Hi, we're http://www.learnoutloud.com and our site started acting
sluggish this weekend. We've experienced no spike in traffic nor have
we made any major changes so we're quite puzzled as nothing like this
has happened before. We're LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) and the
problem seems to be only on certain IP addresses because for the
computers at our office the speed of the site is normal but on my home
computer it's very slow. All other sites are fine for me, but audio
downloads from our site are coming in at 4 KB/s when at the same time
on other sites they're usually 400 KB/s or more. We've received
complaints from customers and our page views are down so it's a
problem with many people. We've talked with our hosting company and
they claim that all is normal on our server. If you can lead us down
the right path as to what the problem is and how we can fix it we'll
give you a $100.

---

Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 19 Jul 2006 17:34 PDT

jpbischke...

Great site!

Your site and the streaming content are loading quite quickly for me.
This suggests that your site and your host are functioning normally,
and the fact that only certain locations are experiencing difficulty
suggests that it may be a breakdown of some servers between those
locations and yourself. This is a problem with the internet rather
than your site. 

One thing you can try is to have some of your more computer-savvy
customers ping your site by opening a Command Prompt and typing:

ping www.learnoutloud.com

When I do this, I get 4 responses of 25ms, which is great.

Customers who notice problems or timeouts while pinging can
run a traceroute:

tracert www.learnoutloud.com

This will pinpoint servers that are timing out or slowing
your connection. Have them send you the results and you may
be able to figure our what's happening. Since your home
connection is experiencing problems, you can start there.

The Internet Traffic Report site may also help you pinpoint
problem areas. As you can see from their North America page,
there have been some major problems recently, with some 
major servers having gone offline, with subsequent increases
in response time and packet loss:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm

As you can see from the 7-day Global Chart of Response Time
on this page, Sunday, July 16th marked the beginning of a 
fairly large increase in Response Time:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/7day.htm

On the same page, they have a free ITR Client for Windows
that you can download to monitor traffic on your computer
in real time, test the connection, and more.

Let me know where this takes you...

sublime1-ga

Are ftp transactions slow as well, or is it only http that is
sluggish?  If your ftp access is slow as well I would come down hard
on your hosting company to help you resolve it.

Not that this helps you at all but @ ip 68.185.117.73 in Rocky Mount
Virginia I see your problem. The site loads so slowly that the video /
audio is unusable.
Surely this must be down to the hosting company (I guess)

I am still flabbergasted as to what is going on. Thanks dgp-ga for
confirming that there is something going on here with certain routes.
My FTP is slow as well on this IP address. Considering it's just our
site and no other sites that I can find that are experiencing this
slowness I have to assume it is something near our hosting network.
Our server seems totally fine, so it must be beyond that. I contacted
my own personal ISP Comcast and they say everything is okay with their
network. So it's gotta be on our hosting side. Any other ideas?

Hello again. After reading Sublime's comment I pinged your site and
got readings of between 99nS and 112nS.

I then cleared my cache and returned to your site, sadly the video
presentation still runs faster than the download which causes the
presentation to lock up for several seconds at a time.

That said, out here in Smalltown Virginia  I am on a microwave link
with a download speed of 1.25 Mbits but I guess you  expected your
customers would not all be running 5 Mbits +

Good luck I hope you resolve this

dgp

jpbischke-ga,

Run the tracert as sublime-ga suggests. This should show you exactly
where the hangup is. Be aware it may have nothing to do with your ISP
or your hosting provider. If a router anywhere between you and your
website is having trouble, it slows down everything that crosses it's
path. Saying that you can't find another slow site isn't really
meaningful. You're kind of throwing darts at the Internet at that
point...

- Hammer

I tried it, everything loaded fast for me as well.  Nice site, by the way...

this sounds like a reverse dns lookup problem

apache takes ips and reverse lookups them in order to get the 'domain
name' chain of the system accessing the site.

if an ip cannot be resolved it may take a while before apache realises
this, and this causes a slowdown

try making a .htaccess file in (the top) of your www directory and put
this line in it:

HostnameLookups off

tell me how it goes.