Host claims 63% resource usage

Regular Joined: Sep 20, 2004 Posts: 79

Can someone with knowlege on resource usage on nuke give me some info here. My host is claiming that im using 63% of the mysql server resources. I find this number to be fairly large considering my site is a game guild site and not a large commerce or information site. I have probalby around 50-100 guild members that hit the site on a daily basis to read the forums. I do have some other things that use sql db like a guild roster, a picture gallery, a dkp site. These other functions are used but not on a heavy basis.

My daily hits show as
58149 26.80%
32834 27.95%
983 32.80%
199 21.26%
153 33.63%
358044 18.07%
This is off webalizer and obviously not unique hits a day but should give you a general idea.
Thx for any info.

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

Its a game server ?

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 11:25 am

No- Just a game guild site. [url]http:www.dreadguard.com[/url]

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 12:41 pm

well your site loading time and speed is ok,..but you dont have anything instaloled on the server?
any games stuff?
if not i dont think theres any truth in the heavy load story...

registered · Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 1:04 pm

Heh! Nice theme! Wink

Are you running a chat server by any chance? Chatrooms chew up server resources like mad!

How about any other proggies running continuously in the background, like MS-Analysis in dynamic mode?

Are you running on a virtual account? Semi-dedicated? VPS? Et cetera... Depending on the way the server is setup, your site might need more memory. For instance, 63% of 256K isn't a lot, you know?

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 1:30 pm

Nothing that would run at a constant.
I would of installed ms-analysis just so I could have a search function to scan ip's that are linked to user accounts but the site was down so I couldn't get the program. No chat programs. Yeah im running on a shared rs200 package from http://rackslash.com/
I have miniumal install really. 7.6 3.1 backend. I have a guild roster on there but that is only loaded when someone views it. I have the picture gallery Another program that only loads when in use. I run a dkp site on a subdomain which is only used when viewed, nuke sent with ip tracking turned on. I do use a signature program that runs with my roster so users can have a nice sig that pulls out their character info but this is still only used when someone loads the page. They are claming the 63% resource usage comes from forums itself.

I am starting to lean that their mysql server is a hunk of crap lol.
This is the 3rd d*** host i've gone through this year haha. The problem I have is we do use a decent amount of bandwidth and I do like to host in game movies so I'm always looking for a package that has a large amount of bandwidth. Alot of places i'm starting to find that offer 100GB at least with a decent price but they just can't seem to be stable enough. I also run the payment for the hosting and our voice server host off donations so I try to keep the price down to a minium.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

Ask your host to provide you the details of what processes are chewing this up. They should be able to tell you that w/o any problem. That will help isolate the issue.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 1:49 pm

Hrm...

If you have shell access, try running:

Code:

procinfo -d -r -n2

It might be interesting to see what it reports...

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 4:31 pm

No luck on the shell access. At least I don't see any in cpanel.
I wrote them another letter asking for the information on the processes being used.
They keep giving me some bs about give us 3 days to monitor.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 4:43 pm

procinfo is not a standard utility with most distributions so I doubt if you have it. There are other tools to provide the information but since you don't have root access then it's probably a moot point anyway.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 5:47 pm

I sent in another mail and asked them what processes are being chewed up and this is the only responce they give me lol.

Quote:

Hello,

Our all servers are dell products, dual xeon 3.2GHz with 2GB Memory.

Somehow your account is using extremely high % of MySQL over 30%, which means it uses a lot of memory and CPU.

At this point, your account is still used a lot of MySQL. Please give us time so we can monitor accurate % of phpnuke.

Thank you.

Posted: Sun Oct 23, 2005 8:43 pm

That doesnt sound very informative to me!

Quote:

<snip>Our all servers are dell products, dual xeon 3.2GHz with 2GB Memory.

- so? This doesnt mean they have been configured correctly or have not had too many shared accounts added.

Quote:

Somehow your account is using extremely high % of MySQL over 30%, which means it uses a lot of memory and CPU.

Somehow?
They should be able to provide the exact amount of individual resources used for cpu, memory, apache, mysql etc.

Check your cPanel error logs to see if there are any consistent dead url's

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:00 am

Hello,

It looks like causing by phpnuke and maybe /dkp/. You may need to update to latest version.

Also you may need to control modules of those scripts.

Please optimize on those things and let us know. (ASAP)

After change, we will monitor again.

Thank you.

these morons are about as much help as an umbrella on a sunny day.

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:05 am

What is /dkp/ ?

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:18 am

Dkp is a point system used in high end guilds to keep track of loot. The funny thing is dkp would not even make that many calls and is only used when someone is "using it" which is a rarity you bascially go there a couple times a week to check your points after a large game raid.
Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login!

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:19 am

Okay, I went over to http://forums.eqdkp.com/ and took a look around and discovered that yes, this certainly may be the cause of your problems. I downloaded the code and I can only say ... HOLY COW. There are a ton of MySQL queries going on. Remember, ROBOTS may be going in there and making those queries, so it is NOT just users you need to worry about. Permission it so ONLY registered users can see it, use it, run it.

A quick look at the forums finds that there are threads about infinite loops of queries and other SQL intensive problems with versions including 1.30. I would suggest that your seriously look into this with them and find out if there any patches to fix these problems and to reduce the number of queries that are being made.

In other words, this doens't look like a nuke problem.

Steph

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:23 am

I would start by changing the permissions so only registered users have access to this program. That might make an immediate impact! Make that change and ask your host to start measuring the impact.

If google or inkatomi got hung up in there, that couldn't certainly be screwing you over with huge amounts of queries.

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:24 am

Hmm i'll look into that but the problem is that my visitors wouldn't even be at the dkp site the past 3 days that they have been moderating. The actuall dkp sit is used rarely because the only time you need to visit it is when large raids are held and the points are updated. Which is once a week.

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 11:26 am

hmm never thought of trying ot make it into a module and use nsn group to cut other users off. I could probalby use nukewrap for this, I just dont have the knowledge to make other programs into modules.

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 12:09 pm

Well, you wouldn't even need NSN for this, you could use Nuke's default permissions system, but this is critical because there is no need for the bots to be in there.

Now in this regard, at least open your robots.txt file and make the following change:
find:

Code:

User-agent: *

and add under it:

Code:

Disallow: /dkp/

The bitch is, most robots today ignore the robots.txt file (though they aren't supposed to) but this might help anyway.

In any event, you need to figure out a way to restrict access to this program as I highly suspect that this is the root of your problems. Maybe someone else on the dkp team can figure out how to convert this to a Nuke module. If not, there is one other solution. You can use CGI Authentication to keep the bots out of it.

What you would basically be doing is using Apache to assign a login ID and password for access to those screens. You can handle this by just assigning a group ID and password that everyone uses and posting it on your domain as an announcement. This will let everyone in, but keep the bots out.

To do this, we need to add some Apache level security...

So, first we'll create an .htaccess file that will get dropped into the /dkp/ directory.
Open an editor and add this code to it:

Code:

AuthUserFile /path/to/your/password/file/.htpasswd


AuthGroupFile /dev/null


AuthName "dkp is restricted to keep the bots out"


AuthType "Basic"





<Limit GET POST>


require valid-user


</Limit>

You need to change the /path/to/your/password/file/.htpasswd to indicate a physical path to your hosting space that is ABOVE the folder where your public internet files are.

For example, on my host, the physical path to my public files is something like "/home/stephbenoit/public_html/" what we are interested in is the level before /public_html/. At the "stephbenoit" level, we want to create a new folder ... the reason being is that it is not accessible by the outside world, only the server itself.
At that level, we want to create a new folder.. let's call it "dkppasswords"

So in this example, we would change that line (above in the .htaccess file that will be dropped into your /public_html/dkp/ directory) to have it say:

Code:

AuthUserFile /home/stephbenoit/dkppasswords/.htpasswd

So my end result is a .htaccess file that says:

Code:

AuthUserFile /home/stephbenoit/dkppasswords/.htpasswd


AuthGroupFile /dev/null


AuthName "dkp is restricted to keep the bots out"


AuthType "Basic"





<Limit GET POST>


require valid-user


</Limit>

Then upload that (your version of it) to the /public_html/dkp/ folder.

Now, we need to create the password that will be used by everyone to access this directory and the dkp program. We'll put this file inside that dkppasswords directory that we just created. You'll notice that we named that file above as ".htpasswd" the reason being is that by starting with a period, it is a "hidden" file on the server.

I was going to give you a program to run that would have you create a password, but I figured let's keep it simple so I did the work for you. If you want, I can point you to a program that you can run on your server to create encrypted passwords.. just let me know. ... Anyway....

Open up an editor and create a new file called .htpasswd and in it place the following:

Code:

dkp:*$hxlin3hU1DM

What this does is create the ID of "dkp" and the password of "password". Quite simply that is what everyone would use for access to dkp.... you can of course change the dkp (anything before the colon) to be whatever ID you want, for example, you could make it

Code:

gamers:*$hxlin3hU1DM

and then the ID would be gamers instead of dkp.... PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS CASE SENSITIVE!

Anyway, upload that new .htpasswd file to the new /dkppasswords/ directory that we just created.

Okay, so you've uploaded the new .htaccess file that we created to the /public_html/dkp/ folder and the new .htpasswd password file to the /whatever-before-public_html/dkppasswords/ folder. Now we are ready to go.

Whenever you try to run anything in the dkp folder, you will be prompted for an ID and password. Simply enter dkp in the ID field and password in the password field and you are in and the bots are out.

You can then post a forum sticky about this new ID and password or simply do a mass email to your users explaining why you had to do this.

In any event, it is just a matter of letting everyone know that the folder is password protected and giving them the ID and password to get into it.

If you check the "remember" checkbox on the screen, you won't have to enter the ID / Password every time, your browser will remember that info.

Anyway, I've tried to make this as simple and fully explained as possible and I know this will solve your dkp problems as relating to bots, but you should still talk to the dkp people bout infinite loop issues and patches for their code, regardless. This will at least make sure that bots cannot run dkp queries!

I hope it helps, let us know!

Steph

Posted: Tue Oct 25, 2005 1:52 pm

Just secured another host once I get everything reinstalled i'll give that a shot.

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2005 10:06 am

Anyone know why after a full migration of site that I the news section, right blocks would dissapear and when I log into admin it logs me in but only shows logout of admin option?

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2005 2:24 pm

Assuming you're using a patched version of some kind, make sure that your admin.php file has the define('ADMIN_FILE', true); statement at the top and that your theme.php file is using
if (defined('INDEX_FILE')) {
instead of
if ($index == 1) {.

Also, in the blocks where you see
$index = 1;
modify it to read
define('INDEX_FILE',1);

If you are not using a patched series, then make sure that those files are all using the $index code instead of the INDEX_FILE code.

Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:07 pm

index file in theme and admin. Wasn't sure which block file to check.

I had the host migrate from my other host which was a full working site. Why I was wondering what the hell could of happend lol. Teach me for trying to save time haha. Thought maybe I had to reset some permissions on files but I don't see how that would effect teh main page news and right blocks not showing. Admin loging in but not showing me anything but admin/logout has me baffled to.