Damage report 4th February 2014

At times you have technical difficulties and it takes time to get the problems resolved, but there is times where even simple things take more time than what it should be.

This particular website is about 18 months old and has been moved from shared hosting to a dedicated server since.

With running a site, technologies tend to get updated which can cause problems on the server.

In my case, I was running Ubuntu 13.04 with Apache2, PHP and MySQL… Everything was working perfectly. Couldn’t complain. Then I had to update Ubuntu to 13.10 because of end of life support for the product.

That is when the shit hit the fan. Apache broke. Not good. Could I get it working? Barely. After a while, I just gave in and switched to nginx. Everything was sorted. As time went on, things were getting slower and then….

Slowness when using SSH, sites kept crashing… Turned out to be php5-fpm (which is nginx’s PHP) that was maxing out the I/O on the CPU whenever anyone visited this site. Some plugin that I am using is using a lot of PHP (not sure which) processing and restarting it would only cure the problem for a few minutes.

I said “Right, I’m reinstalling the OS”. So yesterday (3rd), I started to backup the all the sites, databases and everything else and switched to Debian 7.

First impressions, a heck of a lot stable compared to Ubuntu and hasn’t crashed yet (Knock on wood). Sites are running smooth as butter and nothing to complain about.

I’m happy and also thankful to Pricetx for helping me throughout this process.

Written on the tablet using the WordPress app. Apologies for any mistakes.