Question posted in
Some documentation to get you started can be found here.

Website get slow sometimes and fixes by itself – Apache

Since about 2 months ago, I’ve experienced my website slows down (timeout problem), however I’ve made some checking on the server and my settings and behavior is this (LAMP, VPS 6GB Ram – 4 cpu cores, but I’m not expert on Linux or apache):

When it suddenly starts to hang, I’ve check the browser network behavior and I’ve found that images takes up to 24-30 seconds to load (small images from 4K to 180K), some of them fail to load. It also happens to .css files sometimes (10 seconds to load). During this period, only 1 core is used and RAM stays at 1.4GB tops. The server is hosting a website based on CMS (Joomla – SSL – gzip set).
Check browser network tab here

I have apache MPM as prefork with these settings:

KeepAlive On
KeepAliveTimeout 3
MaxKeepAliveRequests 500

   StartServers        5
   MinSpareServers     5
   MaxSpareServers     10
   ServerLimit         100
   MaxClients          100
   MaxRequestsPerChild 3000

I have mod_security enabled, but there isn’t any suspicious behavior. I have also server-status enable, and I’m not sure but it doesn’t look very loaded (most of process in K and W). The access log shows the usual behavior and no error logs found.

The Database is MariaDB, no hanged queries during this periods and nothing in slow query logs.

The thing is, even if I restart the apache service, the website still hangs. So I tried restarting the server (shutdown -r) and when the server and services are up again, it also hangs. Sometimes when I’m not monitoring the website, it comes back to normal after 20 minutes, but sometimes takes even 3 hours. The problem is that it’s a production server and it’s not always that happens. Sometimes it happens 2 days in a row, then after 3 or 4 days, sometimes happens twice in the same day.

Any idea what could be happening here? I’m out of clues right now. Thanks in advance

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    I posted the case on webmasters.stackexchange.com but no luck, they closed the question. As last resource, a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to move the entire website to a different server with the same characteristics, and boom!, problem solved. So bottom line, it seems the problem was a strange problem with the server itself.


  2. 0

    I suspect strongly its the server host. I once had the same exact problem and first thing I did was to get a copy of the website and ran it on wamp server on local machine. That way I was able to clear the confusion of whether its a server or CMS issue.

    Login or Signup to reply.
Please signup or login to give your own answer.

Back To Top
Search