A traceroute reveals the requests are timing out for a bit after they reach mediatemple.net. Looks like they either have you on a slow server, have a bandwidth crunch in that router, or don’t know what they are doing. Considering one of the guys that started Media Temple bummed cigarettes off me all day at a conference I attended, my guess is the latter.
Well, at least we have an additional piece of the puzzle. Would you mind comparing it to SparkleCityBlogs.com, which is more-or-less the same set up, but on a different host? I don’t know how to do the traceroute magic.
SparkleCityBlogs.com was nice and snappy (go Dreamhost!):
traceroute to sparklecityblogs.com (67.205.6.171), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 21.9.344a.static.theplanet.com (74.52.9.33) 42.176 ms 22.557 ms 55.576 ms 2 po201.dsr02.dllstx2.theplanet.com (70.87.254.141) 0.367 ms 0.355 ms 0.243 ms 3 te9-4.dsr02.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.125) 0.620 ms te7-4.dsr02.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.121) 0.609 ms te9-4.dsr02.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.125) 0.483 ms 4 et3-2.ibr04.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.25) 0.358 ms 0.358 ms 0.367 ms 5 c1.fd.5746.static.theplanet.com (70.87.253.193) 40.216 ms 40.202 ms 40.211 ms 6 cr1-eqix-peer.sje007.internap.net (206.223.116.134) 40.594 ms 40.447 ms 40.586 ms 7 cr2-cr1.sje007.internap.net (66.79.146.190) 49.707 ms 49.570 ms 49.706 ms 8 cr2.lax009.inappnet.cr2.sje007.internap.net (66.79.147.6) 49.958 ms 49.693 ms 49.955 ms 9 cr1-cr2.lax009.internap.net (66.79.146.205) 49.958 ms 49.696 ms 49.705 ms 10 core1.lax.inappnet-12.cr1.lax009.internap.net (66.79.149.130) 43.463 ms 43.443 ms 43.710 ms 11 border21.po2-20g-bbnet2.lax.pnap.net (216.52.255.102) 43.462 ms 43.448 ms 43.460 ms 12 newdream-8.border21.lax.pnap.net (216.52.220.146) 42.713 ms 42.700 ms 42.711 ms 13 ip-66-33-201-114.dreamhost.com (66.33.201.114) 217.335 ms 43.324 ms 46.583 ms 14 apache2-igloo.gravano.dreamhost.com (67.205.6.171) 43.592 ms 55.439 ms 50.830 ms
Now when I try AVLLive.com it is much faster:
traceroute to avllive.com (72.47.234.163), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 21.9.344a.static.theplanet.com (74.52.9.33) 0.835 ms 0.707 ms 0.867 ms 2 po201.dsr01.dllstx2.theplanet.com (70.87.254.137) 0.369 ms 0.356 ms 0.243 ms 3 te9-4.dsr01.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.117) 0.496 ms te7-4.dsr01.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.113) 0.609 ms te9-4.dsr01.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.117) 0.484 ms 4 et3-1.ibr04.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.87.253.9) 0.358 ms 0.358 ms 0.368 ms 5 ge5-3.br02.dal01.pccwbtn.net (63.218.23.25) 0.745 ms 0.731 ms 0.742 ms 6 avanz.ge3-1.2.cr01.lax03.pccwbtn.net (63.218.91.30) 37.718 ms 37.702 ms 37.589 ms 7 cr01-2-2.lax4.net2ez.com (64.93.64.74) 37.592 ms 37.579 ms 37.590 ms 8 cust-77.lax4.net2ez.com (64.93.75.14) 37.592 ms 37.579 ms 37.589 ms 9 72.10.63.174 (72.10.63.174) 37.966 ms 38.078 ms 43.835 ms 10 vz241.mediatemple.net (72.47.238.3) 37.841 ms 37.828 ms 37.715 ms 11 mtnxhost.net (72.47.234.163) 37.966 ms 37.829 ms 37.840 ms
I can’t replicate the slowness from earlier, and when I visit the site, it is much faster now. Still, it might be worth keeping an eye on. You could be sharing a server or router with a site that hogs a bunch of bandwidth at various times of the day.
Apart for some very occasional downtime, Dreamhost is outstanding. (It’s SA goon owned, as I understand it, which is a selling point.) There was a period about a year ago when several of their servers died all in the same two-week period, and I had several days of downtime on my sites, but other than that the problems have been pretty minimal.
I’m wondering if part of the problem with AVLLive is the way the syndication works. It continually creates new posts out of RSS feeds, and if there are a lot of them happening at the same time, I’m wondering if that alone would be enough to slow down the site. We’ve talked about creating a cron job to run the whole aggregation/post-creating process a few times a day (during low traffic times), rather than the default of checking/syndication each feed once an hour. Do you think that would address it?
We could do straight-up aggregation if this was an unworkable situation, but we’d lose the nifty local blog archive if we did that.
Apart for some very occasional downtime, Dreamhost is outstanding. (It’s SA goon owned, as I understand it, which is a selling point.) There was a period about a year ago when several of their servers died all in the same two-week period, and I had several days of downtime on my sites, but other than that the problems have been pretty minimal.
Downtime happens no matter where you host. It’s inevitable. What matters is how a company handles it, and Dreamhost does that well.
Steve Shanafelt - 22 October 2009 09:14 PM
I’m wondering if part of the problem with AVLLive is the way the syndication works. It continually creates new posts out of RSS feeds, and if there are a lot of them happening at the same time, I’m wondering if that alone would be enough to slow down the site.
Hells yes that could do it. If your server is doing a lot of number data crunching and shoving things into MySQL, then yes, you could see some slowdown, especially if resources on the server have demands from other sites/users.
Steve Shanafelt - 22 October 2009 09:14 PM
We’ve talked about creating a cron job to run the whole aggregation/post-creating process a few times a day (during low traffic times), rather than the default of checking/syndication each feed once an hour. Do you think that would address it?
If you are on a shared server (I don’t think DH offers dedicated), then you can’t predict low traffic times of the day. A cron job might bring it to its knees if you are ‘saving up’ a lot of data to be dealt with all at once.
Steve Shanafelt - 22 October 2009 09:14 PM
We could do straight-up aggregation if this was an unworkable situation, but we’d lose the nifty local blog archive if we did that.
How about a dedicated server? They are pretty cheap these days. This would allow you ultimate control and you wouldn’t have to share resources with anyone. You could also have much more power for monitoring your resources, tuning your database, and more. That is, if there’s a budget for this project…?
I’m not sure what the setup is for AVLLive, but SparkleCityBlogs is on a shared server. I’ll have to see what our options are.
One idea I had for SparkleCityBlogs was to create a non-public site to aggregate and store the feeds, then use that feed to display on another site. (Or use Yahoo Pipes or something to accomplish the same sort of thing.) That way, it would only only be aggregating from one site once an hour. I’ve done something of the sort with HubCityHeadines.com, which is just straight-up aggregation (very much in the style of popurls.com), and it’s blazingly fast. But it’s also not storing anything beyond the syndication cache.
But part of the idea behind AVLLive is to make it a lot more usable for people who want to rate local blogs, share and rate local blog content, find archived local blog stories, look for trends and generally play with the data, so we’ll have to find a way to get the speed situation under control. And aggregation alone won’t let us do that stuff.
Steve- here’s a somewhat rhetorical question. If a blog has not had a new post since February is it still a blog? If it isn’t, should it be on this list?
I like this site a whole lot better than the Blogasheville one. Thanks.
Steve- here’s a somewhat rhetorical question. If a blog has not had a new post since February is it still a blog? If it isn’t, should it be on this list?
I like this site a whole lot better than the Blogasheville one. Thanks.
We’ll have to set some kind of guidelines before we start promoting the site, definitely. I’d say a blog should have a new post at least in the last two months, and an average number of posts of at least one a month. That seems fairly forgiving. To be eligible for syndication, rather than the blogroll, I’d say a blog must be even more active—maybe an average of one post a week?
So, I tried searching for one of my posts on AVLlive, using the search box at the bottom of the blog. The post is The Great Anarchy Debate, Redone, Part 1. I put in “anarchy” as a keyword, but nothing came up. I searched manually by going through each entry for that day, and I say it was there. Why didn’t the keyword search work?
Well, the basic distinction would be that with BlogAsheville, being a member of it just gives you posting privileges. You still have to choose to post something there, its not automatic, and there are certain guidelines on what you can post. With AVLlive, anything you post on your own blog, if you’re a member, is automatically posted on the site, with no restriction. At least, that’s how I understand it to work.
I noticed avllive.com was not working (nor was the MX site & forum) about 12:30 pm today. The MX site was saying there was a database error. I’ve noticed similar issues other weekdays around the same time.
Finally, MX came back up, but now when I visit avllive.com I see the default Apache 2 CentOS page. What gives?
Well, the basic distinction would be that with BlogAsheville, being a member of it just gives you posting privileges. You still have to choose to post something there, its not automatic, and there are certain guidelines on what you can post. With AVLlive, anything you post on your own blog, if you’re a member, is automatically posted on the site, with no restriction. At least, that’s how I understand it to work.
I noticed avllive.com was not working (nor was the MX site & forum) about 12:30 pm today. The MX site was saying there was a database error. I’ve noticed similar issues other weekdays around the same time.
Finally, MX came back up, but now when I visit avllive.com I see the default Apache 2 CentOS page. What gives?
We were trying to add some very cool functionality to AVLLive, but there appears to have been a runaway script of some kind. Instead of being very slow and having an occasionally huge drag on the server, instead it just crashed the thing. We’re not sure what the problem was, so we’re rebuilding the thing from scratch in a way that will hopefully make it less likely to collapse under its own weight.
We have: It’s the blog syndicator I was talking about earlier that tends to slow the site down, since it’s making individual posts out of each RSS entry. Apart from the slowness, it’s pretty cool. I’ve been using it for one of my Spartanburg sites for about a year, and the performance varies a great deal based on the number of blogs you’re trying to syndicate, and the amount of time you allow for the queries.
The new and improved (and hopefully not at all slow) AVLLive.com should be up and running right now, if you want to take a look. I think this will be a much more interesting site for a much wider range of people, and once I build a standalone blogs feed, it’ll accomplish more-or-less the same thing as the old blog-based design in a much more efficient manner.
On the tech end: We’re using SimplePie and a modified WordPress template to get it working, so it’s pretty lean. The downside is that we no longer have the blogroll syndication, and we’ll probably be making that a separate project.
