Server Keeps Crashing...

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Posted by metroidnemesis13, 07-19-2008, 03:32 PM
System specs: Intel Celeron Proccesor 256 RAM (yeah I know...) Debian Etch Joomla! 1.5 Okay... so, here goes. Recently, I have switched from Siteground hosting services and everything was fine. Now I have changed over to a dedicated server that resides at my house. I'm routing DNS through FreeDNS (freedns.afraid.org). For a week or two, the server was fine. Recently, we started working on the website on the new server (posting new articles, changing the theme, adding some plugins, etc.) and it's steadily gotten worse and worse about, when we save changes to something, or post an article, the website will go offline. Eventually, the website will come back. My question is: What is causing this? The actual server isn't shutting off, so It has to be something between my modem and the user. Is my modem just shutting off because it's overloaded? (that seems sort of improbable) Or, is it a DNS issue? (I have a Dynamic DNS system set up that is working fine) Thanks in advance
Posted by vibrokatana, 07-19-2008, 03:37 PM
Most home connections have a paltry upload. Does it say something like connection reset? Or is it returning an error?
Posted by XWS Chris, 07-19-2008, 03:48 PM
I wouldn't suggest trying to run a server on a home connection for anything other than personal use. Most ISPs don't even allow it in their ToS. You may want to upgrade to a business-class internet connection or consider a different solution. As for your problem I would expect that it is the upload bandwidth. Occam's razor
Posted by Dan_EZPZ, 07-19-2008, 03:49 PM
Can you still SSH in? Anything in the error logs? Can you ping the box when its down? You're going to have to dig deeper - it could be anything.
Posted by ldcdc, 07-19-2008, 04:27 PM
Experiment with removing some of those. One of them could be the culprit. Also try to determine what happens, what is the bottleneck. Is the CPU usage very high, is the swap being used a lot? Try using top and vmstat. If the plugins are absolutely needed, and they are the cause of it all, a server upgrade might be the only solution. I'm moving this to the technical forum.
Posted by ExileonMain, 07-20-2008, 05:54 PM
He's right. It could be anything. You need to dig deeper. Setup nagios on another server and keep an eye on what ports are going down and for how long. Also, could be your router at home? It could be bad or maybe (if it's doing the dynamic dns for you), it might not be keeping up with your ISP's ever changing IP. Just like the previous poster, most ISP's don't give big uploads or even decent ones because they don't want home users running a business or high bandwidth off their home connection. They might be doing strange things for particular ports. (For example like P2P ports but maybe even other ports like 80, 21, etc, etc) However, I'm hoping one day when VerizonFIOS comes to my neighborhood, things will change. I'm dreaming of a day where we all can buy 100mbps to 1000mbps (both up and down) and we can do whatever we want with it.
Posted by hbhb, 07-21-2008, 12:27 AM
the first thing came through my mind is the DNS/Resolver & bandwidth. perhaps you can start with that.
Posted by vikasharma, 07-21-2008, 07:04 AM
You need to upgrade the bandwidth of your internet connection.

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