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Server Issues
Many server issues are best diagnosed with network and process monitoring
tools. There are a number of good ones available for all platforms, both
commercial and free. However, some server diagnostic information can be gathered
from your web site logs using web analytics.
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| Figure 6. Server down-time could be
indicated in the Gaps in Service report. |
Down-time
There may have been times that your server or web site was not responding
that you were not even aware of. Summary uses analytics to recognize periods of
inactivity in your request logs that are unusual. Figure 6 shows the Gaps in Service report. These gaps could just be
unusual time when there were no requests to your site. For frequently visited
sites, this is usually and indication that the physical server was down, the web
server software was down or that the web server could not connect to the
Internet. Failures in the logging system or corrupt log files can also produce
gaps in service. You should look at the report and determine if there are any
periods that you were not aware of and try to diagnose the cause of it to
prevent outages in the future.
Bandwidth Usage
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Your web site probably has a limited available bandwidth for connecting with
visitors. There may be times, say during a promotion or a product release, when
your bandwidth usage is well above normal. Most service providers will allow you
to ‘burst’ well beyond your average usage to handle times such as
these. However, if your monthly usage typically exceeds your contractual
allowance, you could be paying more for connection than you need to be. The
solution to this is to either increase your contract quota with your provider or
determine where the bandwidth is being consumed and alter the site to reduce the
amount of bandwidth required to present the information you need. Refer to Lesson 10 - Bandwidth Management for detailed coverage
of these issue and solutions.
Off-peak hours
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Figure 7. The Time of Day report shows which
hours of the day have the least traffic. |
When running a server there are maintenance tasks that will need to be
performed that can put a heavy load on the system, for example, processing your
log files in Summary on a daily basis. Generally you will want to run these when
the server is least busy so you do not affect the performance too much or so you
affect the fewest users possible. For daily tasks, you can use the Time of Day report, Figure 7, to determine which hour or
hours have the least amount of traffic. Usually this is the hours of 3AM - 5AM.
However, this depends a lot on the location of your server and your visitors.
For example, if your server is located in San Jose and most of your customers
are on the East Coast, 5AM San Jose time is 8AM on the East Coast, which is
probably a high-traffic time. If you have many international clients, it may be
hard for you to find any ‘off-peak’ time to schedule these tasks.
Then you need to make your own decision when the best time to interrupt users
is.
If you have tasks that run on a weekly basis, you can use the Day of the Week report to find out which day is lowest
traffic, and schedule for that day. Your hourly patterns will probably be
similar for all days, so you can likely schedule your weekly tasks at the same
time as (or just after) your daily tasks.
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