Hello JV,

If you have left the browser idling, these are most likely background activities which checks for "New Notifications". There are activities running on the back ground for the back end as well as the front end so that when there are new updates, you would get notified

I see. And I have confirmed this with recent server logs. I logged off a couple of hours ago, and now executions have dropped to normal levels.

I found the "Interval to check for new items" option under Settings/Stream in the backend. I set this from 30 seconds to 300 seconds and this has reduced executions somewhat. I assume this was the place to change the amount of background activities?

And is ES designed to keep a person logged in unless they manually log out? Is there a way to allow Joomla's session time to override this?

Thanks, Mark. No rush. I know it's a weekend!

Hello JV,

Yes, that's the correct location to change the intervals As for your questions regarding session life time, yes when an ajax call is made to the server to check for notifications Joomla automatically assumes that they are still "alive" and won't automatically log them out.

In a way, it's a blessing in disguise because user don't get annoyed by automatically being logged out (but of course it depends on the way you look at things)

My main concern is that just me being logged in raised the executions to nearly 75% of what SiteGround allows in a given hour. Does this mean if I have 4 people logged in, it will increase the executions by four times that?

And I assume by setting the interval to 300 seconds, that if someone sends a message to another, the notification that a message has been received -- or a new post on the site or whatever -- the red notification icon will not appear until the next 5 minute interval. Is that correct?

Also, would having caching on the site disabled affect these executions? I presently only have caching enabled in Joomla but not on the site in cPanel.

Hello JV,

Yes, that is correct. If you have 4 users logged in at the same time and you configured the interval to query the server every 300 seconds for new notifications, it would mean that you will then have 4 additional AJAX requests made in 300 seconds.

Caching will not disable these notifications and you can't cache new notifications because that defeats the whole purpose of pulling new notifications. It's like driving a car without wheels. You can however turn off new notification polling as shown in the screen shot here, http://screen.stackideas.com/2015-03-01_1441.png

Also, I am not trying to be rude here (please bear with me because I have been explaining this for quite a number of times) but you are wanting to setup a social network and not just a basic website, however you are hosting your site on a shared hosting and have to worry over such annoying limitations. Have you considered if Facebook were to run their site on a shared hosting account? They would save billions but I am very sure that their technicians are going to have a nightmare.

I know your site may not be as big as Facebook but you don't need to invest billions on machines / data centre's as there are tons of cloud vps offered at a very affordable rate. Wouldn't it be better if you start looking out of the box and moving your social network site on a cloud vps? It really doesn't cost too much at all. https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ , the cheapest you can go is at $5 / month but I would recommend you start something at $10 or $20 / month.

Apart from having full control of your machine, as an added bonus, you can scale up / down as you want. If your site is using excessive resources, I believe by then you would have enough resources to scale up.

Also, I am not saying that Siteground is bad but they are restricting resource usage by a fair policy only to protect themselves because what they are offering are shared hostings where they could eventually host 500 - 1000 customers per machine. I could imagine if 50% of the machine users has such complex sites, it would be a nightmare for them as well.

You're not being rude at all, Mark. I need all the answers I can get. But I don't recall reading anything about ES needing a VPS in order to handle several people online simultaneously, or that shared hosting is not recommended. My apologies if I missed that in your earlier posts or in posted sales information.

I certainly have no problem with spending more on a server. I've always thought hosting fees were ridiculously low anyway. I see SiteGround offers a VPS at around $50/month. If I can't afford $50 /month for a hosting company, I shouldn't be in business. I just didn't realize I would need one for EasySocial.

Hello Jv,

I think it really depends on what sort of hosting you are on and not really a requirement of EasySocial. We have never said that you MUST install it on a vps

Some hostings are very lenient and they are really good in optimizing their servers / webservers. We have customers that runs on Siteground and Cloudaccess without a hitch too.

Most hosting providers do not restrict such resources. If you only have a couple of users on the site, I don't see why Siteground would take any action or send you a notice that you are making excessive requests to the server. These requests are really tiny and most don't even cost 2 - 3kb since they are just returning plain JSON data.

If I only have a couple of users on the site, there will be no problem. It looks like I would need 4 or 5 logged in to start pushing that limit. I already have times with 4 or 5 people logged into my live site and it doesn't have ES installed yet. I suspect I could end up with 10, 20+ logged in at the same time, and that would definitely push me over the limit.

I take it your customers on Siteground do not have large user bases, as I don't see how ES could run on a shared hosting plan like the one I have, their GoGeek plan.

At any rate, it's a non-issue now. They are transferring me over to a vps as I write this. No limitations on executions. 1 x 3.0 GHz CPU Cores, CentOS, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD. That should do the trick, don't you think?

Hello JV,

Hm, I really don't think Siteground will have problems if you have 4 - 5 users logged in at the same time. It's pretty ridiculous We have customers running on so many shared hosting (including Siteground) with more than 100 users logged in at the same time without any issues at all.

As for the vps, I believe it's a pretty decent server but have you tried digitalocean? I would certainly bank on Digitalocean over Siteground's vps because with Siteground's vps you do not have root access to the server.

Well, the transfer to VPS didn't go so well. Too many issues all at once. Had to cancel it and go back to the GoGeek shared hosting plan for now.

I don't see how you can have customers with 100 users logged in at the same time running on Siteground's shared hosting plans. It looks like they give me 40,000 executions per 24 hours, which is their biggest shared plan. When I had 3 users logged into ES on the staging site, I was seeing about 25 executions per minute on the access logs. That math works out to 36,000 executions in a 24 hour period, just 4,000 away from my limit. Furthermore, they limit my emails to no more than 400 per hour. I assume any email notifications ES spits out will count towards that limit, and with 100 users logged in, assuming they have email notifications turned on for some things, I would imagine that limit would be exceeded often, especially if I wanted to use PHPlist to do an eblast at any point in the day.

So on one hand you say that I'm trying to set up a social network and shouldn't be troubled with the annoying limitations of shared hosting, and on the other hand suggest that Siteground's shared hosting works fine with ES for customers of yours running ES with a 100 people logged in simultaneously. So I'm a bit confused on which way to go... stay with the shared, or give VPS another try. I'm really not worried about the cost. If the vps transfer had worked this weekend, I'd be on the vps; but if you say I can run with 100 people logged in on Siteground's shared plan, I'd just as soon do that.

Thanks for the feedback, Mark.

@JV
I am on GoGeek and with all Stackideas products and will see how it works out going live later this month but my reason for posting was to suggest Zoho business instead of Siteground email. It is free for one user with a number of alias names available and you can upgrade cheaply at any stage but the free option is perfectly fine for the majority of business needs.

Take a look (I am not linked to Zoho in any way, just a user with a high opinion of their quality of service and support in all their free/paid products).

@Richard

I will be most interested to hear how your site manages when you go live! Please let me know.

And thanks for the suggestion on Zoho. I was unfamiliar with them, and they look like a nice alternative to MailChimp. I'm not that familiar with MailChimp either, but have checked them out for possible use. Zoho looks like it might have a sweeter interface and more features. But they are pretty much the same animal it seems.

I will certainly let you know the impact of going live on SiteGround although I do expect to move beyond GoGeek/Cloudflare fairly quickly to Cloud and eventually to a Dedicated Server as the site grows.

I should clarify ref my post above, I redirect the SiteGround email to Zoho Business for my own requirements to have everything in one place for free/minimal cost - email, word processing, spreadsheets, projects, team networking, CRM, Campaigns and managing contacts as well as website notifications (sign ups, user actions that require authorisation etc).

The (up to 10) alias emails for 1 free user allows me to create (and control) up to 10 users on the site to handle administration, blogging, forum and other support requirements under their own email address.

However I believe the best website component (miles ahead of the rest) for email/newsletter to handle information output to users/subscribers is AcyMailing and the Enterprise edition at 89 euros for Year 1 and 32 euros for Year 2 onward is excellent value.

Another alternative for transactional emails would be https://mandrillapp.com/

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. Both make PHPlist look like Notepad.

Richard, thanks for the clarification. I will open a ticket with Siteground and find out what their response is to the executions issue and ES. It doesn't sound right that running ES with 5 people logged is should be the maximum their GoGeek plan would allow, but I wouldn't be too surprised.

Hello JV,

Thanks, keep me updated on this as I would really love to learn more about it too.

subscribed +

Well, as I suspected, Siteground confirmed that my GoGeek plan will not accommodate ES with more than 4 simultaneously logged in users (and this would be users logged in 24 hours per day). Their response:

If the numbers you've provided are correct you will indeed need a more powerful hosting solution.

On the subject of when the site would actually be throttled down, they said it would be throttled down after meeting the monthly max of 1,200,000 executions, stating that if I meet this limit 2 weeks into the plan, the site would be shut down for the remainder of the month, or until ES was disabled.

Given the stats I provided in the screen shot at the beginning of this post, I can assume at default settings, that ES will make 7 executions per minute per logged in user. Let's say the site is busiest during normal business hours, 9-5 weekdays. That's 40 hours a week. Call it 160 hours a month. If I have on average 5 users logged in simultaneously during those times, that would amount to 336,000 executions per month - within the limits. That would set the max at about 18 simultaneous logged in users, on average, during those times on the GoGeek plan. Of course, that would mean no other logins outside those hours. But these are hardly real-world numbers. Hard to say what would actually happen without looking at a real month's worth of stats. (I think my math is right, if anyone wants to check it.)

Seems if anyone wants to use ES with any expectations of growth beyond these numbers, a different host/plan would be in order.

And Mark, regarding your earlier comment: "As for your questions regarding session life time, yes when an ajax call is made to the server to check for notifications Joomla automatically assumes that they are still "alive" and won't automatically log them out." Does this ajax call occur only when the user's browser is on the ES pages, or will it occur even if they leave ES pages and go elsewhere on my site, still being logged in?

Hello JV,

I guess this is really not a limitation in EasySocial but the hosting itself. If they are going to be also including ajax calls as a request on the site, then the best bet would be either to move to a different host that isn't so stringent or turn off notifications altogether if you must stick with siteground. It is extremely unfair to say that you can't run EasySocial on a shared host because Siteground is imposing such restrictions. Other web hosts doesn't and we have a fair share of customers who runs on EasySocial on shared hostings without any issues at all.

The ajax calls only happens when you have the notifications of EasySocial the page. These activities are running in the background to check if there are:

1. New friend requests
2. New conversations
3. New notifications

If you are on another page (Joomla article for instance) and there are no notifications module on the page, then no requests would be made to the server.

Mark,

Please understand, I never said that you can't run ES on a shared host. I said that ES may require a different host than Siteground, or a different hosting PLAN than Siteground's GoGeek plan (which would mean upgrading to their VPS plans) -- and then, you would only need a different host or upgraded Siteground plan only if you wanted more freedom to grow beyond the numbers I estimated. And these are only estimates. I could be way off.

I believe ES is brilliantly coded, with all efforts made to make it as efficient and flexible as possible. I also believe it will run with many more users than my estimates indicate, on other shared hosting companies that are less restrictive than Siteground.

The fact that the ajax calls only occur when an ES page or module is loaded is a good thing for me, as I would expect users to spend time on other pages on the site. ES would simply be one aspect of the site, not the focal point.

Hello Jv,

Ah, sorry maybe I misunderstood your post but I guess it's a drawback when you are hosted on Siteground because of it's restrictions on requests.

I will add to Mark's comment here that DigitalOcean is the way forward.

Use this link for $10 off : DigitalOcean

Not only does it give great value, and you can easily increase resources when needed, but it is fantastic for testing sites. Each server (droplet) takes less than 1 minute to create. You can try it on a site for an hour or 2 if you want, then destroy it or create a copy, and only pay for the time it was created, rather than a monthly plan.

Testing literally costs pennies!

For even better blazing performance and security, I have started using these guys: ServerPilot. This link gives $10 off

It is a control panel that sets up NGINX with apache, all done with Saas. It makes your http:// calls faster than ever. It has a free plan, or $10 per month if want SSL and extras.

NB both links provided are referral links. It gives you $10 off. Google them to use directly without referral. ( I always like to save money where I can! )

Thanks for sharing this Darren