Internal Error

Internal Errors are usually caused by the DreamHost "Process Watcher" killing the scripts utilized to run this wikisite.^[1] OneSci is currently running on shared servers from DreamHost (a web-hosting company); and, although they are a good company overall, lately this site has been plagued by Internal Errors, due to a site going over RAM (Memory) limits on their shared server.

Report an internal error here

A shared web hosting service refers to web hosting where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. So, if another site on the same DreamHost server is hogging a bunch of RAM, then the entire group of sites on that particular server will collectively suffer. It's somewhat like Game Theory.

Correspondance

Your site is up and running now. However, while some of the downtime can be attributed to the server issues when load spikes for example, there is another reason why your site is going down.

It seems your scripts have been getting automatically killed by our Process Watcher script due to your sites going over Memory limits on the shared server.

2009-09-22 10:05:54 procwatch2 INFO: Process(pid=1714, name='php5.cgi', uid=monakhos(2776055), tty=None, cpu=18.7, rss=49852.0, vsize=103416.0): kill for total RAM

2009-09-24 13:31:23 procwatch2 INFO: Process(pid=30145, name='php5.cgi', uid=monakhos(2776055), tty=None, cpu=0.6, rss=49832.0, vsize=103916.0): kill for total RAM

RAM is just another term for memory, the main purpose of including the log is to assure you that I have indeed investigated the issue and so that we can match up the time stamp and date to the problem you are reporting.

Please understand that while you may not be hitting your disk space or bandwidth limits, these are actually entirely different things.

If we didn't limit the amount of memory our customers were using on the server, then one customer could bring the system down completely if they so desired!

I would highly recommend that you follow the steps in the following wiki article in order to reduce your usage:

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Finding_Causes_of_Heavy_Usage

Also, please be aware that just because this site is the one getting killed, it isn't necessarily the problematic one.

For instance, if Site A is using 90% of your allotted memory usage, and then Site B attempts to use an additional 15%, Site B will be 5% over and will get it's script killed.

I'd also recommend looking into any 3rd party plugins you may be running, especially if you happen to be running Wordpress installs as they can be notoriously poor at memory management.

Lastly, you may want to look into DreamhostPS, as you will be able to raise your memory limits to whatever limit you'd like.

You can enable this from your web panel here:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=vserver.provision

Should you have any further questions or concerns, please let me know and I will be glad to help you out.

Thanks! Oscar

I've already went through all of this with someone else about a month ago. Although I have other sites hosted with dreamhost, onesci.com is the only one that ever has any problems; and really, there is only one other site that has 100MB of content.

I've went through all the logs and cannot find anything unusual. The highest number of requests are simply from dreamhost's own internal dummy connections. If there is a wiki script that is causing errors, I am unable to determine which script it could be.

There is one thing I do not fully understand. Each person that visits the wiki will increase the bandwidth, but each visitor will also add to the CPU load. Therefore the "Unlimited Bandwidth" which is advertised, will never be achieved in the slightest, because your scripts will kill the site before even 100 people are accessing the wiki. Yesterday I had 10 unique visitors, to the wiki (which is offered as a one-click install by dreamhost), and this was apparently enough to surmount the dreamhost "Memory limits" (which is a number that not even defined to us webmasters).

If there is something specific that I could do to keep my site from going down, please let me know. But as for all the things you've mentioned below, I've tried them.

Thanks

-Brad

I've spent a good amount of today looking at the server and have contacted _several_ people about their usage and have fixed other issues but the load seems to stay. Hopefully things are getting better...are you having issues still at all? I can load the site without issue and can see only 1 error when googlebot hit. If you still have trouble, let me know. I will be gone Sun,Mon so if you need further assistance I would write into main support here: support@dreamhost.com

Thanks! Jason Y

1. ↑ 2009-09-22 10:05:54 procwatch2 INFO: Process(pid=1714, name='php5.cgi', uid=monakhos(2776055), tty=None, cpu=18.7, rss=49852.0, vsize=103416.0): kill for total RAM
   2009-09-24 13:31:23 procwatch2 INFO: Process(pid=30145, name='php5.cgi', uid=monakhos(2776055), tty=None, cpu=0.6, rss=49832.0, vsize=103916.0): kill for total RAM