Server issues

[yasslay]

Has anyone else repeatedly experienced server issues whilst trying to access the forum? I’ve had SQL errors and 500s so far. I think that these are closely connected to another thread posted in January. Does anyone have fixes for these issues?

[Elinruby]

Known issue. They are contemplating a hosting upgrade.

[Midsize Jake]

Known issue. They are contemplating a hosting upgrade.

More like a hosting change — unfortunately, the situation hasn't gotten much better since this post of mine a month ago. I was hoping we'd see more improvement in recent weeks, but IMO we really haven't, and Bluehost is still aggressively advertising to bring on more WordPress sites, probably all using the same servers and bandwidth we're using.

[Elinruby]

Known issue. They are contemplating a hosting upgrade.

More like a hosting change — unfortunately, the situation hasn't gotten much better since this post of mine a month ago. I was hoping we'd see more improvement in recent weeks, but IMO we really haven't, and Bluehost is still aggressively advertising to bring on more WordPress sites, probably all using the same servers and bandwidth we're using.

Let us know if we can help somehow.

[Ron Lybonly]

Known issue. They are contemplating a hosting upgrade.

More like a hosting change — unfortunately, the situation hasn't gotten much better since this post of mine a month ago. I was hoping we'd see more improvement in recent weeks, but IMO we really haven't, and Bluehost is still aggressively advertising to bring on more WordPress sites, probably all using the same servers and bandwidth we're using.

Let us know if we can help somehow.

Ditto. Also willing to chip in a few bucks for site-hosting costs.

[Vigilant]

Load times are impressively long...

[Elinruby]

Load times are impressively long...

Getting that here also

[Zoloft]

It’s gotten in the way of routine administration tasks.

I do understand Midsize Jake’s dilemma. I spent years in his shoes.

[Ron Lybonly]

It’s gotten in the way of routine administration tasks.

I do understand Midsize Jake’s dilemma. I spent years in his shoes.

I appreciate his work!

[yasslay]

Load times are impressively long...

Same for me.

----

When my phone is on mobile data, I'm also unable to access the website. Is this a part of the same issue with the server host, or is this a separate one?

[el84]

Load times are impressively long...

Same for me.

----

When my phone is on mobile data, I'm also unable to access the website. Is this a part of the same issue with the server host, or is this a separate one?

No idea what part of the world you are in, but it's possible that the "age-restriction" settings are set on your mobile data. When I switched to my current provider I was unable to access the forum as the age restriction setting was on by default. I logged into my account, found the setting to remove the restriction and have now been able to access it.

[yasslay]

Load times are impressively long...

Same for me.

----

When my phone is on mobile data, I'm also unable to access the website. Is this a part of the same issue with the server host, or is this a separate one?

No idea what part of the world you are in, but it's possible that the "age-restriction" settings are set on your mobile data. When I switched to my current provider I was unable to access the forum as the age restriction setting was on by default. I logged into my account, found the setting to remove the restriction and have now been able to access it.

I found the culprit - I had my hotspot on and forgot to turn it off! It’s still strange, though.

[Elinruby]

It’s gotten in the way of routine administration tasks.

I do understand Midsize Jake’s dilemma. I spent years in his shoes.

Same. Any remarks I make about this are an attempt to provide information. Not a complaint.

[C&B]

Known issue. They are contemplating a hosting upgrade.

More like a hosting change — unfortunately, the situation hasn't gotten much better since this post of mine a month ago. I was hoping we'd see more improvement in recent weeks, but IMO we really haven't, and Bluehost is still aggressively advertising to bring on more WordPress sites, probably all using the same servers and bandwidth we're using.

Let us know if we can help somehow.

Ditto. Also willing to chip in a few bucks for site-hosting costs.

Me as well. There is plenty of help available: take it!

[No Ledge]

Wikipediocracy isn't the only related site experiencing technical difficulties:

Error
Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes.

See the error message at the bottom of this page for more information.

Original error: upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure

Are these symptoms of Wikipedia hitting new heights in popularity? i.e. are the glitches being caused by heavier than usual traffic?

[el84]

Today the servers have been a lot slower than usual, and I've been getting quite a few Internal Server 500 errors.

[Vigilant]

Today the servers have been a lot slower than usual, and I've been getting quite a few Internal Server 500 errors.

I'm getting 60 second load times.

The current forum is unusable.

Please do what is necessary to fix this.

[Midsize Jake]

Agreed, this is getting ridiculous.

I'm looking at A2 Hosting, Siteground, Greengeeks and maybe Hostinger as potential new hosting providers. If anyone wants to recommend some others, or un-recommend any of those four, feel free to post here or send me a PM, or if that's too slow, e-mail the Support address.

Basically, all the research I've been doing on this for the last few days has amounted to "all self-respecting websites should get the hell off of Bluehost immediately," and I think we've already done most of the "optimizations" referred to here. Apparently some hosting companies claim they'll do a lot of the migration work for you, but presumably there will still be some downtime. Sorry I've been dragging my feet on this.

[Elinruby]

Yeah today has been well beyond the refresh-and-retry issue this has been for me so far. Maybe I am missing something obvious but wouldn't downtime have more to do with repointing the domain than the migration per se? If I am not, that probably should be a screening question. Are most users in the US?

[ltbdl]

images sometimes give up and show the broken image thumbnail.

fonts take too long to load.

getting several ERR_CONNECTION_ABORTED and 500s.

[AndyTheGrump]

Was practically unusable yesterday. Click on a link, then go do something else, and check back in a few minutes to see if anything had happened...

[Elinruby]

Is unusable here. Getting the occasional 404 now also.

Mods, webmaster@wikipediaforum.com is you guys not Bluehost right? I sent a hosting suggestion there because I couldn't stay connected for enough clicks to send you a PM

[Elinruby]

Is unusable here. Getting the occasional 404 now also.

Mods, webmaster@wikipediaforum.com is you guys not Bluehost right? I sent a hosting suggestion there because I couldn't stay connected for enough clicks to send you a PM

[Elinruby]

Is unusable here. Getting the occasional 404 now also.

Mods, webmaster@wikipediaforum.com is you guys not Bluehost right? I sent a hosting suggestion there because I couldn't stay connected for enough clicks to send you a PM

Never mind, Gmail claims there is no such user. That *is* what your 500 error message says, dunno what's up with that.

Back up trying to PM I guess

[C&B]

Known issue. They are contemplating a hosting upgrade.

More like a hosting change — unfortunately, the situation hasn't gotten much better since this post of mine a month ago. I was hoping we'd see more improvement in recent weeks, but IMO we really haven't, and Bluehost is still aggressively advertising to bring on more WordPress sites, probably all using the same servers and bandwidth we're using.

Let us know if we can help somehow.

Ditto. Also willing to chip in a few bucks for site-hosting costs.

Me as well. There is plenty of help available: take it!

Irony alert: posts literally telling you you can afford to upgrade from Windows NT, and how we are as of now! (Three post attempt, a record?!)

[Giraffe Stapler]

Sorry I've been dragging my feet on this.

You didn't cause this problem and you shouldn't have to be dealing with it. Wikipediocracy is paying Bluehost for a service and they are not adequately providing it. Thanks for the work you do to keep the site running semi-smoothly.

[Elinruby]

Sorry I've been dragging my feet on this.

You didn't cause this problem and you shouldn't have to be dealing with it. Wikipediocracy is paying Bluehost for a service and they are not adequately providing it. Thanks for the work you do to keep the site running semi-smoothly.

The throttling is shameless though, something really needs to happen. I have been trying to suggest sales@tmdhosting.com to Jake for several hours now and the one in 10-15 times I make it to my control panel to send a PM it crashes when I hit submit.

Literally unusable. I suggest a Better Business Bureau complaint and maybe the FTC also. And at this point I quit. He will either see this before he does something else, or not.

I am sure he's noticed how fast it's gotten worse this much worse, and is working on it

[el84]

Things have randomly improved now, I wonder how long for.

I spoke too soon.

[C&B]

Sorry I've been dragging my feet on this.

Sorry, was not having a go at you either! It must be heart wrenching to keep having to go to the same trouble always. Just saying, make it a communal effort (actual community involvement rather than Wiipedia-pretend community involvement, that is!) and share the fiduciary burden!

[Randy from Boise]

I am also having persistent problems with two different computers.

t

[Elinruby]

I am also having persistent problems with two different computers.

t

it's definitely not the computers.

[Midsize Jake]

I have updates...

My guess is that Bluehost totally knows they've overloaded their servers, and have been fiddling with their configurations in hopes of reducing the number of complaints. I just spent another hour or so chatting with one of their support people, and this time they seem to have — for now — fixed the ridiculously-slow-load-times problem. So that, along with the logical conclusion that we hadn't been under attack this whole time, is the good news.

The bad news is, we're still getting the "Max-Connections Exceeded" and "Max-Questions Exceeded" errors, and I suspect the Server Error 500 pages too, though I haven't seen one of those since the slow load times problem was fixed (or rather ameliorated, to use the more likely-to-be-accurate term).

So basically, we're back to where we were a couple of months ago, and I don't know how long this will last. Maybe they've re-routed us to a different... database server? That would seem the most likely explanation, but I don't see anything different in the PHPMySQL admin control panel. Another possibility was slow DNS resolution, but it didn't seem like that... they did tell me that pages were loading fairly quickly on their network when I was still getting 20-30 seconds per page here at my house, but I guess I just assumed they were lying.

Even if the current load times persist for a while, I'm still convinced we have to leave Bluehost. There's much less immediate pressure to do it right now, which is good, but we're still going to have to do it soon, definitely before our renewal date a couple of months from now. I should mention that late last year, they "rolled out" a new CPanel wherein I can no longer view raw server logs, which is what I would normally use (along with site stats) to verify whether or not we're under some sort of attack. In our case, that alone is probably a deal-breaker, but I also get the strong impression that their support people are now operating under a "no going off-script, EVER" policy. They even made me disable all of our Wordpress plugins by renaming the folders they were in (since I couldn't get into the site to do it the normal way), presumably because that's in the script, or else they just wanted to be annoying. Clearly this has had nothing to do with Wordpress plugins. I was half-expecting them to ask me to unplug my router and then wait 15 seconds before plugging it back in.

That said, whatever they did to fix it (again, not explained), I'll just note here that load times for the Wordpress pages returned to normal about 10 minutes before the phpBB pages did. That seems a little odd, though if it was a problem with the database server and they were moving the databases around (without telling me), that might explain it if they moved the Wordpress DB first, and the phpBB DB took a further 10 minutes to move...?

Once again, I apologize for all this, and I've added Elinruby's suggestion of TMD Hosting to my list (they appear to be a little cheaper than most, but that's not necessarily bad). In the meantime, please remember to copy each post to your clipboard before you click "Submit," so that you don't have to type it all back in again if you get yet another database error, since it looks like we're all going to keep getting those. (On Firefox at least, there's plugin called "Form History Control" that I can personally recommend.)

Last but not least, thanks to everyone for being so understanding. Honestly, I was probably a fairly good choice for this job a decade or so ago, but since I pretty much retired from the IT business I've kinda lost a step, so to speak. And I've never been really good at getting things done quickly anyway, as most of you have probably realized by now. I guess the one thing I'm still above-average at is being reasonable and "diplomatic" with help-desk and support people, but even I have my limits!

[Lurking]

[...]
The bad news is, we're still getting the "Max-Connections Exceeded" and "Max-Questions Exceeded" errors, and I suspect the Server Error 500 pages too, though I haven't seen one of those since the slow load times problem was fixed (or rather ameliorated, to use the more likely-to-be-accurate term).
[...]

Most recent 500 I got was about 45-60 minutes ago, fwiw, but yeah, load times have improved significantly, and the frequency of errors does seem to have gone down a fair bit compared to a couple hours ago.

(Don't really have anything else of value to add, other than saying I don't envy you having to deal with this issue)

[Midsize Jake]

Also....

It looks like one of the things they did to ameliorate (I refuse to say "fix") the page-load-times problem was to enable caching when you use the back-button. So if you read the site via the "Active Topics" page and use the back-button to go back to Active Topics after reading the new posts in each thread, you'll now see the "Unread Posts" icon for the thread you just finished reading, which you wouldn't have seen before tonight, since in the past we've preferred to not confuse people.

Needless to say, I'm a little hesitant to change that back (assuming I can even figure out how) since for all I know, that could be the only thing they actually did, in which case changing it would be bad. So hopefully we can all live with it for the time being at least, and to be fair, the other forums I'm a member of (which is to say, all four of them) behave this way too, so I guess there's something to it.

[The Blue Newt]

“SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]
User 'wikiped3_root' has exceeded the 'max_user _connections' resource (current value: 1) [1226]
An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.”

Is this saying that each user can have only one connection, or that there can only be one user connection?

[Midsize Jake]

Is this saying that each user can have only one connection, or that there can only be one user connection?

Technically it's both, but the "user" in that context isn't each individual visitor or forum member, it's the entire website. All of our requests to the database server come from our one hosting account, "wikiped3_root" (which I kind of wish they wouldn't display on that error page since it's one less thing a black-hat would have to guess for a SQL injection attack). Normally we'd never need more than one connection at any given instant, but the server is running so slowly (IMO due to being overloaded) that the requests pile up, and somehow there's an additional concurrent connection request, and it fires off the error.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to ask them to increase that max value to 2 or 4 or 256, but it's not something we can change ourselves — otherwise everyone with a shared-hosting account would set it to the highest possible number, which would be bad on a shared server because each connection reserves a certain amount of memory. But I suspect this is really just one of the ways they try to upsell their customers onto Virtual Private Server (VPS) accounts, since presumably then you can change all the settings to whatever you want.

If we were to somehow be forced to upgrade to a VPS, then I/we might take some of you up on your generous offers to help with the hosting costs since they would probably triple. But I'm about 99% certain that the problem will go away when we move to another hosting company... unless of course we pick the wrong one.

Hopefully they're not reading what I'm posting here either, since with my luck there's probably some sort of non-disparagement clause in their ToS.

[Zoloft]

Is this saying that each user can have only one connection, or that there can only be one user connection?

Technically it's both, but the "user" in that context isn't each individual visitor or forum member, it's the entire website. All of our requests to the database server come from our one hosting account, "wikiped3_root" (which I kind of wish they wouldn't display on that error page since it's one less thing a black-hat would have to guess for a SQL injection attack). Normally we'd never need more than one connection at any given instant, but the server is running so slowly (IMO due to being overloaded) that the requests pile up, and somehow there's an additional concurrent connection request, and it fires off the error.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to ask them to increase that max value to 2 or 4 or 256, but it's not something we can change ourselves — otherwise everyone with a shared-hosting account would set it to the highest possible number, which would be bad on a shared server because each connection reserves a certain amount of memory. But I suspect this is really just one of the ways they try to upsell their customers onto Virtual Private Server (VPS) accounts, since presumably then you can change all the settings to whatever you want.

If we were to somehow be forced to upgrade to a VPS, then I/we might take some of you up on your generous offers to help with the hosting costs since they would probably triple. But I'm about 99% certain that the problem will go away when we move to another hosting company... unless of course we pick the wrong one.

Hopefully they're not reading what I'm posting here either, since with my luck there's probably some sort of non-disparagement clause in their ToS.

Good work, and yes, we need to move anyway.

Things are mostly working now.

[Randy from Boise]

If we were to somehow be forced to upgrade to a VPS, then I/we might take some of you up on your generous offers to help with the hosting costs since they would probably triple.

Maybe we could apply to WMF for a grant. They're loaded... ;0


t

[C&B]

Yes.... And they love publicity.

[Elinruby]

For what it is worth I have just now navigated the site and clicked on multiple threads without a single crash, hurray . They did something. The night before last it was taking great determination to read anything and I wasn't exaggerating when I said I was literally unable to send you a PM.

I think tmd may be cheap because they are in Florida. I talked to Denise in the chat app on their website and got some intelligent answers to technical questions. I got the impression that they are big enough to be competent and small enough to be flexible, But I could only get so far without actual throughput and disk space requirements,

[Yngvadottir]

Yes, I got up to find more than a page of threads with unread posts. But that had been a teeth-grinding experience. Unfortunately, the only person I currently know with a server in their closet, I don't trust as a competent sysadmin.

[eppur si muove]

Also....

It looks like one of the things they did to ameliorate (I refuse to say "fix") the page-load-times problem was to enable caching when you use the back-button. So if you read the site via the "Active Topics" page and use the back-button to go back to Active Topics after reading the new posts in each thread, you'll now see the "Unread Posts" icon for the thread you just finished reading, which you wouldn't have seen before tonight, since in the past we've preferred to not confuse people.

Needless to say, I'm a little hesitant to change that back (assuming I can even figure out how) since for all I know, that could be the only thing they actually did, in which case changing it would be bad. So hopefully we can all live with it for the time being at least, and to be fair, the other forums I'm a member of (which is to say, all four of them) behave this way too, so I guess there's something to it.

That doesa explain something I noticed yesterday. Thanks for explaining why this is happening.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Well, it was nice while it lasted. Today I am getting frequent "too many connections [1040]" SQL errors.

[Vigilant]

I'm seeing random bouts of long load time.

[Jester]

Had about ~30 seconds load time followed by the message

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@wikipediaforum.com to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

loading both the forum and the blog. It ended up working after five minutes. I think you, the mods', are aware the issue persists, but just in case you're not ...
Either way, thanks for doing your best to fix this. It can't be easy.

[Elinruby]

Internal server error again. Still occasional and I usually get in in the second try, but...

[Vigilant]

Again: Super slow, internal server error, 500 return codes, etc.

Basically unusable.

[The Blue Newt]

Seems to be at it again.

[Midsize Jake]

Yeah, that didn't last long. I wonder if there are Wikipedia fans on Bluehost's server-op staff?

[No Ledge]

500 Server Error
A misconfiguration on the server caused a hiccup. Check the server logs, fix the problem, then try again.
URL: http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtop ... 13&t=13447


Happened just a few minutes ago.

How do I "check the server logs"?

Oh, I tried to post *this* massage, and the response was,

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

User 'wikiped3_root' has exceeded the 'max_user_connections' resource (current value: 1) [1226]

An sql error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact an administrator if this problem persists.

Contacting an "administrator"... hmm, I'm an administrator (on Wikipedia). Should I "move the page"?