21 replies to this topic

[magdalena]

I'm having a continuing problem with my hosting company and my oscommerce site with resource usage.

If someone is running over 5000+ products, I would be interested in knowing where you are hosted and if you are on a dedicated server/have a memory cap.

If anyone is running oscommerce on Midphase, please let me know if you are having any issues.

Any help would be appreciated.  My website is getting unusable.

I have not made in changes to anything but cosmetics.

Thanks.

[Jack_mcs]

The number of products don't necessairly matter. If your site has 0 visitors, you could have a few million products and it wouldn't make any difference, other than in admin. So you need to determine what problems you are having. If it's failing due to something like max connections, then you may need to move to a VPS, or even a dedicated server. If you are using too much bandwidth, then it can probably be fixed by optimizing your site and installijng an image thumbnailer. Moving to a dedicated server will certainly fix whatever problem you are having but the cost may be prohibitive.

[magdalena]

Thank you.  I should have been more clear.  I am asking if anyone has 5000+ products with significant traffic and where they are hosted.  I ask about midphase because my site has been running for years, and years, and now it's not.

I have narrowed down the issue, according to midphase.  The memory is capped at 1GB and I'm exceeding that threshold (I've posted about this one before).  I haven't made any processing type changes.  All other resource allocation seem adequate.

I guess I was looking for a couple of recommendations for good hosting that is known not have significant issues with osCommerce or if anyone has midphase and is experiencing any problems.

[DunWeb]

Lillian,

A 1GB bandwidth use is almost unheard of now as most hosting providers have moved to unlimited bandwidth. The number of products you have is not many at all so you must be generating high traffic.  I would move to a hosting provider with unlimited bandwidth or you could move up to VPS or DS hosting to avoid such restrictions.



Chris

[magdalena]

Thank you.  I do have unlimited bandwidth and storage.  It's server memory that is set at 1 GB and is maxing out.

I also have the website stripped way down.  My norm is 3k-5k.  Right now there is very little traffic which is why all of the problems, I am having, are very suspect.

Edited by magdalena, 20 December 2011 - 03:46 AM.

[Jack_mcs]

Are you sure it is memory you are out of and not disk space?

[DunWeb]

Lillian,

I would check your website to see if someone is taking advantage of a vulnerability and resolve that issue.  As far as the 1GB, if you have a bandwidth restriction of any kind, seek out new hosting. many hosting providers 'basic' hosting packages now start at 10GB hard drive space, which is more than sufficient for most stores.



Chris

[magdalena]

Jack_mcs, on 20 December 2011 - 04:07 AM, said:

Are you sure it is memory you are out of and not disk space?

Yes.  I've gone over this with the hosting company and looked at the resource usage charts.  I have unlimited bandwidth and disk space.  Thanks.

Edited by magdalena, 20 December 2011 - 03:21 PM.

[magdalena]

DunWeb, on 20 December 2011 - 04:14 AM, said:

Lillian,

I would check your website to see if someone is taking advantage of a vulnerability and resolve that issue.  As far as the 1GB, if you have a bandwidth restriction of any kind, seek out new hosting. many hosting providers 'basic' hosting packages now start at 10GB hard drive space, which is more than sufficient for most stores.



Chris

Thanks for your reply.  It's not a bandwidth or disk space issue.  It's a server memory issue, according to them.  Can you point me in the right direction as to how to see if someone is exploiting a vulnerability?  I have the KISSER enhancement, couldn't put that in yesterday because their servers were down.

Sorry for the late replies, the notifications went in spam.

[DunWeb]

Quote

Thanks for your reply. It's not a bandwidth or disk space issue. It's a server memory issue, according to them

On a hosting account, a 'memory' cap is usually defined as bandwidth usage.  I suggest moving to a better service provider.

To check for exploits, I would check your access logs to see if an IP is spending considerable amounts of time on your site. (excluding search engines)



Chris

[magdalena]

DunWeb, on 20 December 2011 - 03:59 PM, said:

On a hosting account, a 'memory' cap is usually defined as bandwidth usage.  I suggest moving to a better service provider.

To check for exploits, I would check your access logs to see if an IP is spending considerable amounts of time on your site. (excluding search engines)



Chris

That's fine.  I have talked to them many times.  I'll do it again.  I'll check the logs.  The original question was I was already looking for a new service and was asking anyone for recommendations on a good hosting company that is running osCommerce.  I will consider the other discussion satisfied at this point.  Thanks for everyone's help.  If you know a good inexpensive hosting company, please let me know.

Edited by magdalena, 20 December 2011 - 04:07 PM.

[Jack_mcs]

magdalena, on 20 December 2011 - 03:24 PM, said:

Thanks for your reply.  It's not a bandwidth or disk space issue.  It's a server memory issue, according to them.  Can you point me in the right direction as to how to see if someone is exploiting a vulnerability?  I have the KISSER enhancement, couldn't put that in yesterday because their servers were down.

Sorry for the late replies, the notifications went in spam.

I'm sure it is annoying beng asked several times if it is really memory. It is just that on a shared server, memeory is usually set to 128 MB, give or take, per account. 1 GB is low for modern servers but that does refer to total server memory. If your site is using that much memory somehow, it seems something isn't setup correctly on the server or, as Chris said, something is using the resources outside of normal traffic..

[magdalena]

Jack_mcs, on 20 December 2011 - 04:07 PM, said:

I'm sure it is annoying beng asked several times if it is really memory. It is just that on a shared server, memory is usually set to 128 MB, give or take, per account. 1 GB is low for modern servers but that does refer to total server memory. If your site is using that much memory somehow, it seems something isn't setup correctly on the server or, as Chris said, something is using the resources outside of normal traffic..

To start, I do appreciate everyone's input.  That being said, this is all I know.  When I noticed the problem by site was blowing off with 404 or 505.  This could be on the landing page, displaying the next page of products or in admin (e.g., adding categories).

When I asked Midphase they said I was exceeding the "memory cap" of 1.0GB.  When I looked in my control panel the resource charts said I had unlimited bandwidth, disk and had a separate chart for memory.  In the category of "nMem" I was exceeding 1.0GB frequently.

I wasn't aware this was happening, before, because I wasn't paying that much attention to the site due to my class load.  The log that I looked at had it occurring for the last month, so it wasn't anything that had been done recently.  This may have been going on for years, but I didn't see it because they just put the 1.0GB cap on when they migrated the server in the spring.

I have tried repeatedly to get Midphase to be more specific about the problem, with no luck.  They just keep saying that is all processes happening within that account at one time.  They have not suggested it was a bandwidth issue.  I'm saying you guys are wrong.  I'm just saying.  I will bring up the memory per account vs. total server memory point to them.

I would wholeheartedly agree, something is up.  I was trying to take the easy way out and just move to a host that was already known to run osCommerce with significant traffic/products and just upgrade to 2.3.1.  Again, normally my site has several thousand products with small traffic (100-200 daily).

The problem I am having is that I am technical enough to understand what I am being told, but not experienced enough to immediately poke holes in every statement they make.  Therefore, I am somewhat at their mercy.

Also, I have other accounts with these guys.  What a mess.

Anyway, I will definitely try to find the problem.  Midphase is suspect because my father has a very small shop running on another account (very low traffic) and his stats sometimes get up to 500MB.  He's on a very clean version of 2.3.1. Something stinks.

In the meantime, I think I'll try site5 unless someone knows they suck.  I tried to talk to siteground and it took me 11 minutes just to get to someone to answer any detailed questions, so they are out.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

[Jack_mcs]

These types of problems are difficult since it can be more than one thing.Without help from the host, other than a general statement, it may take a while to figure out. Moving to a new host may solve the problem or you may find you have the same problem there. It seems really unlikely, to me, that you are exceeding the memory limits given what you said. But a site can be getting a lot of visits that they are not aware of which can cause such problems. Without going through the logs, you won't be able to know if it is a traffic problem or not. And most shop owners don't have the experience to look through the logs, which takes you back to your host. Seems you are in a catch-22 situation.

[velvetpixel]

There are many things a host "can" do but if it's a shared account then they most likely won't as those changes would impact their other clients as well.

Have you thought about getting a VPS so you have full control over MySQL and apache? It would allow you to install caching tools that would allow you to manage a better balance between memory and server load.

Sounds as though you don't have CLI access in your current set up so you can't really trace what MySQL queries are RAM heavy.

You could see if your host will install New Relic for PHP http://newrelic.com/ to help you track down what is eating up your RAM in osCommerce.

Edited by velvetpixel, 20 December 2011 - 09:32 PM.

[magdalena]

Thanks for your suggestions.

[rudolfl]

Just had same issue. Our provider is installing CloudLinux.
The problem is RAM. On shared hosting, I got 256M of RAM and I exceed that, causing server error 500.
Next step is to move to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with 1G of RAM.
I would love to know how I can profile the RAM used by scripts and what can be done to minimise RAM usage.

Same problem is hit with both osCommerce and CreLoaded based sites.

Rudolf

[DunWeb]

@rudolfl

Same advice as given to the OP, change hosting providers to one that does not make restrictions.



Chris

[Jack_mcs]

rudolfl, on 22 February 2012 - 09:43 PM, said:

Just had same issue. Our provider is installing CloudLinux.
The problem is RAM. On shared hosting, I got 256M of RAM and I exceed that, causing server error 500.
Next step is to move to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with 1G of RAM.
I would love to know how I can profile the RAM used by scripts and what can be done to minimise RAM usage.

Same problem is hit with both osCommerce and CreLoaded based sites.

Rudolf

This is the same confusion as mentioned several times in this thread. Memory and bandwidth limits are two different things. A server can offer unlimited bandwidth, though that is a lie, but they cannot offer unlimited memory. This applies to standard server though. Cloud servers are relatively new and different hosts are handling them differently so if you are on a cloud server, there might be such a thing as unlimited memory. Though I doubt it since it still boils down to physical memory somewhere so unlimited simply can't occur.

If you are getting Internal Server errors, your host should be able to tell you exactly why the error is occurring. Moving to a VPS may "fix" the problem but it might just be masking a problem that needs to be fixed. If you are exceeding 256 MB of ram, it is mostly some script that loops and loads a lot of data. My SiteMonitor script will cause such an error on sites that have a very large number of files. It has ways of getting around that problem. So you need to find the reason for the failure and see if there is some way to fix it. Or, if you don't mind the extra cost of a VPS, you can try that.

[rudolfl]

Well, main priority at the moment is to get sites back online. So, VPS will have to do for now.

How will one find the offending script? We do have lots of products, so this is one problem.
Speaking of which -- how does PHP frees up memory it allocates? I came from C/C++ background and you use malloc() and free().
For example, I issue a query and get large result set. That is being dissected and used. When will it get cleared and returned to RAM pool? Do I have to explicity call something? Will it happen automatically as script finishes?
Thanks,
Rudolf