Network slowness for the past hour
Posted (March 9th, 2007 at 1:32 pm PST) by KellyIt appears that I, in a stroke of brilliance, mis-pasted the same IP addresses into both of our core routers. This caused an effective bridging loop as both of our routers fought for the ip address. This pegged their CPUs and the uplink between them. We have removed the offending IP addresses and the system seems to have recovered. This was a problem for approximately the previous hour and 15 minutes, ending at 1:30PM Pacific time.
134 Responses to “Network slowness for the past hour”
Thanks for the good job
Sounds great. Too bad my web site’s down now though.
all of my website are also down 
anyone?
ideas?
up soon?
please?
reasons?
Mine just went back up. No idea. Solly Cholly.
It’s official! Dreamhost are staffed by super genius aliens from the planet Zork, where this is perfectly normal working practise.
WOO! My website only had one 50 second downtime issue. Nothing more…
Those of us from the planet Zork are mortally offended that you feel so little of us. Next, you’ll blame us for inventing Windows.
Peace,
Gene
Give these guys (and chicks) a bit of a break. They’re honest when they screw up and admit when stuff breaks and even let you blow off some steam here. Try getting that at most hosts.
What have we got so far in abundance here? Yeah, it’s a sense of humor of DH crew.
So, while downtimes keep piling up, let’s pay it back.
Some contest like “The Best Downtime Banner” is needed.
For instance, ” Our site is brought down by happy DreamHost team” 
decaf
:hug:
You guys still rock socks. I recommended you to a friend of mine and they’re also happy DreamHost customers. Hang in there, it’s Friday!
Well SOMETHING’s down, because my sites have been offline for most of the past two days. HALP!
Idogg: And you did send a customer service complaint about this?
Or not?
Peace,
Gene
My sites are still really slow — what’s going on here? Dreamhost seems to be going into a steady decline.
Likewise, it’s taking about 3-4 minutes to load my front page. My site is on Dr Pepper if that helps at all. Any idea whats up?
Yep. It was good for a while then recently it went kablooey again. I don’t really mind, but my users sure do :p Dreamhost has still been a great host and speedy with fixes. Great job guys!
Nooooo worky!! Plz fix.
kthnxbye
Another day another outage. Email is not working well at all. For an upgrade this sure seems like a downgrade. Well at least your trying to upgrade, thats a plus…
This is the craziest hosting company i have ever seen.
webmail doesn’t work…
ERROR:
ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
Query: SELECT “INBOX”
ERROR:
ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
Query: LIST “” “INBOX.Sent”
help?
can’t access mysql via phpmyadmin nor can I ping it.
Well, looks like I can’t ping my website either……
I’ll wait and see.
Thanks.
I like it.
I can’t seem to log in to the user CP here on the site either…the password/email hasn’t changed….
Sounds like I need to scream my own plea for help….
Something like…
OMFG HELP ME DREAMHOST MY SITE WAS DOWN FOR 5.2 SECONDS AND I LOST LIKE A TRILLION DOLLARS AND NOW I SUE YOU BECAUSE YOU DESTROYED MY SITE ABOUT MY CAT BY UPGRADING YOUS NETWORK!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
…
Strangely enough, I feel better now. Keep up the great work DreamHost, especially those who upgrade my network!
- (Very) Happy DreamHost Customer!
So much faster now. Thank you!
ridiculous, yes, but i admire the honesty.
dragan
My sites are currently not responding… waiting and hoping the promised improvements actually make a difference
+1 to sites not responding.
Wow, way to make me eat my words Dreamhost! My sites are back up and they are screaming! I hope this lasts, I’m cautiously optimisitc (if this stays up, all the crap of the past few weeks is easily forgotten)
Re. Helpme and Usako : There are several things that *you* can do to possibly “fix” the problems you are having. Had you posted on the Dreamhost Discussion Forum (http://discussion.dreamhost.com), you may very well have your problems fixed by now, as you may well have been pointed to relevant help.
The particular issues you mentioned have been discussed there, one of them just today, and fixes supplied. Posting here may, for some reason be preferable for you, but I would think getting a answer that *helps* would be more gratifying than simply sharing your problem, though I understand that YMMV.
–rlparker
timestamp test
Is a day going to go by where my sites work all day? Every single day my site goes up and down, up and down, up and down. I figured it was the upgrading, it isn’t. What in the world is the problem here? Less than two months signed up and I’ve had NOTHING but problems. I won’t be recommending DH to anyone, I wouldn’t shoot my credibility in the foot like that. This is absolutely ridiculous.
Can’t connect to ftp (nesbitt). The sites are up, but very very slow.
I can’t connect to my mysql sever still.
My site is running slow, and i cannot access my http://FTP. When accessing my FTP i get this error:
451 Transfer aborted. Broken pipe
I keep getting this when I try to bring up my site. Is this related to this issue? Been going on for about 4 or 5 hours:
Network Error (tcp_error)
A communication error occurred: “Connection refused”
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.
For assistance, contact Customer Support.
Its fixed now for me. Awsome job, my site is so much faster now!
My account, on cletus, is finally fast again and no problems. I think it’s finally over; we weathered the storm. Thank you DH.
Indeed! I know get the same speed from Dreamhost as I get from sites hosted here in Europe. Thanks for the work!
Have done, Gene. Thank you for checking. I’m in a somewhat remote location (construction camp in the middle of the desert in the UAE) and haven’t been able to find another way to check on this.
I’ve been a long term customer but these kinda downtimes happen quite a lot lately and I’m not happy with it. If it’s some personal site, fine but I also gonna start to run a webshop and this is killing for a starting business. Please shape up!!
My site loads wicked fast now. Thanks DreamHost team!
Okay just realized this IS kinda a problem personally for me. My portfolio application for college is hosted on my site, so hopefully they will be looking at it at an up-time. my sites are running terribly slow on and off. telling from how many other people posted it’s not just me so submitting a support ticket or going to the forum wouldn’t help (and not sure…but if i can’t log in how do i post? not familiar with how the discussion board here works…or is it like this where we just input a name >.>).
This is the only host company where I get a good laugh when there’s a downtime. Cheers DreamHost!
THANKS AGAIN GUYS MY SITE IS DOWN AND MY SQL DATA BASE HAS CRASHED!!!! THANKS AND GOODTIMES A#@HOLES
Jason are you sure your SQL DB server has crashed and the server wasn’t just having slow network connection?
Also do you not keep a back up of your SQL DBs? My largest DB is backed up daily and at nearly 200mb it’s fine following this…
My site is dead - as it has been for most of the past two weeks. I suppose this is business as usual for dreamhost…
Lol, just shows with only one router functional, the network still functions tolerably 
The only problems I’ve had over the last 3 weeks are the very public downtimes that have been commented upon repeatedly. The only real setback was, I didn’t get to push/pull backups (I sync my DH account to my server, and vice versa, daily) a couple nights. That’s it.
If this is resolved then why is everything still slow as hell?
Slow as hell? Nothing loads here, even the DB’s are down (at least the ones that are mine lol), phpmyadmin wont load, seems to be on all my sites.
I had 30 second load times for my index page last night but things have improved vastly now and I’m back in the 3 to 5 second range.
My site is running like molasses and the load on voss is > 300:
[voss]$ uptime
09:21:12 up 12 min, 2 users, load average: 301.63, 218.59, 105.05
things are indeed not really ok. My domain and the files are accessible but much slower than it should
gene. go chase a ufo. if your sites are fine, why are you here?
I totally missed the downtown and/or slowness but can I complain about it anyway?
Why not?
That doesn’t stop most people.
1 Millons Video http://www.ciyara.com Come
Duplicate IPs (L3) don’t cause bridge loops (L2).
How about volunteer network change peer reviewers? I love the openness of Dreamhost when it come to operational reporting - why not do the same with engineering.
Just so everyone knows. Pacific Time changed during the night. We are now an hour ahead of the time we used to be. This is also -0700. Also known as PST. And that’s why you have an hour of missing access log entries.
And it looks like the times on this page didn’t. It’s 2:14 pm Pacific time. For whatever it’s worth.
I moved my sites to mediatemple two weeks ago when things were going downhill here. Couldn’t be happier, even though I’m spending $20/month now. It’s just not worth it to spend little and deal with this.
After two years with dreamhost, I’m sorry to have to leave, but this is unacceptable.
Dubya Tee Eff, over?
Note that the correct host timezone is now PDT not PST.
sorry about that, it is PDT, unless DH doesn’t change time down south like another “host” in the next state supposedly doesn’t.
Dammit, why isn’t this posted here yet?
My sites are down. I went into the control panel and requested support for the problem.
Here’s dreamhost’s reply, via email:
“We are experiencing a very high server load on this server at this time.
We are working to find who and what is causing this and should have it
resolved shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.”
So, they know some of our sites are inaccessible, but they’re not posting it here?
That is unacceptable.
I’m with Rob. I’ve had a support ticket in for 3 hours with no response whatsoever, either there or here. I need to know if my MySQL is down or if something ‘broke’ that I need to fix. All I need is a damned answer. Grrrr…frustrating….
Another day of my sites being slow or unavailable. It’s reassuring to see other people have been experiencing trouble in the past few days — but disappointing that Dreamhost has yet to resolve these issue, or adequately communicate what the problems are.
Port 443 access is down to my site and your web panel is also not reachable to rerort the outtage, probably for the same reason.
Sure is hard to develop a site when I can’t access it half the time. Also, email and webmail have been down for me all morning and still no response and no status message posted here.
ok this is getting stupid - sites down yet again or slow as molasses. another round of tickets where the sites are back up for an hour by the time they respond then back down again. getting close to a week now where my sites have been unreachable. appalling.
now site errors - incredible.
Where is my site??? WTF? My site keeps going down and I need it to be up. Who can I call to find out what is happening???
submit a ticket, the site will be back up by the time they look at it and will go down an hour later. it’s all good.
I’m done, I can’t take this anymore. Any one a reliable host?
Guys, these DH admins are working hard. They do not need us putting more pressure on them than they already have. If you dont like it leave. Otherwise STFU and let them relax and do their job.
Site down again. Clients depend on site being up to deal with customers. Happening too often and I never receive a clear response telling me the system is fixed. No phone number to call for help, etc. Very unhappy with customer service.
Red what is your point, that is their job, we pay our hard earned money for results, so you need to STFU! Trust me i will leave
Right now I’m having problems too - I can’t access my databases via ODBC. This is very annoying as this is one of my client’s sites and it does not reflect very well on me at all. I guess you get what you pay for with this shitty hosting.
Our site is down. I could deal with that (I guess) but it doesn’t even appear anyone has noticed there is an issue. I talked my boss into moving our website here it’s a small site, no sales so I figured it would be okay. I was very very wrong. I’ve been with dreamhost for several years now and I’ve sent many people here. Now I feel like an idiot.
I have a show with a HUGE band tonight at 8:30pt and our listeners can’t even access the site to get information. I’ll spend the day wasted answering email from teenagers instead of actually PRODUCING a radio show. It’s sad.
I have a consultant here from India who’s doing work for my company. We need access to my company’s website for him to synchronize our databases, and hes leaving in 4 days, and still has to do training etc.
This is very upsetting as right now we’re just sitting here waiting to complete what we need to do. This is ridiculous.
I’m definitely getting angry here. My sites are down again after having come back online late last night/early in the morning.
I woke to find a reply from DH support that didn’t even address the question I asked.
LoL, I haven’t had decent page queries for almost a week. 30+ secs for a page to load if it loads is just terrible. Fire off an email to support then get no results 48 hours later… I definitely agree that DH at one time was the best but now there a other hosts that give you the same or more for your dollar. Luckily, I don’t run e-commerce or I’d be out of business :O Bye bye DH when subscription runs out for sure.
Anyone knows more reliable host out there? I’m willing to pay the money to get results, I should of known the coupon was too good to be true.
Wow, things are crawling lately. I’ve been with DH for almost a year and this is the worst it has ever been.
Even shell access is sloooooow.
WTF!? seriously… no email, no webmail, no admin panel, only our site is up. i can’t even get to dreamhost.com! what is wrong with the service?
Can anyone recommend a good hosting company? Mediatemple is a bit too much at $20 a month, and I don’t think I’ll need everything they offer. Multiple domain hosting is a much though.
i’m done. don’t even know how to send yet another support ticket as the sire errors change everytime i look at it. i give up. i’m losing money here.
know anyone who will transfer over your sites for free for for a small fee? don’t have the time for this right now …
Your post… it’s honest, I doubt anyone disagrees with that. But it also smacks of a total lack of configuration management. Don’t you guys have upgrade checklists which you run through as a test beforehand? I admire you’re attempt to make out it’s all a big joke, but you’re lack of professional attitude is starting to grate.
My FeedMedic keeps shooting alerts every hour :” Read timed out”
As a matter of facts,
someone took already DREAMHOSTSUCKS.COM
But we can’t see it online.
Just a wild thought :
Is that website hosted by DH as well?
This site loads extremely fast. All my sites? DOWN.
John, whose website is hostgator, recommends…hostgator. No thanks.
Hostgator seems over priced although it has some REALLY nice admin panel stuff that should be basic. I don’t know why DH doesn’t have some of it. Go look at their demo then add that to the panel! I could care less about the cosmetics that DH added. -_- Those asking about hosting should check [url=http://order.1and1.com]1 & 1[/url]. Great prices, packages, and “omg their up and running!’ Sigh, how many hours now WITHOUT even a “yes we know our datacenter is lagging, we’re working on it”.
@ld : Are you talking about my site “This site loads extremely fast.” ?
I use WordPress Cache Plugin to make my site much faster and responsive, so it saves some grey hair
but doesn’t save my dream about better DreamHost.
Lol read html for dummies and build simple pages instead of using tons of fancy useless CMS apps that eat all the CPU
Mikhail–nah, I was talking about this here status blog. But the cache plugin sounds promising.
My sites are all still down and now I also can’t ssh in, which I could a little while ago.
Chose who are considering 1and1 should check the online chatter first. They have an abysmal customer service record, and very sharp limits to MySQL databases (100MB). That was a deal-breaker for me, even though our vBulletin message board is young.
And I heartily recommend the WordPress Cache plug-in. It works beautifully and will speed up WP on any host.
Peace,
Gene
Everyone, please contact me for a class action lawsuit against Dreamhost. Punitive damages could get into the $67 zillion.
Shit still ain’t working. So much for 99.999% up time huh?
Pretty bad network slowness on hyperion. Almost makes me want to edit my files locally.
I’m not sweating it though, I’ve been through enough DH issues to know that they’re pretty sincere about trying to resolve this stuff.
Regarding the 1and1 recommendation: I’d advise against it, I left 1and1 to come here and still don’t regret the change, even in the face of these network issues.
Ezipo: How about filing an action against Microsoft for being — Microsoft?
I mean let’s have fun. Now if I were only an attorney; then I could appreciate such nonsense.
Peace,
Gene
stfu gene. will you reinburse me $$$ last for the weeks downtime?
stfu clown.
gene obviously you are a broke bitch who has no understanding of web business.
once you move out of your mom’s basement you might be able to comprehend what uptime means to biz sites.
if not.
STFU.
gene ask a UFO to reinburse me for lost sales you pathetic nerd.
My sites are down AGAIN. Man. One day my site doesn’t work, the next day my mail, the next day my site…I am getting very tired of this. I know problems happen, but the service here really has been getting worse in the last 6 months. I am willing to pay more for reliability. If it were not such a pain to move I would have done so already.
Renewed another $239.40 US today for another year Just loving it here - at least they are honest - I can totally respect that. I wish I could be this transparent with others in my company when we screw up.
J Says: Obviously you’re a troll. You didn’t lose any sales for your fanboy site, whatever it is. Do you have the courage to tell us? You know what my site is, by clicking on my name. That site links to my other sites, all of which work. Other than the power shut-down on that infamous Sunday morning, my downtime has been minimal, my problems minimal. And, yes, I am a paid-in-full customer, in case you’re wondering J Says. But you’re not serious are you!
Peace,
Gene
All our sites and especially the databases are running extremely slow. There’s nothing on the emergency page about this but it’s obvious others are experiencing the same problem. If Dreamhost is really going to tout honesty, I’d appreciate it if they’d make an effort to keep people updated about system problems on the emergency status page. A cynic might say that the reason they don’t is because network outages and downtime are too widespread and common. I’d like to see their overall plan for upgrading the network posted somewhere with updates as to how they’re doing. This would at least be some help. At the least, since we can’t call support and sometimes have to wait a day for a callback as to why sites are down, I’d like to see them make an effort to keep the emergency status page updated. Thanks.
David, the fact that I’m not having any problems with four sites — and the five databases they use — clearly indicates that not everyone is being affected. Click the link to which my name points, and the links there to my other sites to see for yourself.
Did you file support tickets about these items?
Peace,
GEne
Honesty, love, warm and fuzzy won’t cut it. Only performance does. Is there a leader among this “employee owned company”, somebody who holds people responsible for their failures? I dropped the DH ad on my site, I don’t want to refer people to something that will make them mad. Will move the site as soon as possible, it is incredibly slow, more the admin part.
Sittingbull: You have a WordPress site. Lots and lots of plug-ins can cause it to use more memory, make more MySQL queries and hence slow down things considerably.
On my WordPress-driven site, http://www.macnightowl.com, I spent a fair amount of time getting rid of unnecessary add-ons. That and the WP-Cache plug-in have done wonders for me. Are you sure DreamHost is to blame for your problems?
Peace,
Gene
Gene, when I go to your site, I get a dll error upon loading the page. Perhaps a paranormal event has occured? Not sure.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to suggest everyone was having problems, just that many on here seem to be reporting problems. Perhaps the slowness is only related to one or two servers. Still, this would be good information to post on the status page Otherwise, I’m apt to think they’ve been captured by space aliens and reprogrammed for poor customer service… or something like that. ;^)
OK, do you have QuickTime installed? The embedded player requires that to run the on-demand show. Also, we have a Flash navigation bar. However, I routinely check my sites on all the major browsers, Mac OS X, Windows XP and Windows Vista for proper functionality.
In any case, David, I see just a handful of complaints. With over 450,000 domains, probably over 100,000 customers and — what? — 1500 or more servers, it would be impossible to have everything operate perfectly every single time. I just looked at the Support area and, as I write this, there are 238 open support requests. Considering the size of DreamHost, that doesn’t seem like an awful lot.
Peace,
Gene
Gene, you could be right but I’d rather not give a free pass. Given that this thread was in response to Network issues, I’m not sure anyone but a Dreamhost employee would know for sure whether our problems are related, or that other issues have not cropped up. I’m sure you’re aware there have been substantial network issues in the past related to strains on the original network architecture. Many of these problems could likely have been avoided had they re-invested in their infrastructure as their customer base grew.
Going forward, I would like to know that they have a roadmap, that they are making the investment necessary to modernize and standardize their existing infrastructure, and that we are privy to that information and the progress that is being made. The payoff for Dreamhost would be to inspire more confidence in their expertise and commitment to system reliability.
Thanks,
David
Still very sluggish today. System load average in the high teens, often up to 25. Ssh terminal sessions are unresponsive for 10s of seconds at a time. Processes killed randomly. What the hell is going on here? If this wasn’t a jailed system at least we’d be able to run ps and see what’s happening. All I can tell is it’s not me.
This is on basic-vat.gloop.dreamhost.com
top - 22:03:19 up 48 min, 3 users, load average: 42.44, 18.32, 12.62
Tasks: 8 total, 1 running, 7 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 8.7% user, 1.8% system, 0.5% nice, 89.0% idle
Mem: 3621448k total, 2324216k used, 1297232k free, 36796k buffers
Swap: 6313512k total, 0k used, 6313512k free, 1243032k cached
@Gene:
We spent a fair amount of time on the blog getting rid of add-ons that slowed the loading time. We got down to 2-5 seconds. Then, without new add-ons, after about 2 weeks, the blog was back to its usual 18-20 loading time.
NO new add-ons, sorry
Sittingbull: I looked at your site today and it seems to load OK. Did you run a Traceroute to make sure that the bottleneck isn’t somewhere else along the chain?
Peace,
Gene
Things back to normal now…
Yeah, still super slow. Load time of 20+ seconds. If anyone knows anything, will they contact me? I put in a ticket, but that may have been overkill.
Oops, once again my site is unfaithfully slow, last week loads, weekend downtime, databases, today loads, I mentioned before is this happens everyday, don’t know what to do anymore, and again Gene Steinberg with your posts looks like you work for DH, whatever hope to find peace soon!
thanksss
Everything work great! Thanks, guys for your hosting!
I can’t believe there are still people who post at these areas looking for technical help, or wanting to complain, or are looking for answers etc. when it clearly says that dreamhost may not read these comments. This is not the place for those kinds of issues. Log a ticket or visit the forums, people. The blog format is not a customer-service type of calldesk application. It will never work as one – think if all the queries and questions and issues were posted here. It would be an absolute logistical nightmare to try and correlate issues and understand the problems. Please get some sense and stop posting here.
Completly agree with you, Chain. But this page still have good ranking in search engines.
Wow! Sounds good. You must be a genius.
thanks al ot…
webmail doesn’t work…
The only problems I’ve had webmail doesn’t work…
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Hi guys
Take it easy over there at DreamHost