What Happened? 3
April 17th, 2010 by ComputerBob
When I got home from work at 5:30 last night, I discovered that my email accounts were working again, and all of my Web sites appeared to be completely restored.
But I was incredibly disappointed to see that this site was still running really, really slowly.
In fact, it was running so slowly that I doubt if anyone except me could even tell that it was back online.
Every time I visited this site or refreshed its home page, my browser would say “Waiting for ComputerBob.com” for an average of 93 seconds — then suddenly, the home page would completely load in less than one second.
Did you wait 93 seconds for the home page to finally display yesterday, or did you assume that it was still down and leave?
That’s what I thought.
So a little after 5:30 last night, I went to my Web host’s Web site and opened an “Urgent” support ticket, to tell them that this site was still running really, really slowly.
I received an automated confirmation of my new support ticket within a minute. A few minutes later, Diego Miramoa started working on figuring out what was causing the delay.
Over and over, Diego and I wrote back and forth to each other, as I tried to help him troubleshoot the problem.
I discovered that this site’s HTML-only Web pages were all loading instantly, but its home page and all of my Journal entries (which all use WordPress and a MySQL database) suffered from the 93-second delay.
So I figured that the delay must be caused by either a WordPress misconfiguration or a bad connection to the MySQL database server.
But Diego did some checking and discovered that even though many other Web sites on the same server as this one use WordPress and MySQL databases, this Web site was the only one that was experiencing a mysterious 93-second delay before it would display.
More troubleshooting.
More exchanges.
Diego determined that the 93-second delay appeared to be a DNS issue — some DNS process or problem was running each time someone visited this site, and it took 90 seconds for it to finally time-out and and allow this site’s pages to display. But he couldn’t figure out what was causing that DNS issue.
At one point, I ran out of ideas, so I gave Diego permission to make whatever temporary changes he needed to make to this Web site in order to troubleshoot the problem, and told him that I would stop bothering him for awhile so that he could try to figure it out by himself.
A couple times, after that, I thought of one or two other suggestions, to try to troubleshoot the problem.
Each time, I would write to Diego again, and he’d write back a minute later.
After a few hours, I started to alternate between sort of watching TV with my wife and running into my office to check my email, to see if Diego had written to me again.
Several hours into that process, I started hearing from Jorge Catena, who was working with Diego to solve the problem. Like Diego had already done, Jorge wrote to me several times, to tell me that they were trying different things to solve the problem.
I had no way of knowing what they were trying, but I could tell that they were doing different things because for about ten minutes, this Web site didn’t display at all — instead a “server misconfiguration” error appeared.
In fact, during that short period of time, all of my Web sites were down, and they all displayed a “server misconfiguration” error whenever I tried to visit any of their pages.
But I wasn’t worried — I’ve worked with both Diego and Jorge before on other issues and I know from experience that they both really, really know their stuff.
So when I saw that “server misconfiguration” error on all of my sites, I was actually kind of relieved, because it told me that Diego and Jorge were “deep under the hood” of the problem, twisting their electronic wrenches to fix the problem.
I also noticed that the “server misconfiguration” error was appearing instantly, without any 93-second delay, and this site’s favicon (the little “C and B” logo) was also appearing in the left end of my browser’s address bar.
That told me that the ComputerBob.com domain was displaying instantly, without the 93-second delay, even though only its favicon was currently being displayed.
At 1:00 AM this morning, this site’s home page appeared.
Instantly.
And all of its other pages began displaying instantly.
Without even waiting to hear from Diego and Jorge, I wrote to them and said, “YOU FIXED IT! Wooo-hoooo!!!! So what was the problem?”
Eleven minutes later, Diego wrote back and confirmed that it had been what he had suspected — a DNS problem that had affected only this Web site.
I wrote back and said, “It’s loading almost instantly for me. Every time. Many, many thanks to both you and Jorge for figuring it out and fixing it. My Journal entry tomorrow will be a very happy one. You and Jorge may want to stop back and take a look at it, since you’ll both be mentioned in it. Thank you both, again, for sticking with it until you solved it. ”
A few minutes later, Diego replied, “You’re welcome 
Please let us know if we can assist you in anything else.”
So, to summarize this whole adventure, when my sites’ Web server went down and had to be completely rebuilt from scratch, I was disappointed that my Web host didn’t do a better job of communicating their progress on that issue for two days. But once they got the server back up and running, they were very polite, helpful and communicative to me during the 7 1/2 hours that it took to solve this site’s DNS problem.
So, just like I was for the past few years, I’m back to being very, very happy with my Web host: Downtown Host.
Tell them ComputerBob sent you.
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http://www.computerbob.com/wp/what-happened-3.php
Tags:
Cybercrime, Hardware, Internet, Personal, Security, Tech Support, Web Development