Battle With Webhost - "MySQL Server Has Gone Away" Errors

[Scan Cape Cod]

Hello,

Well as the title says, it's been a battle, and continues to be one. My webhost is 1and1 and I have had their "Dual Advanced" service since May of 2011. It is a shared server type of account and it has worked quite well for my small website until the last week or so. At the time this started I was running 4.2.1, a MediaWiki, and a few other small databases on it. vBulletin averages about 50 users online at a time, the majority of which seem to be search engine crawlers. This has never been an issue; the site has always run fine.

Late last week I noticed vBulletin's performance to be suddenly extremely poor. Randomly, page loads were and are taking in excess of 30 seconds to load. There are no error messages for "end users", just excruciatingly slow page loads most of the time. A few days after that I started receiving vBulletin generated error messages. The messages contain a wide variety of errors, but the constant in 100% of them is:

MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away Error Number : 2006

Now I've done the research on this error message, gathering data from both this website and from vbulletin.org. I understand that it is a server side issue. I have submitted a ticket to the webhost, and suffice to say my interaction with them has been horrifying. Their tech support might as well be non-existent. I'll spare you the details. I don't have any information on any timeout values other than mysql.connect_timeout, which I see in the PHPInfo section of ACP. It is set to 60.

One thing I did notice with their service; they have a feature called "Site Lock", which is an apparent anti-virus/malware scanning system. Apparently it uses software called "Sophos" to complete the scans. It indicates that I have malware in the forum.php file. However, I have searched it from stem to stern and I see nothing. I looked at the page source of forum.php and I see nothing also. I have also used external websites that apparently can scan a URL and/or website looking for virus or malware activity. Other than Sophos, none have seen anything. The filesize of forum.php is exactly the same size as that of the install files that are on my local machine.

Aside from the above possibility, which I think is a false hit, I think/hope I have done everything I can on my end. I did run the patch up to 4.2.2 during this problem, thinking at the time that a refresh of the files might solve the problem. It did not. The only other change I made during the process was to upgrade to version 5.4 of PHP as I had been running a 5.2 version. 1and1 recommended 5.4 (not suggested by their support but posted at their website). Their version of SQL is 5.1.73-log. They claim they don't have a newer version. I have run optimization of the database both in the ACP and PHPMyAdmin. I have also run repair on all tables. It makes no difference. In PHPMyAdmin nothing looks unusual; no excessive overhead, no funky looking tables, etc.

The webhost is pretty much playing dumb, and making off base ludicrous suggestions that I should upgrade to a dedicated server as a "solution". Not acceptable.

I hope this is a thorough explanation. If anyone can think of anything else I can do on my end to ensure it is not any fault of mine, I'd appreciate any input. I'm at a loss at this point, but I am by no means an expert in these things. Thanks in advance, and regards.

Scott
Webmaster - Scan New England
http://www.scan-ne.net

[jdj]

Hello,

My webhost is 1and1 and I have had their "Dual Advanced" service since May of 2011. It is a shared server type of account and it has worked quite well for my small website until the last week or so.
http://www.scan-ne.net [/FONT]

I use 1and1 for holding domains but I find the interface between my PC and their server incredibly slow and it has been for years (even slower than the connection to vbulletin.com used to be :-) ). So I don't use 1and1 for anything other than holding domains. I tried a couple of their website building packages and didn't get on with them.

[donald1234]

You are not the only one with this problem http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forum...mering-my-site most shared servers from big companys have such methods to limit resources as they advertise unlimited resources but in reality they cram as many people onto the server as possible for maximum profit. You don't get the resources of a dedicated server for the price of shared server no matter what the sales pitch says.

[Scan Cape Cod]

I definitely understand the concept of overselling shared space; I've been through it before with a company called Pow Wow. I don't expect dedicated server features for shared server prices, that's not the point. The point of my post here is to get some help from the community regarding anything I may have missed. I expect this battle to continue with 1and1, so I want to make sure I've done all that I can. Thanks.

[donald1234]

Like it says in the post I linked to, all you can do is try and limit visitors, especially bots or try a different web host, as or if your forum grows it is inevitable that you will need to upgrade to more expensive hosting at some point..

[Scan Cape Cod]

Like it says in the post I linked to, all you can do is try and limit visitors, especially bots or try a different web host, as or if your forum grows it is inevitable that you will need to upgrade to more expensive hosting at some point..

All of the above is understood. I don't think it's a matter of a growing forum. The amount of concurrent users has been roughly the same for a period far pre-dating this issue. I'm trying to work on learning how to reduce bots. I've added a robots.txt file but thus far it doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. To keep it simple I set it up to block everything for now, just to see if it would make a difference. I'm not sure if this should be immediate though or if it's a process that takes a few days.

I suspect that 1and1 has simply oversold webspace and this is the result. That said, I just want to ensure all of my ducks are in a row, so your input on solutions I can work towards is welcome. Thanks.

[Lynne]

When I go to your site, I get an Internal Server Error on several pages (mostly CSS pages). I would suggest checking your error_logs (if you don't know where they are, ask your host) to see what is listed in there. I suspect that may give a hint as to what the problem is.

The malware doesn't have to be in the forum.php file itself. You could have a rogue plugin. Your templates could be hacked. Have you gone through Zachery's blogs regarding securing your site?

You do have a lot of bad html on your page (someone doesn't seem to like closing their <p> tags and who knows what they are doing with their <a> tags to images!) I would suggest running the page through an html validator and fixing it. You also have modifications, so I'd suggest disabling them to see if that fixes the issue.

[Scan Cape Cod]

Thanks Lynne. I haven't had or seen any Internal Server Errors. I'll look into the error logs.

I've disabled the plugins/hooks system entirely, but the problems persisted. I have not looked at Zachery's info but I'll certainly do so going forward.

Where are you seeing the bad html? I'm not surprised if I've made errors within; I use WYSIWYG type programs for them, and I'm absolutely layman at it. This is why I've come here, and I'm glad you've taken a look.

Not to be a pain, but can you just point me at one modification you can see that may be a problem and I'll work at it from there.

Thanks.

[LOCO.MTB]

I have out v4.2.x Forums hosted on 1and1 as well... have for years, and it's only been in the last week or so that it's started throwing all the MySQL errors... Someone at 1&1 has "tweaked" the MySQL config and screwed things up... I can't even get a database backup to work now without killing the MySQl process...

[LOCO.MTB]

Just ran the "SHOW VARIABLES" command in phpMyAdmin.....

1&1 has the wait_timeout set to 60 !!!!

[Scan Cape Cod]

I have out v4.2.x Forums hosted on 1and1 as well... have for years, and it's only been in the last week or so that it's started throwing all the MySQL errors... Someone at 1&1 has "tweaked" the MySQL config and screwed things up... I can't even get a database backup to work now without killing the MySQl process...

Thanks for commenting, Loco. I'm sorry your sites are hosed too, but at least I feel a little better about it maybe not being my fault. Your time frame falls into place pretty much exactly with when things started to go bad for me. If I knew where to run "show variables" from in phpMyAdmin I'd do the same for confirmation. The problem of course is getting someone at 1&1 to understand what the problem may be....and then getting them to actually do something about it. Their customer support thus far is brutally bad. It's unfortunate, as I was very pleased with their uptime and service until now.

That said, hopefully it'll be solved. And that said, it's always a learning experience every time. Lynne, I don't know if you're still here or if you've deemed me too stupid to even continue , but I did look at Zachery's info and I have for the most part followed the guidelines. Going forward I am definitely going to revisit the volume of plug-ins used. I think a more standard version of vBulletin might be in my long term best interests, and a more modular approach with regards to modifications, addons, etc. will be in order.

That is, if the site ever works right again. The sucky thing is, I just paid 1&1 for three more years of service. The battle continues...

[LOCO.MTB]

If I knew where to run "show variables" from in phpMyAdmin I'd do the same for confirmation. The problem of course is getting someone at 1&1 to understand what the problem may be....and then getting them to actually do something about it. Their customer support thus far is brutally bad. It's unfortunate, as I was very pleased with their uptime and service until now.

That said, hopefully it'll be solved. And that said, it's always a learning experience every time. Lynne, I don't know if you're still here or if you've deemed me too stupid to even continue , but I did look at Zachery's info and I have for the most part followed the guidelines. Going forward I am definitely going to revisit the volume of plug-ins used. I think a more standard version of vBulletin might be in my long term best interests, and a more modular approach with regards to modifications, addons, etc. will be in order.

That is, if the site ever works right again. The sucky thing is, I just paid 1&1 for three more years of service. The battle continues...

1) You can't get to the variables values directly.... I used both MySQLDumper (which is my usual Dbase backup program) and a process from the Admin Control Panel in vBulletin to find them.
2) It is NOT just the max_timeout variable that is causing problems. They have also lowered:

max_userconnections to ONLY 18! I sometimes have that many spiders and "guests" and by guests, I mean scumbags trying to harvest information from my forums.
max_connections to ONLY 240... and this is for the ENTIRE server, not just a single database as I understand it.... And before they closed the hole insecurity a while back, I was able to see ALL the databases on the server (read only), and there are hundreds of DBs on the server.
max_allowed_packet = 10 Megabyte or thereabouts... not bad, but still too small.

And tthis doesn't even take into consideration the low PHP limits that are on us...

These changes are RECENT... the MySQL stuff probably started right about the time we started getting the MySQL error emails....

My SQL error log (setup through vBulletin) shows that I had ZERO errors from September 13, 2013 until June 7, 2014....

And my server started throwing Error 2006 on June 7th... and I also started capturing "Too many Connection" errors (no error number).

They lowered these values so far that you can't run the forums without problems...

AND, I can't even get a clean backup to run because of them...

[Wayne Luke]

To clarify:

SHOW VARIABLES; is a query. You can enter into PHPMyAdmin's SQL tab and press the Go button.

In vBulletin's AdminCP, you can list them under Maintenance -> Diagnostics -> System Variables.

[Scan Cape Cod]

Thanks Wayne, I was able to do that and confirm Loco's findings. Not good at all. I hope it's temporary and was done for troubleshooting purposes. If not, it's the last straw for me. At this point I'd have to conclude that while not in perfect condition, my vBulletin config is not responsible for this problem, so I won't waste any more bandwidth here. Thanks to everyone for the help.

Scott

[LOCO.MTB]

To clarify:

SHOW VARIABLES; is a query. You can enter into PHPMyAdmin's SQL tab and press the Go button.

In vBulletin's AdminCP, you can list them under Maintenance -> Diagnostics -> System Variables.

Thanks Wayne Luke... I'm a little punch drunk from the all-nighter I pulled working on this...