Site Slowed Down Massively

Unsure about the source of website lag

[Admiralrewd]

I run a forum style website. Recently (the last 1-2 weeks) the site started to slow down. At first I assumed it was because our traffic was going up. Especially since we've had a big increase (about 25%) about 2 weeks ago. Since then, there has been no new growth, but the site has continued to slow down more and more. Two days ago I sent a message to my webhost, since the site is not anywhere near any of the listed limits for space, databases, bandwidth (in fact, they say you can have nearly unlimited bandwidth within some guidelines). They offered nothing useful as a response. I also did a site diagnostic which the webhost provides, and it said that the test noticed that traffic was very high. But as I said, it is nowhere near their stated limits. Today the site was almost unusable, but traffic was actually lower than the last few days, I assume because most people have left over the terrible load times!

My site has a couple competitors, one of whom started spamming our site one day, although I cannot be sure it was them. Is it possible they are spamming me in some way? Is there some simple way to tell? I have not updated any code during this time period. I just can't imagine what the problem is. Is there some way to diagnose the problem simply?

[Admiralrewd]

I should also add, it does not appear to be dependent on the time of day. My website seems slow independent of isp, location, time of day.

[anallawalla]

If this is a shared host, some other subscriber might be running CPU-intensive scripts. You need to narrow down whether the database is running slow or if static pages are also slow.

[bwnbwn]

But as I said, it is nowhere near their stated limits.

I am very leary of this as I have seen way to many state Unlimited BW but actually a certian amount of BW is assigned to that server.

You have unlimited BW on that server that has a limited amount of BW assigned to it. If that server begins to exceed the limit assigned to it IT begins to choke it off a slow death.

I suspect this is the cause of the slowness if you have checked everthing else out.

[maximillianos]

Shared hosting could be the problem. However if you are on a dedicated instance, try rebooting the server to see if that helps. Then you will know it may be application/memory problem related. Ie- unclosed db connections, etc.