Sometime site runs slow, sometime fast, what causes this?

oyjord · Hangin' Around Joined: Aug 25, 2006 Posts: 44

Hi all,

I ran two Ravennuke sites at Godaddy. They worked ok, but the sites seemed to run a bit slow.

I moved over to Bluehost, and BAM, my sites ran lightning fast.

Now, though, they're starting to slow down again! But here's the kicker, it's only periodically slow. Throughout the day, sometimes it's lightning fast, sometimes it's snail slow.

I optimized the DB in the admin panel, and all looks good there. I went into PhPMyAdmin and my databases seem really nice and small and not bloated.

Any tips where the problem might be? Any chance googlebot could be the culprit?

Thanks for any advice,
Oy.

Guardian2003 · Site Admin Joined: Aug 28, 2003 Posts: 4824

It could be a dozen or more things;
pulling external images
pulling external RSS feeds
pulling any sort of external data
high server load if your host does back-ups
too many hosting accounts on the one server
too many bots (causing high load)
....

oyjord · Hangin' Around Joined: Aug 25, 2006 Posts: 44

Guardian2003 wrote:

It could be a dozen or more things;
pulling external images
pulling external RSS feeds
pulling any sort of external data
high server load if your host does back-ups
too many hosting accounts on the one server
too many bots (causing high load)
....

Thanks!

Let's see:
-the nuke site pulls ONE small Cafepress images on the frontpage
-we pull ONE RSS feed and list in on the frontpage (I'll disable it for a bit and see if it helps)
-don't think we're pulling any other external data
-we don't have more than a small handful of users, and I don't think there are any scheduled backups
-when I check the ip tracking, there's nothing there besides a few of my users and Googlebot (though the Googlebot does seem to come often and hits the site quite often)

Thanks again for helping, I'm really scratching my head here.

Oy.

Guardian2003 · Site Admin Joined: Aug 28, 2003 Posts: 4824

Have you considered it might be network related and nothing to do with the site?
You could easily do a tracert when it slows down to see if there is a network problem. If your not sure how to do that just ask Smile

montego · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 12:41 pm

Welcome to the world of shared hosting... Sad

What I have also noted is that backups being run can also cause temporary slow-downs.

Glad you are doing the Optimize DB as this is something that I would do weekly on a busy site.

oyjord · Hangin' Around Joined: Aug 25, 2006 Posts: 44

Guardian2003 wrote:

Have you considered it might be network related and nothing to do with the site?
You could easily do a tracert when it slows down to see if there is a network problem. If your not sure how to do that just ask Smile

Thanks!

I have considered this. I've been experiencing the slowdown though, now at two different hosts. Both times I've run traces and they look just fine. I've had users across the country using different ISPs also run traces when they've seen the slowdown, and their traces are fine, too.

I'm starting to feel like we have a real Scooby Doo Mystery here! Wink

oyjord · Hangin' Around Joined: Aug 25, 2006 Posts: 44

I pay for a dedicated IP every month. I don't know if that has any bearing on the matter, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

montego · Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 1:07 pm

No, dedicated IP shouldn't have anything to do with this. It is simply server load I suspect. Like I said, welcome to shared web hosting.

slackervaara · Worker Joined: Aug 26, 2007 Posts: 112

Maybe you could complain to your web hotel? My web hotel shuts down immediately sites that get to much traffic and slow down others. It is a low budget web hotel with 3 USD/month. On my site the MySQL server seems mostly to be overloaded.