On the morning of Thursday the 3rd of November exactly at Midnight, our website’s average transaction time to load the backend scripts that run the site increased by 400-800%. We were planning to move the site that day to a new server, but we didn’t want to move a busted site that we didn’t know what was wrong. We’ve worked with multiple tech support people at our original hosting company and our new hosting company. Nobody has figured anything out.
We have been troubleshooting on our own and testing all possible variables since we discovered the issue. We went ahead and switched to the new server as a part of our variable testing, and the issue persisted. On our staging site we have on their server however, there is no issues present, even when we cloned the same copy of the site we transferred to our new server. The differences between the servers are the PHP subversions. We had already determined that server updates had happened at midnight on the morning of the 3rd, but every tech support person we talked to was very dismissive of anything we brought to them as a possibility for what was going on.
We are now in the process of cloning a copy of a server that has the lesser subversion of PHP on it still that appears to work just fine in testing in our staging environment. Of course Tech support at our new hosting company won’t do anything to rollback the live server to the previous subversion, this is apparently technically beyond them and their systems they use to manage their servers.
So please be patient as we once again take the site down to create a full backup to clone to yet again another server to see if we can for at least a short period of time have a website that runs normally until we can get the the root of the issue with the PHP subversion upgrade that appears to have broken the site.
