Charas-Project
Off-Topic => All of all! => Topic started by: Alex on January 31, 2014, 03:55:29 AM
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Howdy, I'm alive!
As someone maybe noticed, there are issues with the complete resources files.
That's because of those damned hosting guys, that emailed me stating we were having too many files per folder, as well as violating some not-better-defined resources policy (about disk and CPU).
FYI, about the number of file per folder, they wrote:
Due to this, web access has been revoked on the directories.
And in general they also wrote me (and without any prior notice) this:
Due to the serious nature of this situation, your hosting account will be suspended if you do not resolve this issue by 2/2/2014. Please note that if the hosting account is suspended, any websites you host on this plan will be disabled.
Honestly, I was SOOOOOOOOO pissed off when I saw that. They put down the entire files of complete resources without even a notice!
2 quick things I replied them immediately:
I understand your will of solving this, but stating "fix in 2 days or we will suspend" seems just unappropriate to me.
I wonder if you would be that fast in eventually returning my money (paid up to 2018) in the event I would decide to leave.
Number of files per folder:
Now you're preventing web access, but really you never told me about such limit.
And I can ensure you there were already more than 1024 files per folder since when I moved this domain on you.
A pre-alert instead of suddenly preventing web access after years of being there would had been more appropriate.
Then, I fixed the issue myself by splitting files in folders, to match their rules. And I sent this last reply to them:
While waiting for your reply, maximum file/folder issue has been solved.
Now no folder contains more than 1000 files.
Kindly give web access back for those folder ASAP.
Considering the rush you wanted to push on me, I really expect a reply within a couple hours maximum here.
Still waiting for their reply.... :P
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...man, that's incredibly dickish of them!
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Not the best customer support, is it?
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STILL waiting for a reply.....
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Write them a nasty letter complete with curse words and feces.
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They're Americans.
Considering today is Friday and Sat/Sun will be the SUPERBOWL weekend... I'm not really expecting any other ping back before Monday :)
I already fixed the folder issue, and Osmose already updated the forums to the latest versions.
So now, no matter how much traffic this place generates now, they'd better not even THINK at touching this hosting.
If not our future, these are our memories. Doesn't matter, both will be defended.
Words of wisdom in perfect old-school RPG style!
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They're Americans.
Considering today is Friday and Sat/Sun will be the SUPERBOWL weekend... I'm not really expecting any other ping back before Monday :)
Don't stereotype; I'm working both days this weekend :p
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So now, no matter how much traffic this place generates now, they'd better not even THINK at touching this hosting.
If not our future, these are our memories. Doesn't matter, both will be defended.
Words of wisdom in perfect old-school RPG style!
Hell yeah. It's comforting to know that things have been dealt with.
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Sai, hehehe... honestly, I really feel you.
24/7 wasn't enough, so I started to deal with every single Country in the World.
Playing with timezones, now I'm officially a 32/8!
But yeah. We've dealt with things. Now waiting for their move... and to have the CR back too!
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First victory: CR are back!
Now they still claim we're overutilizing CPU resources. I'm currently downloading some logs, perhaps there's some page online that's invoking one of the generator's script too often... Let's see.
If I'll find anything, eventually I'll just ban some IP some way
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First victory: CR are back!
Now they still claim we're overutilizing CPU resources. I'm currently downloading some logs, perhaps there's some page online that's invoking one of the generator's script too often... Let's see.
If I'll find anything, eventually I'll just ban some IP some way
Well a victory is a victory!
It sounds like this hosting company is just terrible. How can a 10 year old website with a handful of active users be 'over utilizing' CPU resources? A good hosting company should have a modern stack to host their sites so they don't run into these stupid problems, or at the very least implement some sort of throttling for the CPU or pages that eat up lots of CPU.
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Extra update. They wrote again.
The claim is no more about CPU usage... they say we're using more than 4 TB or memory per day (yes, no mispell - THEY SAY FOUR TERABYTES PER DAY!).
Testing the best I was able to find was the forum file included in the normal site to show you if you have new PMs, but still it was 4.25 MB per hit. Slightly high in any case.
So, to verify if it was the cause, I temporary left that there only in the homepage, but disabled it from all of the other pages (especially the CR one).
So next step is to wayt a couple days for them to send new stats and see if this foum include was really the cause.
But man... 4TB per day?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? It's like 16,384 hits of 256 Kb each. In the Golden age, perhaps
So now, I'm curious to see what else they can find out.
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Don't you guys understand? Lord Raffles found a job there and is finally executing his plan to destroy Charas! We are doomed!
Seriously though. It's weird that they do seem to try and find any possible reason to shut us down.
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Indeed. Why are they going through so much effort to try and kill the site? I really doubt that we're running that much traffic through here.
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That's pretty damn strange. 4 terabytes, daily? That's Chronicles of Riddickulous.
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Good, I see that complete resources is restored and be available to download again.
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4TB is a goddamn lot.
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We do have some sort of backup in case the host up and deletes the files, yes?
That sort of thing happened over on Blip.tv, where a lot of people lost their videos. Of course, they gave warning (by a few months I guess) of the change in policy, but not enough warning to backup everything that was on there (which one group attempted to do - they got about a tenth of the total content).
So please do be careful. I'd hate to see this site lose data. I may be too busy to program these last few years, but I still come back here now and then and I always feel great to see this site is still up and running. I'm hoping to get my nephews (now 10) into programming soon, and with any luck we'll be getting a Raspberry Pi soon and working on retro games within a couple years.
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We're still fighting. And they're not proving to be much helpful to identify what the cause of this "4TB" is.
So, I am proceeding with tests, as the only thing they give me is a generic memory usage per day thing - which means every test I make needs at least 1 day just to show whant happened.
Right now I temporary put down the entire CR area. This way, by tomorrow, I should know if the amountof RAM was related to those or something else.
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Man that's strange. It's not like were hosting entire videos of data. I really don't see 4 TBs. I just don't see where that number can possibly come from.
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Well, don't make cofusion.
They're not talking about 4TB of Bandwidth, but 4TB of used memory for script running. Still high though.
However, as they're not providing something useful, I made my own checks. I found that they allow me to download the raw acees logs, so I was able to write script of mine to parse them.
Some interesting data I found, related to Sunday.
To the sensible pages I was checking (mostly: complete resources, the generators and the forum) we had:
- 236368 hits from regular IPs
- 41142 hits from bots and crawlers
About the pages visited by regular IPs:
- images from complete resources (non php files): 32003
- resources.php (the file browsing CR pages): 2141
- resources_download.php (the file to click to download a CR): 371
- viewer (the generators file showing each of the small images we have there): 184076
- forum (total accesses): 17777
So, what now?
For now I've added a mroe strict robots.txt, let's see if that will prevent all those hits from bots.
Out of that, the only real big PHP thing I see there is the viewer. I'll have to dig to separate the IPs accessing specifically that.
And that's it for now. Phew!
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Next step. No replies from them, but I played a little with math.
If you're curious about that, let me share some math :)
This is the latest reply I sent them:
Dear staff,
This reply includes some important new information.
So, please revise it fully - this time an appropriate reply on the written topics will be needed.
I made a parse of our log file relative to Friday January 31th, this file:
ex20140201000001-72.167.131.126.log
For that day, these are the data you sent me, as demonstration of our violation:
Date Username # procs CPU time Memory Usage
2014-01-31 charashosting 219836 19545 secs (0.09/proc) 4125.27 GB (19.22 MB/proc)
And here are the results and tech data you'd need to read about.
For each specific entry I've also added the consumed memory per hit detected by placing memory_get_usage(true) in the page.
File: ex20140201000001-72.167.131.126.log
Total accesses: 388395
Detailed accesses by sensible locations:
- resources: 186767 (these are not php files, but direct links to images)
- resources.php: 13669 - 256Kb (php file showing pages)
- resources_download.php: 3219 - 256Kb (php file generating images)
- viewer.php: 132394 - 256Kb (php file generating images)
- forum: 19667 - 4,25 to 5,5 MB (average 4,875, all of the forum's scripts)
- php generic: 17687 - unknown (other unmatched PHP entries)
- others: 14992 - unknown (other unmatched entries, but NOT php files)
So, picking the specific PHP files I monitored, the used REAL memory size is:
(13669+3219+132394)*256 = 38216192 KB = 37320,5 MB = 36,45 GB = 0,035 TB
19667*5,5 = 108168,5 MB = 105,63 GB = 0,1 TB
This makes a total of 168949 PHP calls for 142,08 GB registered used script memory.
In your log you say we had 219836 processes for a total of 4125,27 GB. Subtracting my results, what's left is:
219836-168949 = 50887 procs
4125,27-142,08 = 3983,19 GB = 4078786,56 MB
So, accordingly to your logs and my pure math detailed here, the unchecked pages should be:
4078786,56/50887 = 80,15 MB/Proc.
Honestly, don't you think this is a little... absurd???
Moreover, a simple phpinfo shows we have a limit of 64M per process. So 80,15 MB/Proc cannot simply be.
With these numbers, the issue seems to be on your monitor.
I am sending you this because I want to make clear why I keep saying it's not something I can fix myself.
Even if you do not provide "help on custom coded solutions", it's clear there is something not matching here.
So, if you really want the issue fixed (and you surely want), you'd really need to help me understand how this math is even possible.
Looking froward to hearing for you,
Alexander Bonivento
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Math. Hard to argue with numbers. Hopefully, that'll get 'em to cooperate.
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Love that reply : p
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Frickin stick it to 'em, bro.
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UPDATE. Their reply.
And I'm not kidding, I get it with this very same formatting:
Dear Sir/Madam, Thank you for your response. We have verified that your CPU and Memory Usage are still too excessive for shared hosting. At this point, we will not provide a new report on your usage, as it appears this has caused some confusion throughout our correspondence. However, your top accessed URLs are below, as this information may be helpful during your review: Top accessed unique URLs sorted by hitcount: 2137 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php 1729 - GET charas-project.net/resources_down.php 343 - GET charas-project.net/index.php 210 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/charas_r.php?lang=en 200 - GET www.charas-project.net/forum/Themes/charas2/css/index.css?rc5 (http://www.charas-project.net/forum/Themes/charas2/css/index.css?rc5) 191 - POST www.charas-project.net/forum/index.php?action=register2 (http://www.charas-project.net/forum/index.php?action=register2) 190 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=115 186 - GET www.charas-project.net/forum/Themes/default/scripts/script.js?rc5 (http://www.charas-project.net/forum/Themes/default/scripts/script.js?rc5) 186 - GET www.charas-project.net/forum/Themes/charas2/scripts/theme.js?rc5 (http://www.charas-project.net/forum/Themes/charas2/scripts/theme.js?rc5) 165 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=14014 158 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=4965 157 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=8106 157 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=4888 157 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=4205 157 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/charas_r.php?checkurls=1&lang=en&new=&newtext= 156 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=9650 156 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=4524 156 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=3833 156 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=22134 156 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=21026 156 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=14749 155 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=9649 155 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=5852 155 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=4887 155 - GET charas-project.net/charas2/viewer.php?base_sizeset=1&row=3&scale=2&img=3119 To resolve this matter, you will need to either find a solution to ensure that your application is suited for shared hosting, or move your website to a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Server. You can find the details of our shared hosting limitations in the Hosting Agreement at the following link: http://www.godaddy.com/agreements/showdoc.aspx?pageid=HOSTING_SA (http://www.godaddy.com/agreements/showdoc.aspx?pageid=HOSTING_SA) Your hosting account is scheduled for review on February 7, 2014. However, please note that if we find your account begins negatively impacting the shared hosting server, your account may need to be suspended before that date. We appreciate your cooperation and understanding in this matter. Please let us know if there is anything else we can assist you with. Thank you, Tiffany H. Professional Hosting Support As we value your feedback about the service you received, please take a moment to complete the short survey linked at the bottom of this email.
For your information, this is the reply I quickly sent them:
Tiffany,
As I asked for, replies on the specific topics I wrote were expected.
Please look at them, and try to explain the math I wrote.
I was extremely specific in my analysis, while your reply still add nothing to the discussion.
BTW, from you TOS:
In the event the bandwidth or disk space usage of your website presents a risk to the stability, performance or uptime of our servers, data storage, networking or other infrastructure, you may be required to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated Server, or we may take action to restrict the resources your website is utilizing.
Sorry, but in there I can't really read anything about "shutting us down". Eventually "restricting our resources".
If that's the case and if we're overusing some resource, why can't you simply do as described and limit them? IE, forcing a cap?
Regards,
Alexander Bonviento
And just to be safe, I'm considering to take it back and move everything into a VPS of mine I already have (for my work, I have a full virtualization server with some space).
Right now I'm starting to move files, just in case those crazy horses will do something stupid...
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What host are you using that gives you customer service this terrible?
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You can see it the reply. It's the terrible GoDaddy... I know they aren't the best (at all!) however, at least till now, they did good for 6 years.
Looks like they want to lose a customer
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Yeah I just caught that myself. I've heard other bad things about them.
Doing some very quick math myself. The top two pages have ~4000 hits, but then decline steeply from there. So I'll use 10000 hits as a rough estimate for total hits. To use 4TBs of memory, that means that each page load would use roughly 400 MBs of memory. I realize that this site uses more memory than the average site because a lot of the UI is calculated on the server, but to use 400 MBs of memory each page load is.... essentially impossible under normal circumstances.
Do you have any large recursion algorithms that may eat up a lot of memory? Otherwise is it possible that a long running script has a memory leak? Apparently PHP's memory management isn't the best out there, and you can get a memory leak with circular dependencies.
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I thought that as well.
So I've downloaded the full access log and made a parser of it myself. Extracting every single line of every single access.
That's there the math from my prev reply came from.
However, in any case, phpinfo confirms there's a memory limit of 64MB, so something higher than that per script would not be possible in any case.
Also, it's ages no one is doing coding stuffs in here. I found most users being bots and (possibly) spammers.
But again, I've analyzed all of the possible pages from the logs.
At this point, if they seem to ignore the math I provided, am I allowed to think I'm talking with someone... stupid?
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Signature related.
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At this point, if they seem to ignore the math I provided, am I allowed to think I'm talking with someone... stupid?
It's not that you're allowed to, it's that you ought to.
I venture one of three things happened.
1.) Tiffany made a mistake, looked at the report for the whole server instead of the charas shared instance, mistakenly thought the server's stats where solely charas stats, them simply never bothered to look again. (or is simply can not tell the difference).
2.) I hear GoDaddys servers are pretty full. They may be trying to push people into buying dedicated servers through shady means. It wouldn't be the first time they did something like that.
3.) Tiffany is mentally challenged.
Edit:
Signature related.
I don't think I every read that before, but it is great. I believe I may steal that for a facebook status in the near future.
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FYI, I'm copying everything down right now (just to be sure).
I'll wait for their reply, but I'm already almost there from being able to move everything away. At that point, I'd leave there just the DNS to keep the domain and redirect to my own servers.
Only thing I don't like is there's no money back... at most, they give you "credit", but consider I already paid this until 2018!!!!
I'd love to smash them and get cash back. But seems not possible.
Oh well, in that event I will have free services from Godaddy forever (Charas is probably the most expensive thing I ever did in there :P )
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Let's see.
The move is done. So please let me know if you see anything looking wrong, in any section of the website.
If can see this, then you're in a new server. More details soon.
Goodbye, GoDaddy!
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Well the one thing I notice is the "seffaq team" logo in the upper right corner. I think the "welcome prpl_mage" used to be there.
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Fixed.
Some issues with path of themes, now shoud be ok
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Just read the whole discussion. Holy crap, what a headache. Since you moved everything, did you ever get a response back from Tiffany?
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Wasn't Tiffany but Jess replying to very last emails. Pretty minimal tough, here are the latest ones.
Jess,
yes, I've redirected the DNS to a VPS on an hypervisor of my own.
I was able to check every single detail of the server in there, and was unable to see anything similar to what GoDaddy reported earlier.
I may agree with your current analysis and I can see your point. Unfortunately the early replies I've got were not like this and just too generic (and, for this, little irritating too).
So now the move is done. The server will stay in my other VPS and I'm going to cancel this hosting on GoDaddy.
Hope we will have better luck in future.
Dear Alexander Bonivento, Thank you for your response and attention to this matter. I understand that you have canceled your hosting account. We appreciate your feedback and look forward to assisting you in the future. It does not appear as though further assistance is required at this time. Please let us know if you have any further questions, comments, or concerns
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I wonder if they just pick a random name to tack on the end of their emails. It's not like we'd ever find it.
-Laura