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What's up with the web server?
I have some concerns about the performance of the KittyCatS.biz web service.
First off, I'll speak to those comments I'm seeing on other threads about posts going missing. The forum software updates the last post time and username whenever a change is made. So, there are times when you'll see it saying so-and-so made the last post at such-a-time but, when you look, that's not the last post and it's not by the named person. That usually means the someone edited (or removed) an earlier post. The clue to this is usually that clicking the Last link from the Forums list will take you somewhere into the midst of the thread, instead of to the very last post.
My issue, though, is with the extreme time it takes for some pages to load.
Recently, I've been looking intensely at Charm's Pedigree and Cattery pages. What I've noticed is these pages can take anywhere from a few second to upwards of a minute to load.
This morning, I've been running some monitoring tools. What I've found is that network latency is NOT the cause. I've been monitoring the time it takes for a response from the various important points:
* The gateway router from my cable company to a backbone. Located in Dallas, TX.
* The gateway router from the backbone to the hosting company. Located in Alexandria, VA (Washington, DC).
* The local router directly connected to KittyCatS.biz. Located near Cleveland, OH.
* The machine hosting KittyCatS.biz. Also in Cleveland, of course.
I did this to ensure that network issues were not the cause of the excessive delays I'm seeing. What I found was about what I expected. Network issues are not the cause. Typical round-trip times were generally around 60 milliseconds (about right for my cable modem). Worst case times were around 200 milliseconds (not bad .. Charm was logging into Second Life to cause those).
So, while network latency might cause a fraction of a second's delay, it cannot account for the seconds-to-minutes delay I've been seeing.
Next, I checked the responsiveness of the main KittyCatS.biz home page. For this, I used some web-based tools. I didn't see much wrong here. The page begins loading almost immediately. I takes about 4 seconds to load, but that's *ALL* because of the two huge images on the main page.
So, I went into my Firefox and started timing how long it took to for Charm's Pedigree Roster page to load.
THAT is where I finally found the wide variation in time. Typically, her 600-or-so cats load in about 2 seconds. I'm *NOT* talking about the page-display time (how long it takes for everything to load and the page to be fully displayed). All I measured was the time it took for the base HTML to be produced and transmitted by the pedigree2.php script.
This leads me to conclude that there is something causing a great deal of slow-down on the web server, and it's only related to the Pedigree and Cattery PHP scripts.
My first guess would be memory page swapping. There's simply not enough physical memory for all the PHP processes and this is causing page swapping.
My next guess would be something having to do with the SQL database. Perhaps it, and not the PHP processes, is page swapping. Or perhaps there are too many concurrent requests for the current configuration.
But, whatever the cause, it's related mainly to the Pedigree and Cattery PHP scripts. Yes, I've noticed occasional problems with other portions of the web server, such as the forum PHP scripts. But that is generally rare, as compared to how often I'm seeing dismal response times from the Pedigree and Cattery.
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