I got a note from the ISP yesterday that explains much of the issue we saw.
On Sunday, I issued a ticket because PHP performance was in the toilet… again. You’ll recall, this is the issue I got blamed for about a month ago. Turned out at the time it wasn’t my doing, though they were not sure what the problem WAS, exactly.
So, Sunday, I called another one in.
About 1am Monday, they pulled the server down to rebuild it. The closing on the ticket read:
System administration team identified performance problem on your web server this was related to the slow hard drive because of web stats calculation on the server.
Aha. Now, we’re getting somewhere.
Also system administrators have strongly recommended you to move your php driven applications to the Linux based account as it has better performance for php and leave ASP, ASP .NET, ColdFusion driven applications on the Windows based accounts.
Well, as I’ve already discussed with you, this is a PHP driven site, and as such I’ve been wanting to move to a linux box for some time. I started on a Windows server because my kid wanted his own site, and was using Front Page at the time. That’s since migrated elsewhere. So there’s really no reason to stick with the Windows server any longer other than the couple of days we’d be unavailable because of the new DNS listings.
I’ll likely make the move before winter, but when exactly, I don’t know. I’ll keep you posted. For now, we’re OK.