Websites not responding

[meavic]

Dear all,

I've had a problem on my VPS now for nearly four months and every now and again it rears its head. Most of the time it can be solved with a reboot of the service and unfortunately PowerVPS Support seem to find nothing wrong. However it's now becoming a real problem as it has happened nearly 8 times in the past month and my clients are starting to go elsewhere.

The problem we get is that if you type in one of our websites into the browser it sorts out DNS pretty sharpish but then the browser just sits there with 'Waiting for www.[domainname.com]...' and nothing happens. Eventually the browser gives up.

For those of you on the inside at PowerVPS I would suggest ticket numbers AUF-494316, RAH-162124 and CKK-624714 as good indicators.

Prior to requiring PHP 5 I was on an older server (had been on it since '04 I think) and it was extremely reliable. Since being moved over to the newer servers I've had this problem recurring as well as many others. I've logged more support tickets in the last 5 months since moving than I had in any of the previous 4 years on the older server.

Can anyone help me before all my clients go?

[meavic]

For anyone interested, and to provide a resource for googling questions like this it appears that the problem is down to one IP address opening 117 separate connections to the webserver and Apache just sort of crumbles.

Once that IP was blocked everything was running fine. (Unfortunately it turns out the IP was in fact one of our own clients so a stiff talking to was required!)

I'm not sure whether it was a coincidence that this started happening around the same time as moving - or that this is a red herring - or whether the older server was better at handling larger numbers of connections or what but hopefully the problems will disappear now.