Support

I have used AkeebaBackupPro and have been very happy with it on my Joomla site.

I recently moved hosting to Rochen after hearing great reports of their service on this and other forums.

To my horror a few hours ago my websites were all suspended without any prior notice (written or otherwise) from Rochen. It turns out to be due to a bug with the Akeeba Backup component, causing my site to hog CPU for the last 6 days (which I was not made aware of).

I transferred from the previous hosting to Rochen using the excellent back up service, which all appeared to go well, I checked the logs (install and configuration) and got the site up and running with no problems. I will post some of the logs below, as I am at a loss as to why it started causing problems.

ERROR REPORT:
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[26-Jul-2010 13:14:00] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 74 bytes) in /home/mysite/public_html/mysite.com/administrator/components/com_akeeba/akeeba/drivers/mysql.php on lin$
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Top Process %CPU 47.0 /usr/bin/php /home/mysite/public_html/mysite.com/index2.php
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Has anyone else come across this, or have any knowledge of this error happending?

I want to go back to using Akeeba BackupPro, but can't afford downtime with my site being suspended again. Throughout the is unfortunate incidient I found Rochen to be extremely rude and very unhelpful, maybe they just have a problem talking to women.

Akeeba should not use any CPU cycles except when a backup is in progress. During the backup, it can be hard on server resources. I'm going to flag this for Nicholas, he backs up this site and may have some suggestions on how to smooth this out.

Thank you very much for getting back to me, it's appreciated! If you need any logs to help you please let me know. As you can see from the message from Rochen below this almost had a catastrophic outcome.

Regards, ZM
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Hi XXXXX,

Rochen does not provide phone support. As your site has taken down one of our servers for a short period of time we would normally terminate your account immeidately and provide you with a backup of your files. In this case however we are giving you one chance to resolve the issue before account termination, thank you.
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XXX XXXXX
Rochen Limited

yipes.. I just switched to Rochen and I'd be very interested to know if anything is figured out here..

We were a little hesitant about moving to Rochen at first due to their bandwidth and disk space limits, however the speed of their servers won us over. Their support though is not customer centric and after receiving numerous terse emails I requested to get someone on the phone to discuss customer service. This was flatly rejected with the "support" staff hiding being emails and support tickets.

Our site offers IT elearning, we are not a CPU or bandwidth hog. To the threatening email above saying they would normally close our site down without warning is outrageous service. Especially considering it looks like a module went ballistic and we did nothing to cause the issues.

What's happened good old American customer service?

I don't find the space / bandwidth limitations that much of an issue. I've been with several "unlimited" space/bandwidth hosts and its only unlimited until you hit the limits put forth in the fine print. So far Rochen support tickets have replied with the hour after I submitted them.. believe me I'm still recovering from an incredible host hell experience with a cheaper host. 24/7 chat/phone support is useless when the techs have no clue..

Ultimately, a lot of joomla sites host on Rochen so I'm sure Akeeba will want to figure out if there's an issue this.

Hi Nicholas, thanks for diving in. I was very concious before posting that Rochen host your's and many other sites, for good reasons there is substantial goodwill equity there and it is the reason why we moved to them in the first place.

Looking at the server error log (snippet below) it looks like the archiving thread is exceeding PHP's memory allocation.
[15-Jul-2010 07:30:03] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted

We have a CRON task setup to run every day at 7.30am archiving our complete site, this archive is around 500mb and stored as a single bundle. The archive is large as its for an elearning site of which a substantial bulk of the assets are video.

Archiving such a large site caused (to my knowledge) no problems on our previous hosting provider, Rochen's setup may have lower limits.

As requested I'm transferring account and other info via PM.

Cheers, Jules

I have been off-line all day, apologies. By your tomorrow PM all will be with you.

Cheers,
JJ