I am getting lots of errors when trying to access the runetrack site recently, and it has been getting worse and worse lately. Sometimes it is fine, but at all sorts of different times it will hang on loading the page and eventually there may be a message such as:
or other times a message such as:I understand if there is any maintenance going on then the site may not be available, but this is happening a lot, at all sorts of times and with no information provided, so I wonder if it is more likely to be a problem with the capacity?

Hi Caessa,

I've now taken some steps to hopefully solve this issue. Let me know if the site appears to be working better/worse on your end.

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Seeing as you only posted this a while ago, what did you do?

My clan's RuneTrack which was active an hour ago has now disappeared and another runetrack list which hasn't started yet has it's tracker ID, so we've lost 2 and a half hours experience already.

What was your Tracker ID, Competition Name, and approximate creation date? I've checked a number of tracker IDs and they are all matching perfectly.

The only possibility for your competition tracker disappearing would've been if you had just happened to create your competition tracker today during a very small window of database discontinuity during the maintenance. If this was the case, I apologize for the inconvenience - afraid you'll just have to create a new one.

Though be assured that this isn't a common happening by any means - this is the only time so far this year I've done such drastic database maintenance, and the window of discontinuity wasn't there for long. Unfortunately it just looks like you hit all the wrong conditions at the wrong time.

Anyway though, on the positive side - the new database format should solve any slow loading problems that have been occurring lately.

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Hi Sword Kill, thanks for this. I can tell you that the problem is "better than it was" but not fixed. I am still getting the "Access denied for user 'ffdnthrs'@'localhost' (using password: NO)" error message quite frequently, but nowhere near as often as before. It happened this morning again, and today it has not recorded any of my xp gain, despite having logged out and in again repeatedly.

Hi Caessa,

Which xp gains are you referring to? According to your "User Stat Progress" page (http://runetrack.com/progress.php?user=Caessa), all of your xp gains for this week have been recorded just as they should be.

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Hi Sword Kill,
During that day, my stats were shown to have had zero xp on any skills, as if I had never logged in. The data did get recorded in the end, but actually later that night. All through the day there was no indication of the xp I had gained up until the time the values did get collected much later on - the stat history is correct, it just didn't display on that day for a *long* time.
The problems with the "access denied" message is getting much worse again though.
Thanks for your help.
C

The website was completely unresponsive to me for a long while, now it seems to be okay, but it is still pretty slow when it comes to Clan Competition trackers. Thanks for the quick reply on things though, helped me out

I've now made another slight server adjustment - let me know if things seem better/worse.

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That same localhost error is happening yet again Nothing loads once more... I'm starting to suspect like the thread creator that it is load based issues causing this...

EDIT Runetrack's clan competitions area has been down now for a total of nearly 3 hours...

Hm, I really can't see what the problem is. Everything is working perfectly and very fast for me. I haven't seen a single error anytime this month yet.

Is anyone else having these issues? And for those that are - what Operating System and Browser are you using, also what country are you located in?

I have a feeling this may be something user-specific, as it's all working great on my end.

Edit: I've traced the IPs for everyone who's posted on this thread and all of you are either from the UK or Australia. Perhaps it might only be somehow affecting those outside the US?

Thanks for the continued communication all, I'll get this solved eventually - just have to figure out what the problem is for those that are having issues.

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I used an American based proxy and it came up with the exact same error for me

What exactly is the error message? And does it always appear every time, or are there times when it doesn't appear? What browser/OS are you using?

I still think this has to be something on your end unfortunately - it's all loading very fast for me.

Edit: Try using this proxy as well: http://free-proxy.me/

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There are multiple error messages, I don't know the full errors but I can give you a brief idea of what I see...

1. Generally the site takes around 60 seconds to load one line that says Access denied for user 'ffdnthrs'@'localhost' (using password: NO)
2. After that, maybe a little while later after a few refreshes you get "503 - Temporarily Unavailable" which details something about website maintenance or being down due to capacity issues.
3. The other common message is that firefox could not find the server, but that's a given

It doesnt happen all the time, just for about 3 hours everyday during my time. Today so far it has not happened.

EDIT: Today it has happened once again. 9PM GMT+10 (Australia) The site refuses to load, and when it does, it comes up with an error, the same one each time. This cannot be an error on my end because I tried more than one proxy site, they all show the exact same error. Print screen:

The most common of errors around 8-11PM my time, using the proxy as well this time (one you recommended)

The other error that generally happens once in a while, this one takes about 2 minutes to show up.

In my honest opinion (I've worked with a lot of shared hosting providers) it is extremely likely that BlueHost is the cause of this problem [Read this for some scary facts about BlueHost]. With all due respect, they most likely have 1200 websites on a server with 8 CPU cores and a 700GB HDD - they tend to cram their shared servers with many more accounts than they should. An example of this would be a Reverse IP on your server right now, tells us how many sites are hosted on this server, and it came up with this:



Now if you consider the possibility that at a certain time, at least ten of these 1,200 sites are under immense load, it makes more sense that this capacity/database error continues at the same time for around 3 hours during the day. I agree with you that when you are online the website is fine, but when I'm on, it's terrible as we're in different time zones. The site is barely usable during the night for me.

It's a real shame to me as well seeing as I appreciate your website and hard work more than any other, I use your site constantly and rely on it for my clan's operation. It's just the reliability that's got me iffy about things I hope things can get fixed sometime, just be careful!

Take care,
Jordan

Thanks Downfall - I really appreciate all your help in sorting this out.

You are probably right that it's just occurring in a specific time window every day. But as this time window is in the middle of the night when those in the US are sleeping, we're not aware of it. I suppose if there had to be a time when this happened it would be best to be then, seeing as the vast majority of this site's users are Americans, but obviously I can imagine this is pretty unfortunate for those in Australia who have that time window during their peak playing hours.

The site is actually hosted with FastDomain, by the same company that runs BlueHost, but yes I agree that they do have some capacity issues. I've actually been trying a few other Shared Hosting options, such as HostGator, but none of them are any better than FastDomain.

I have a feeling I'm going to start looking at Virtual Private Servers, which are a step up from shared hosts in terms of performance but not as expensive as full dedicated hosting. I don't really have much experience with virtual hosting, but will do my best to research the best option - however, if anyone has any suggestions on some good virtual private servers (or even less expensive dedicated hosts), I'd appreciate that as well.

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It's no problem I enjoy helping people out with this sorta stuff. It is difficult catering for users all around the world and I understand that, thanks for keeping the service open for a start - it's awesome even with the downtime. Not intending to advertise, I promise, but I'm currently with Site5. These guys are a smaller hosting company, however they do not have an over capacity problem, they do have VPS plans and everytime I make a customer support ticket, it's answered within 15 minutes. I'm pretty happy even with their shared hosting account.

In terms of VPS, I'm a little experienced, but not widely - although out of all the VPS companies my friends that are into web development have tried, only one stands out... and that's Slicehost. These guys don't oversell, they take care of their servers and from what I hear have pretty reasonable plan prices. A VPS should do the trick when it comes to the visitors to this site, because I'd imagine that dedicated servers would be for sites under extreme amounts of load.... however, I could be wrong. I don't know anything about just how many visitors you get

Just to say, I have had more error messages ongoing:and once the message:Right now it is 12:10 pm UK time (7:10 am EST) and still getting the "Access denied for user 'ffdnthrs'" message.
Thanks for you continued investigation.

Just an update - I've been looking into this issue more and here's what I've found:
- The error is only occurring on RuneTrack's MySQL database, none of my other MySQL databases.
- The error starts at exactly 9:30AM GMT every morning, and ends at about Noon GMT - it never happens at any other time (which would explain why I've never seen it, as that's the middle of the night in the US).

I'm working on trying out some other Shared/VPS hosting options, and will hopefully have this resolved soon.


Here's a graph.


Ah, looks like we're nearing the 50 Million hit mark soon for this year.

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Eep. My entire clan is complaining at me because Runetrack is constantly down I might have to change to Google spreadsheets until this is all resolved. Thanks for your ongoing investigation.

EDIT: Something you've done worked. There's no more downtime for me

Hey all,

I believe I've now fixed the server downtime problems by switching to a new host. This seems to have boosted page load time up a significant amount, and solved the issue with the access problems during the evening in Australia. From my tracking logs, RuneTrack is now running at nearly 100% uptime every day.

Let me know if anyone notices any differences with the server (good or bad), or if there's any further issues. However, I believe everything should now be operating perfectly.

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