Intermittent FTP Issues on Phoenix

For the past 3 weeks, while Phoenix has not experienced downtime, (except the planned hardware diagnostic downtime), there have been some really strange delays in FTP and MySQL sockets. We have been working with the data center constantly and no one yet has been able to figure this out. It has now been bumped up to their Professional Services team as the 'court of last resort'.

Right now it is believed that it is an application being run by a user that is latching on and not letting go for several seconds, but nothing we have tried has been able to isolate it. I had considered leasing an additional machine and just moving all user accounts over in hopes THAT would stop the problem. But obviously if it is a user account causing the problem, that would just transfer the problem to the new machine.

I am giving the data center staff about 2 weeks to find this and if they are unsuccessful I will get an additional machine and begin moving all accounts from Phoenix who have been with us from before January 2006 to the new machine. (My thinking is it is probably one of the newer accounts, but there are no guarantees).

Until this problem is resolved you MAY experience some issues with FTP. These issues include:

Initial connection time outs - some times FTP will initially time out when you first connect, but then will connect on its own several seconds later. To mitigate this, increase the time out values in your FTP program. And be patient if you get the time out error message let it sit another 15-30 seconds to see if it reconnects on its own.

Initial directory display taking a very long time to display - once your FTP program shows you are connected it may take 15-30 seconds for the main directory to display. There is no way to mitigate this.

All of these problems disappear, at least for our team in testing from various parts of the world, AFTER the initial connection and directory display has been established.

I apologize for this inconvenience. If anyone had a clue where to look to find the culprit, we would have it fixed by now. And I assure you we are doing everything in our power to get this resolved.

peace

Wolf