Downtime

[fred]

Hi,

When a user is added apache goes down for a bit; can this be prevented considering you cannot run serious hosting on it with this happening.

Thanks,

Fred

[kilburn]

What do you understand by "down", and how much is a "bit"? Setting up a new virtual host REQUIRES an apache reload, during which it stops processing requests (but clients shouldn't receive any error, just a slight delay 1-2sec max).

If its something worst than that, we can try to track down the cause. Otherwise, if you can't afford an occasional 1-2sec delay you should be using some serious load balancing/failover infrastructure...

[fred]

Well, HTML clients aren't seeing downtime, but PHP clients are; the fcgi processes are shot down even during graceful restart. And those clients are cut off (getting a nice white screen).

When processing multiple new clients / changes per hour, this becomes quite a bit of service interruption.

[kilburn]

Maybe you're hitting this php bug. On my own tests, with this versions:

Code:

PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny3
fcgid 2.2.1
firefox 3.5.2 OSX

What happens is that (on graceful restart) the server closes the connection by sending a FIN packet, and thereafter I've got varying results:

1. If the page was previously loaded correctly (so this is a refresh), the browser reloads the page, this time completing correctly.
2. If it's the first time I'm loading the page, the browser shows a blank page and stops.

So yes, this might be an issue. Unfortunately, it's a php+fastcgi/fcgid problem that we can't do much about, except trying with newer versions to see how is this handled. You may also switch to using mod_php5 (the panel supports it), but then you'll have a less secure server.

It's up to you... :S

[fred]

mod_php is not really an option; it's a free hosting server.

I 'solved' it with a haproxy setup which is working fine Thank you.

Opening a new topic for the next problem