Potentially Crashing Server?

Report · Apr 27, 2022

Hello, I am a long time DW user, unfortunately, and in our current setup we have a server with approximately 300 sites hosted on it. I have one login for the whole server, meaning when I connect in DW I get a full list of sites (folders) that I can move around in without havig to connect to each site differently.

This is very helpful, but not a common feature that I have been able to find last I checked (a few years ago) on other tools like Sublime. When I did manage to get something working it was very problematic, somtimes opening a folder would take minutes, or it would crash often, etc etc. (any recommendations would be great).

But I am writing to see if anyone else has experienced an issue where pushing a file in DW to their server causes the server itself to crash? This has happened more than a handful of times over the years. At first I wasn't sure it was related, but now I am starting to think it may indeed be related. I mean almost immedatley after saving and putting the file the server crashes, within seconds.

Unfortuantey our server admin can't give me any clear indication on what the issue is, or why that would happen... So I am kind of in the dark.

PS, I hate DW, literally the worst editor I have ever used and I use it only because the remote connection.

Report · Apr 27, 2022

I've never heard of a file upload from DW causing a server to crash.

Sounds like the server is seriously borked to me.

Does it also crash when using other apps, like the free Filezilla Client, to upload?

Report · Apr 27, 2022

Thanks for your reply. I've not used other apps apart from Putty for accessing the server in quite some time. It also is not happening frequently. For each crash there is maybe thousands of successful saves. So it's not frequent at all. Just seems that it happens immedately after randomly saving.

One thing I was wondering, and I don't know if this would actually be an issue, but could there be perhaps some issue with having that many sites (folders) loaded up all at once? As in, perhaps when saving DW does some kind of allocation on all the files and overloads something.

I am on the latest DW, but I seem to recall this happening after the 2015 version when they seemingly rebuilt the software. Again, maybe unrelated.

Report · Apr 27, 2022

I'm not sure why you'd want to be accessing the entire server when working with individual sites. That to me seems like a recipe for potential disaster, if not plain old confusion, and general mayhem.

Typically, DW sites are set up individually, with their local site-specific root folder pointing to (and only being able to see) the site-specific remote root folder.

I'd certainly never want to access other sites on my server through the specific DW site I'm working on. I use a fairly consistent naming convention and the ability to accidentally overwrite files, and break things "I'm not on", would be too great.

As for the shared server environment, 300 sites isn't all that many if the machine is set up to handle it. Professional hosting companies will get more than that on single machines without issue. However, if it's some generic, got it from Best Buy box, and the boss said something to the effect of "Steve, you know, Karen's nephew, he's good at computers. He's going to run the server in-house", there might be an issue with how things are set up. Excessive traffic for a handful of sites can overburden poorly designed servers.