[Solved] Website is frequently down

[xcrow]

I'm on Tommy plan, and I've noticed that the website is frequently down more than it should. At first I brushed it off since the plan does include some down time
but this is definitely a lot it happens every few minutes and it's making me start to wonder whether there's something wrong with my account specifically 

[wolstech]

What errors are you seeing?

Error 503 was a known problem on this server recently (should be resolved now), and 502 for a few minutes every 2 hours is normal (Apache restart).

[rexkh]

It happens everyday once if not a few. I'm curious why Apache always give 5xx error

[wolstech]

Please see https://wiki.helionet.org/502_Bad_Gateway for information on this error.

[rexkh]

I've played around with "systemctl restart apache2". For my experience, it shouldn't take more than a few seconds. It really take a few minutes to complete in Johnny and Tommy? I'm just curious.

[wolstech]

Yes, it does take that long in our case, because there's several thousand domains hosted on one server, which means a ton of Apache vhosts.

Johnny and Tommy each have about 5500 vhosts (a typical domain uses 2 vhosts, one for plain HTTP and one for HTTPS). Your typical VPS is probably going to have like 10-20 vhosts. An instance of apache on your home computer for localhost development likely has 1 or 2.

Then there's the fact that the servers are also quite busy, so load is not always the lowest...

[rexkh]

That's a lot I guess. I think 5xx error cause by  apache2 crash. What make it crash in the first place? Out of Memory issue?

[wolstech]

It's not crashing. We're forcing it to restart intentionally. The errors occur because nginx is used in front of Apache as a proxy, and it spits out that error when it can't reach apache.