XF 1.5 Website timing out randomly

[hvrry]

Hi,

My site has been working perfectly for months, but a few hours ago it went down. Restarted the VPS, moved to another system etc. and the page loads now after about 30s. I've changed nothing to trigger this, it has just happened. I believe it is due to the database but I'm not sure what to do for that.

Any help is greatly appreciated,
Thanks

 

[Paul B]

What you've described typically sounds server related, rather than anything to do with XF.

The fact that it started without making any changes would support that.

You're likely going to have to do some investigation/monitoring of the server to see what's preventing pages from being served/loaded.

 

[TPerry]

My site has been working perfectly for months, but a few hours ago it went down. Restarted the VPS, moved to another system etc. and the page loads now after about 30s. I've changed nothing to trigger this, it has just happened. I believe it is due to the database but I'm not sure what to do for that.

Check your logs and see how much traffic is hitting it. As popular as it is now for the PITA's (Pain in the Asses) to do, frequently I see DDOS attacks against random sites. Typically it's a WP Pingback attack.
If you are on a VPS, you can also (from the CLI) see how many active connections you have by

netstat -antu | grep :80 | grep -v LISTEN | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Here is an example from my server



If you see an unusually high number, especially from certain IP's, then you probably have issues. If you run SSL on the site, you can also check port 443 by replacing the grep :80 with grep :443

Also check your HTTP server logs for entries similar to this

192.241.x.x – – [09/Nov/2014:22:50:08 -0800] “GET /index.php HTTP/1.0″ 200 “-” “WordPress/3.9.2; http://www.x.x; verifying pingback from 69.30.x.x” “-“

If you see a bunch of them then you are definitely getting hit with a Pingback DDOS attack.
You can check your log easily by using the below command

cat /path/to/your/http_server.log | grep Wordpress

That should filter your log and print out any entries that reflect the above.