Timeout Problems with Powweb

[jammybiskit]

Hi,

I hope I've posted this to a suitable forum - please don't hesitate to move it somewhere else if you think fit. I tried to find a post on a similar subject but was unsuccessful so I apologise if I'm covering old ground.

I have had two sites on powweb for just under a year and up until the recent takeover of powweb and subsequent 'migration' of web sites to new servers things went pretty well.

One site is a music site (http://www.osrecords.com) which hosts unsigned musicians and the other is an arts and crafts site that sells fine art and craft items (http://www.artsanddesigns.com). They are coded up in Perl using mySQL as the database engine.

Both sites make extensive use of file uploading - for example on the music site a musician may upload an mp3 track and it will then be available to browsers on the web. A similar facility is available on the arts site except with pictures.

The problem: following the migration, powweb appear to have imposed an arbitrary 60 second elapsed time limit on scripts (PHP and Perl). They claim this is to prevent runaway scripts hooging the server, which is a good reason, but I can't believe there is no better way. This limit means that a process running a script is terminated if it takes longer than 60 seconds - in fact the user sees a 'server not found ...' error in the browser. Note that this is elapsed time and not CPU time.

Obviously I have raised this with powweb support. The response is

"Please note that the image should be uploaded within 60 seconds or else you won’t be able to upload it as we have set the server upload time out limit to 60 seconds."

Someone with broadband with an upload speed of 250Kbit/s might just be able to load a file of 1.7Mbytes under ideal circumstances within 60 seconds. For a 56K modem link the maximum size would be around 400K, but probably a lot less. A typical mp3 file is 3MBytes and some of our craft designs approach 20MBytes (PDFs).

Now the questions!

• Do you think that an elapsed time limit of 60 seconds is reasonable - e.g. do other shared hosts impose similar script elapsed time limits?
  Do shared server monitoring programs allow the termination of scripts on the basis of process CPU usage?
  Assuming that there's a better way to protect powweb's servers from processes in tight loops, can anyone suggest a way to put pressure on a large, faceless company like powweb to do the right thing?

I hope you can help - I believe there are many other powweb users in the same boat. I don't really want to change host as I've paid in advance and I am a good Scotsman.

Many thanks for your attention - your help will be greatly appreciated.