Anyone having problems with website loading times on Iserve?

Forums › 2degrees (including Slingshot, Orcon, Flip, Stuff Fibre, MyRepublic, 2talk and Vocus) › Anyone having problems with website loading times on Iserve?

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11 posts

Geek

#537478 25-Oct-2011 22:34

I had read another post on here dated the 14th of Sept that said:

Let me assure you this is nothing to do with the RWC, Iserve are KNOWN for thier crappy service. I have pulled 30 clients from them in the last 90 days, due to completely horrible communication, gross incompetence, and poor customer service. Orcon bought them and they have never got the situation under control. Worst acquisition ever!

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iServe have not been at fault throughout this whole acquisition process - they were made to do things the Orcon way - After the sale everything became Orcon - iSERVE was a brilliant company

ptinson

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#537493 25-Oct-2011 22:57

adw:
Kurious1: They did have an office in the Avalon Tower yes - they bought iServe in 2009 and everything from that point on became Orcon - they closed down the Avalon office in July this year so it makes me very sad to read all of the stuff on here rubbishing iSERVE and it's service when it wasn't iSERVE's fault at all - before the closure they were running on a very sketetal crew with very little back up and support from Auckland and that whole time knowing they were all losing their jobs

Hi, so you're saying the datacentre in Wellington has definitely closed down?

The DC in Wellington is still in operation.

meat popsicle

adw

175 posts

Master Geek

#537497 25-Oct-2011 23:02

ptinson:
adw:
Kurious1: They did have an office in the Avalon Tower yes - they bought iServe in 2009 and everything from that point on became Orcon - they closed down the Avalon office in July this year so it makes me very sad to read all of the stuff on here rubbishing iSERVE and it's service when it wasn't iSERVE's fault at all - before the closure they were running on a very sketetal crew with very little back up and support from Auckland and that whole time knowing they were all losing their jobs

Hi, so you're saying the datacentre in Wellington has definitely closed down?

The DC in Wellington is still in operation.

Well that's nice to hear. Great to get a response from Orcon, it would be super if perhaps we can get a response to our tickets. Perhaps you could say what is going on with the slow loading times (going on for almost a year) and also what is happening with the session problem that has been occurring since Monday yet no-one has bothered to come back to your customers. Can you also say when outstanding calls are going to start to be answered please? And why do we get service posting here, yet none as your customer? Thank you.

ptinson

677 posts

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#537500 25-Oct-2011 23:16

I am not in operations so I don't know why you haven't got an answer for the session issue or ticket turn around times sorry.
I know that the guys are working on the 'sometimes slow sites' but any further than that detail I don't have.

Getting a response here from me is not the same as someone that runs the servers answering your question I am sorry, I do this to help where I can and hope that people find it useful.

Me jumping into fixing/diagnosing issues you have may actually slow things down as I don't have the background on the issues I can however ask and see what is going on.
Where I have direct knowledge such as above I can share that with no issue, I don't think it is prudent for me to try and second guess when you will get answers you are happy with though.

meat popsicle

adw

175 posts

Master Geek

#537502 25-Oct-2011 23:19

ptinson: I am not in operations so I don't know why you haven't got an answer for the session issue or ticket turn around times sorry.
I know that the guys are working on the 'sometimes slow sites' but any further than that detail I don't have.

Getting a response here from me is not the same as someone that runs the servers answering your question I am sorry, I do this to help where I can and hope that people find it useful.

Me jumping into fixing/diagnosing issues you have may actually slow things down as I don't have the background on the issues I can however ask and see what is going on.
Where I have direct knowledge such as above I can share that with no issue, I don't think it is prudent for me to try and second guess when you will get answers you are happy with though.

Thanks for helping out where you can - any answer is better than being ignored.

ptinson

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#537506 25-Oct-2011 23:30

Its never our intention to ignore a customer, I can assure you that the people doing the heavy lifting are working very hard, and are quite capable/competent at what they do.

From experience I know that hunting intermittent performance problems can be a real headache, and making incremental changes is certainly more prudent than wholesale change where you have many things in flux at any point in time. I am sure you understand this well.

meat popsicle

insane

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#537508 25-Oct-2011 23:36

Without being able to see bandwidth utilization, firewall connection counts, server connection counts, CPU, Memory, HDD IO wait times etc its nearly impossible to guess at what the cause may be.

About a year ago I had the same problem and after bashing my head against a wall for what seemed like days it turned out to be a faulty hard disk which had not yet quite failed but was causing disk read errors.

The best thing anyone can do is record what time they are having issues in the hope the iServe/Orcon engineers can match the time up with all the various monitoring they would surly have on the servers.

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ptinson

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#537510 25-Oct-2011 23:43

insane: Without being able to see bandwidth utilization, firewall connection counts, server connection counts, CPU, Memory, HDD IO wait times etc its nearly impossible to guess at what the cause may be.

About a year ago I had the same problem and after bashing my head against a wall for what seemed like days it turned out to be a faulty hard disk which had not yet quite failed but was causing disk read errors.

The best thing anyone can do is record what time they are having issues in the hope the iServe/Orcon engineers can match the time up with all the various monitoring they would surly have on the servers.

My understanding is all the usual suspects have been excluded, so we are down to hunting for the unlikely.
But again, I am a sounding board and not doing the actual fault finding on this one.

meat popsicle

adw

175 posts

Master Geek

#537572 26-Oct-2011 09:34

insane: Without being able to see bandwidth utilization, firewall connection counts, server connection counts, CPU, Memory, HDD IO wait times etc its nearly impossible to guess at what the cause may be.

About a year ago I had the same problem and after bashing my head against a wall for what seemed like days it turned out to be a faulty hard disk which had not yet quite failed but was causing disk read errors.

The best thing anyone can do is record what time they are having issues in the hope the iServe/Orcon engineers can match the time up with all the various monitoring they would surly have on the servers.

This isn't just happening with one user nor in one location - it's happening from Christchurch to Auckland. Orcon premium technical support have actually had me on the line trying to get onto one of the sites and can't 'see' me, yet when I tried to get to one of the non-problem sites I 'popped up' immediately - you'd think that would narrow it down a bit. I've sent wire shark reports, etc. We're happy to help in any way we can but what we're not happy about is lack of updates and lack of contact or when a new problem arises like the session problem there's no communication at all (it's now Wednesday, that was reported Monday to what used to be Gold Support) - that's just not professional. I think that unfortunately Orcon has such a churn of staff at the moment that everyone goes back to stage one and the ones that have been there for more than 5 minutes are severely overloaded.

adw

175 posts

Master Geek

#537574 26-Oct-2011 09:39

ptinson: Its never our intention to ignore a customer, I can assure you that the people doing the heavy lifting are working very hard, and are quite capable/competent at what they do.

From experience I know that hunting intermittent performance problems can be a real headache, and making incremental changes is certainly more prudent than wholesale change where you have many things in flux at any point in time. I am sure you understand this well.

Yes I do, that's why we're happy to send wireshark reports and do tests, etc. But that doesn't excuse emails being ignored. CRM/Helpdesk software is a mature tool now but it's obviously not being used. And this doesn't explain the session problem reported to Gold Support Monday, we're still waiting for an acknowledgement of that and it's now Wednesday. Ignoring the client doesn't make the problem go away - it usually just makes the client go away.

MurrayM

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#537577 26-Oct-2011 09:41

adw: a new problem arises like the session problem there's no communication at all (it's now Wednesday, that was reported Monday to what used to be Gold Support)

I haven't encountered the session problem this week, although I had a session problem a few months ago.

Could you please outline what the problem is an on which hosting platform it is (PHP 4, PHP 5, ASP, etc) so I can see if it has affected my websites. Thanks!

adw

175 posts

Master Geek

#537585 26-Oct-2011 09:54

MurrayM:
adw: a new problem arises like the session problem there's no communication at all (it's now Wednesday, that was reported Monday to what used to be Gold Support)

I haven't encountered the session problem this week, although I had a session problem a few months ago.

Could you please outline what the problem is an on which hosting platform it is (PHP 4, PHP 5, ASP, etc) so I can see if it has affected my websites. Thanks!

Hi, we're seeing it on PHP 5 sites (not 4), the server tries to store the session in the individual site in a folder called tmp, so you get a PHP error saying session start failed and the directory doesn't exist. We've put work arounds in place to temporarily accommodate where the server wants to store its sessions. Cheers.

MurrayM

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#537592 26-Oct-2011 10:01

adw: Hi, we're seeing it on PHP 5 sites (not 4), the server tries to store the session in the individual site in a folder called tmp, so you get a PHP error saying session start failed and the directory doesn't exist. We've put work arounds in place to temporarily accommodate where the server wants to store its sessions. Cheers.

Thanks for that.

I probably haven't seen the problem because most of my sites that use sessions tell PHP to put the session data in a tmp folder within the website, and also to extend the life of the sessions. I had to do this because my clients used to complain that the sessions weren't lasting long enough.

ptinson

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#537665 26-Oct-2011 11:50

adw:
MurrayM:
adw: a new problem arises like the session problem there's no communication at all (it's now Wednesday, that was reported Monday to what used to be Gold Support)

I haven't encountered the session problem this week, although I had a session problem a few months ago.

Could you please outline what the problem is an on which hosting platform it is (PHP 4, PHP 5, ASP, etc) so I can see if it has affected my websites. Thanks!

Hi, we're seeing it on PHP 5 sites (not 4), the server tries to store the session in the individual site in a folder called tmp, so you get a PHP error saying session start failed and the directory doesn't exist. We've put work arounds in place to temporarily accommodate where the server wants to store its sessions. Cheers.

I never rely on the server to store my php sessions (regardless of hosting company).
The reasons I do this are:

Security - If I store it where i want i can be sure no other site on the same shared host has access to my session files
Resilience - Many web hosts load balance across any number of physical hosts, and they may not have a shared piece of disk for session data, and i wouldn't use the shared disk anyway because of security. Load balancing may not always be persistent.
Portability - I don't want to be stuck any where having to recode my site just because i change from one shared host to another, If i control where my data is then it makes this easier and i know where to find everything.
Flexibility - I can control my session data the way i want to.

This is just how I operate and not what I am telling you to do, or explaining why you are having issues.

Paul

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MurrayM

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#537699 26-Oct-2011 13:13

I think the session problem may now be fixed.

Can someone else test it and confirm?

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