I'm in the process of creating a forum (with adding categories, etc) so it has not too many members or traffic (no pictures, additional software installed in it, etc), still web-hosting company (which is one of the bigger in the world hosting over 1.000.000 web-sites) puts the forum offline regulary because of forum reaching web-hosting CGI limits!? I have the 'advantage' package with that company so it's a conciderable one (2000GB traffic, 250GB space per month). Could anyone give me a comment on how small or big that web-hosting company's CGI limits are, if my almost empty forum is causing them problems than things can only get worse if the forum would start having 50 members online for a middle-sized forum when it's likely that 20 of them would make a 'process' (such as accessing the forum, using the search script) at relatively the same time. CGI Limits: Resource Limit CPU Time Limits how much "computing time" the application gets from the server before it is terminated. CPU Time is not the same as "clock time", if a program takes 2 seconds to run typically very little of that is CPU time. Most common operations take less than a second of CPU time, however a few can take longer such as re-publishing all your html pages, thumbnailing all your images, etc. --- 8 seconds Memory Limit Limits how much "memory" is available to a running application. The more data an application has to process the more memory is required. Re-publishing all your html pages in particular can take a lot of memory because the files need to be created in memory before they are saved to disk. --- 70.00 megs Processes Limits how many web applications can run at the same time. If 10 visitors are accessing a search script, and 5 are accessing a forum, then that would require 15 processes. After the process limit is reached any additional visitors will get an error when trying to access any applications. Applications are only running when the visitors browser is "loading" after clicking a link or submitting a form. This limit can also sometimes affect the number of web requests the webserver can respond to at once as well. --- 18 processes Max Open Files Limits the maximum number of "file descriptors" a process (application) can have open at the same time. "File descriptors" includes not only files but also sockets for internet communication. Note: Artman 2 requires 150+ file handles when using optimized code/module loading. If your server doesn't support this ask support for modules that support limited file handles. --- 20 files.
At this time of being, I don't believe it's more than 20 visitors per day, plus Google Yahoo MSN Bots and me going through forum while working on it with adding categories and initial topics. One of the CGI limits that caught my attention is '18 processes' that seems me highly insufficient, does that mean that all middle-sized forums where in example 50 members would be online out of them 20 using it actively at that moment would need to be hosted on a dedicated server or it's that my hosting company's CGI limits are too small? As for the CGI limits data, under the Terms of Service the hosting company was not precisive obscure to state 'if you use too much', when I contacted Support, I got the answer that 'there is no printed limits for this', only after I wrote again stating that there is little use for me using that hosting to have problems with even a modest forum, that I got email from company's higher official sending me a link to where precisive data about CGI limits can be seen.
what forum software are you using as im a bit stumped why a forum would be using cgi i thought main concern would be php&mysql
It's a PHPBB 3.0 Stable Version, instead of forums often a blank page started to appear with the note stating if I'm the owner of that forum to contact hosting firm's Support Team, so I did and they wrote that forums get to be turned off automatically for a certain period of time when they.. let me quote them: 'your site has a reached a threshold limit of 4000+ seconds of CPU in the past hour, or 10000+ cgi/php/cron hits in the past hour. We would like to inform you that an average site uses 50 seconds of CPU per hour and gets 20 cgi hits per hour. In order to reduce or minimize CPU/CGI/PHP resource consumption from your site, we recommend the following guidelines: 1. If your site is a blog, shopping cart , forum, or contains a content management system (eg. Joomla, Drupal, etc.) uninstall or deactivate any unnecessary plugins , modules, components. 2. If your website application includes an option for compression, disable this option. 3. If your website application includes an option to turn caching on, we recommend to activate this option along with any other optimization options. 4. Minimize the number and size of images and videos on your website. 5. Avoid hosting chat software from your website (most chat services offer hosted options which does not require you to install any software on your website ) as chat software is very expensive on system resources. 6. Minimize the number of file downloads available from your website . 7. Optimize your web images/graphics within your graphics application by choosing "Save/Export for Web" or increasing the compression levels. 8. Minimize the number of colors needed to display your graphics so the file sizes are as small as possible (ie . use 5-bit or 6-bit). 9. Incorporating CSS can often replace the need for using graphics in navigational menus. If you have followed the above guidelines but continue to receive the "Site Stopped" message, you may require more CPU/CGI/PHP resources than what a Shared Hosting platform is able to offer. As such you may want to consider moving your site to a third party Dedicated hosting platform.' ...................................... As this started to happen ever since I involved PHPBB3 forum with my simple HTML web-site with about 100 unique visitors per day and no blogs, shopping charts, file downloads or similar, I was stunned how I could have already reached the limits with a new hardly active, with no high damanding content they referred to such as grafics, in all almost an empty forum. I asked how are those hits counted when only I, a few visitors and Google/Yahoo Bot browsed the forums. Then they referred to CGI limits such as simultaneous processes going on at the same time (limit of 18 processes) and such. This was a shock, as I'm new to all of this, I ask for advices. It seems if my forum is to gain some-what popularity and more traffic, it will only get in more troubles regarding hosting issues. Their stats of an average site 'getting 20 cgi hits per hour' seems me pretty small as they cound as 1 hit when someone logs in to your forum or use a search script and such, it means 1 hit can be made every 3 minutes at most, that tells about a rather hardly active forum, plus they count in CGI hits from all of your web-pages.
Yes, but which one? This is the hosting firm that hosts over 1.000.000 web-sites as they state so it adds to their reputation. I'm not rushing into conclusions as I'm not an expert so I didn't mentioned that hosting firm's name to make them bad reputation or similar. Dedicated Server is definitely a solution, though its costly at $50 to $100 or over for a month. I'd go with it once the forums are to reach closely 60-70 members, at the very beginning of forum's life it would really need me Venture Capital to rent a Dedicated Server.
it does look weird why this is happening if your getting such small visitors maybe you have miss configured phpbb3 try turning the compression down and cache up it would help, the only other thing i can think of is that a yahoo or google bot has gone crazy on your page but that happens rarley
Yahoo Bot visits once a day or once every 2nd day, Google comes'n'goes every few hours, no big deal regarding that part. I didn't play much with PHPBB3, most things are at 'default' but I'll go through it as well. Rather small 18 processes limit worries me. Thanks for the comment.