we're currently getting nowhere.

 

If it's any help you can visit the site (the earlier copy which is hosted on a different domain/webspace) on :

 

http://tinyurl.com/ydv8tm3

 

The site works absolutely fine here and pages load ok. There might be some Javascript errors related to PNG fixer but it shouldn't and doesn't affect the server performance.

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Thanks for that link.

 

Apart from the dodgy-looking homepage (!), yes it all works fine here too. And I can't see anything that might stuff up the server side either.

 

As you say, it's a 'stumper!'

 

All I can think of is that the ISP has either stuck 'more stuff' on that server than was there before, or they are too dumb to work out the real source of the problem, so obviously that'll be 'your fault.'

 

I can thoroughly recommend f2s (but they've just been swalloewd whole by Opal, so the jury is out maentime ;), and of course the ever-dependable and helpful Fasthosts, but IIWY I would definitely be looking to switch, and at the very least be making enquiries to other ISPs: if only because of your current ISP's just plain unhelpful and bizarrely 100% unreasonable attitude to you (a.k.a. their customers).

 

Just my two-penn'orth ...

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Any further news on this problem or its cause/resolution, BeeDev?

 

I'm REALLY intrigued to know!!! (Yeah, I know, I'm just being nebby!)

 

PS: Will your saga of woe make it to 'The Daily WTF' someday? ;)

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My manager has managed to resolve this issue after a week of phone calls to them explaining the same thing over and over and at last we think managed to get through to 2nd line support and they resolved it I think. the website is currently operating normally. Don't know the reason or the cause of the problem unfortunately.

 

Cheers for your input so far.

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we think managed to get through to 2nd line support and they resolved it I think. the website is currently operating normally. Don't know the reason or the cause of the problem unfortunately.

Hmm … sounds like your classic 'oops, we've screwed up horribly: let's fix it FAST and keep pretending we had no clue how to fix it.' type of thing.

 

If I were your manager, I'd be WRITING (remember pen and paper? :lol:) to the ISP to politely ask for a FULL, TECHNICAL explanation of precisely what the problem was, "… so that I can take appropriate steps to prevent any reoccurrence of the problem in future." ;)

 

Geddit?!?!?!!

 

Then if they refuse, your manager can write another letter (to the ISP's MD this time) to express his/her disappointment that the ISP "… seems reluctant to work with us to prevent problems." That usually lights a rocket under the cover-up merchants and gets at least an apology, if not a proper explanation. B)

 

Hope that helps!

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Hehe,

 

In the end managed to figure it out.

 

It was our fault, we forgot we had setup Custom Error Pages on the server for the domain. Then when we deleted the old site and uploaded the new site, there were some Javascript files missing for the new website etc which shouldn't cause any problems. HOWEVER the old Custom Error Pages were using some files which were deleted together with the old site.

 

So When some1 visits our homepage, the missing Javascript file would instead include the 404 error page, however that 404 error page had missing stuff in it, so it kept going around in a loop.

 

They kept saying it's code, we kept saying its the server config issue, but turns out it's code AND server config issue. Oh well, it's been resolved now and the site works flawlessly :rolleyes:

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