Computer Hope down time (Nov 3&9, 2009)

[Computer Hope Admin]

Just a FYI for those who may have attempted to access Computer Hope today. Apparently the Server went down today, CPU some how was getting maxed out at 400% usage. Unfortunately since I worked until 8am in the morning today I was sleeping most of today so didn't get a chance to look at it until just recently. Had the host restart the box and things appear normal but looking into it further.

[Buzzintx]

Thanks for the heads up...... 

[rthompson80819]

First, thanks for running CH.  I've learned a lot ( and relearned a lot).

CPU some how was getting maxed out at 400% usage.

I'm curious how a CPU could run at 400%?

[Computer Hope Admin]

First, thanks for running CH.  I've learned a lot ( and relearned a lot).

I'm curious how a CPU could run at 400%?

You're more than welcome, it's a pleasure running the site. This system is a linux based system and operates a little differently than what you may be used to in Windows, honestly doesn't make that much since to me either how something can surpass 100. However, each daemon (process) running on the system utilizes it's own percentage of the CPU, each of these processes can surpass 100 themselves and having dozens of httpd (a process that allows a web page or application to be processed by Apache, which allows you to view a web page) the CPU can quickly max out if something else is taking up a lot of the processor, which in my past experience has been a MySQL (database to run forums) getting stuck.

When the MySQL gets stuck because Computer Hope is averaging about 25-30 http requests a second and visitors don't stop visiting the site, things get backed up and the CPU percentage simply increases until it's so busy it can't anymore.

Normally if the CPU isn't getting hammered too much you can SSH into it and kill or stop the process that's using up the CPU, much like you'd do with ALT + CTRL + DEL. However, because the CPU was beyond it's max (normally wouldn't happen if I was able to look at it sooner) the only real solution was to reboot the machine.

Hope that helps give you a little better understanding of it.

[evilfantasy]

That was a long one.

Glad we're back.

[Allan]

Welcome back

[harry 48]

great to see it up and working again missed it last night

[Computer Hope Admin]

Had some additional down time today on the website mostly. I noticed when I woke up this morning that the traffic seemed low overall for the day, but didn't see anything wrong so assumed it had something to do with me getting up early. Later Lostcoast sent me a PM indicating that the pages were down, I hadn't been experiencing any issues but after pressing F5 to refresh cached versions of the pages noticed that I too was only getting the top header of pages. I first attempted to restart the Apache service and got errors about it not being able to load, so once again restarted the server. Unfortunately this too did not resolve the issue and restarting Apache just got the same problem. Therefore after trying and failing to see any known issues with Apache ended up having to rebuild Apache on the server, assuming something got corrupt and was causing it not to work and therefore load the pages properly.

After doing this everything appears to be working. Sorry yet again for the down time but yet again all my warning systems failed. Although not really sure how a warning system could of caught this since the HTML of each of the pages were actually loading, just not being able to be displayed?

Note: Many of you who mainly visit the forums would not of noticed this since they were all loading with no errors.

[harry 48]

it's great the work you do and we all thank you for it


edit; just spent 5 min's clicking around the page's and link's all seem to be fine

[Two-eyes]

some pages didn't load on the forums either...or was that from my side?

Anyway, as others have said, thanks for your dedication for this site. It has given me a lot and I'm doing my best to give back.

Thanks again

Two-Eyes %

[Karnac]

I'm still getting redirected when I use the search box and still getting blank pages with all the links at the top of the page.........Both IE8 and Firefox.......whether or not it's related.

[Computer Hope Admin]

Anyone else getting the issue Karnac is experiencing? Also have you done F5 to reload the pages? I still cannot recreate your issue.

[harry 48]

see my edit, all seems to be ok ,  might be karnac's pc 

[patio]

Karnac's machine is compromised.

[harry 48]

Karnac's machine is compromised.

o'dear that sound's bad i hope it get's better soon