Frequent 504 Gateway Time-out errors on my PHP sites

[freelio]

I have two apps deployed (on Johnny), through Softaculous: Grav, on hutch.helioho.st, and Tiki Wiki, on www.thehutch.net.  Both of them are very slow to load, and often give a 504 gateway timeout after around 10-20 seconds of trying to load.  I can see how Tiki Wiki is a heavier app, but Grav is really simple with no database. 

Is there anything misconfigured, or other reasons why my account would be running so slow with PHP?  I know my domain is hosted in more than one place, but the Grav site doesn't have any obvious challenges.

[MoneyBroz]

Refer to this wiki article for more information on this issue:

https://wiki.helionet.org/504_Gateway_Timeout

[freelio]

Thanks for that reference.  This isn't just happening at certain times of the day that would coincide with restarts, and it isn't initial setup or install that's failing, so that page doesn't have an obvious explanation for my issue.  Sometimes my apps load slowly, but frequently fail and time out, at least 50% of the time just opening the URL.  I'm nowhere near any CPU or memory usage limits, and I haven't created any content past the initial install of either Grav or TikiWiki.

[wolstech]

Apache restarts cause a 502, not a 504, for Johnny users. Your 504 is because your app is taking too long to return. The PHP process is timing out and being killed before it can return a webpage.

Johnny is very slow. You're sharing a single server with over 1000 other people and almost 2500 other websites. Grav's docs make me think it's meant more for a VPS (it looks command line driven, our shared hosting doesn't have SSH access...), and some people report that it can be quite heavy on CPU resources despite its database-less design.

Also, are you sure the software is configured correctly? Some software will time out like this if misconfigured.

The options for this are going to be:

1. Reconfigure the software (if its broken).
2. Use different software. 
3. We can extend the timeouts on your Johnny account so they can run for longer. This will help reduce 504s, but your pages are still going to be very slow to load.
4. You can buy a Morty subscription. That server is substantially faster than the free offerings. Morty is running on much newer hardware, SSDs, and has less than 100 users on it at the moment. If you want to try that, you can use this link for a 7 day free trial (this link is specific to your account). It will charge $5 after the 7 day trial if not cancelled, which is up to 6 months of Morty credit. If you go this route, please let us know after setting up the trial so we can confirm your account has moved.
5. Buy a VPS. https://heliohost.org/vps/ That will give you a whole virtual server to yourself so you won't be competing with other users. Note that VPSes come as empty linux boxes with root SSH access, there's no control panel or web server unless you install one.

[freelio]

Disappointing, but makes sense.  I suppose Tommy would have most of the same issues.

I was trying to move off of VPS hosting, for the cost and complexity. I'll re-think the software I want to run, and maybe I can manage with just lighter apps.

[wolstech]

We're re-evaluating this. It looks like Johnny may be broken...I can't even get phpinfo to run...

[wolstech]

Update: There's something wrong with the server on our end that's causing this. You're not the only one affected, just the first to report it, hence thinking it was a site-specific issue.

We're working to address the problem...I was able to briefly able to load your site in reasonable time during troubleshooting before the issue returned. We'll keep you updated.

[wolstech]

We believe this is resolved. The issue was what basically amounted to a DoS attack against the server's webmail service clogging up PHP. The offending IPs have been blocked and performance has noticeably improved.

Please give it another shot and let us know how it performs. I'm no longer experiencing 504s when loading Grav on your account.