Question

Website took too long to respond (Temporal - After comes back to normal)

Hi. I have a VPS here. From time to time, all the websites hosted on the VPS don’t go through (“took too long to respond.”) by TIMEOUT. Then after some time it will again go through. but when i check the metrics, i don’t see any high utilization of CPU, Bandwidth or even disk I/O. what could possibly cause this temporal issue. But i can SSH into the server very well

Actually i host on an NGINX server that hosts subdomains on 2 domains. one runs on a docker container and i proxy it through the main NGINX while the other works directly under wordpress with the main NGINX server. I also have a phpmyadmin subdomain and all go down! I’m so confused


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Accepted Answer

SSH to the server

sudo apt(yum) install htop

then once installed just run

htop

This will show what processes are running and which are using more resources.

You would also tail logs.

cd /var/log
sudo tail -f syslog
sudo tail -f nginx/access.log
sudo tail -f php.XX.log

while tailing logs, browse your sites until you see traffic show in the logs, and experience the slow downs

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
April 10, 2020

Hi there @tclarencek,

As you are able to SSH to the Droplet, it sounds like your Nginx service is experiencing some issues.

What I could suggest here is, the next time you notice the problem, SSH to your Droplet and do the following:

  • Check your Nginx error logs, you can do that with the following command:
  1. tail -100 /var/log/ngnix/error.log

You can also use this script here to summarize your access log.

  • Check your Nginx access logs for any suspicious activity:
  1. tail -100 /var/log/nginx/error.log
  • Check your Docker status:
  1. sudo systemctl status docker

Feel free to share any of the logs here so I could try to further advise.

Regards, Bobby

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