Hi Sean,
I am writing today concerning one of your level 2 technical analyst's Gary Stanley.
Over the weekend my server got messed up after doing a Cpanel/WHM update and upgrading PHP from Easy Apache. The issue was that the server loads would for no reason spike up out of control. At one moment the server would be at 1.00 and then BOOM it would spike to over 240.00 and stay spiked for 15 minutes at a time. Other times for no reason the httpd process would just stop running.
I had my server admin / Unix guru check out the site from Thursday Night until Sunday he couldn't find the issue. Because I felt that the issue was caused by the Cpanel upgrade I decided after being down for 3 days it was time to get support from Cpanel.
On Sunday morning a ticket was submitted to Cpanel looking for help, and from Sunday until Monday night a number of Cpanel tech tried to help but were unsuccessful, some said they were out of ideas, I was even told that I should consider a new server to handle the load. I knew none of these were going to help and I also knew my old Quad CPU server could handle the loads as it has been handling those loads fine for the past two years. It wasn't until I upgrade WHM and then PHP via Easy Apache that I had these issues.
I got to be honest, I was starting to get frustrated with the support I was getting from the Cpanel team, then came along Gary Stanley.
Gary hopped in with both feet and starting doing things trying to figure out the issue. I was logged in via SSH and watched him examining everything closely and watching the log files. He contacted me each step of the way asking if he could do things to my server in an attempt to fix the issue. Many things he tried didn't work but he didn't give up he kept searching for the cause of the issue.
After many hours my ticket was updated by Gary again with another thing he wanted to try asking me if he could give it a shot I told him he could do anything he wanted if it fixed my issue. He reran EasyApache removing the Zend Optimizer from the PHP build, then restarted the services... since that time we have not been down since and the server has been running flawlessly. Turns out there was something going on and Zend was not playing nice with eAccelerator, Gary figured this out and got us running again.
I applaud Gary's efforts he seemed like he was not going to stop working until he got to the root of the problem. While others gave up Gary kept on working until I was happy. You can't ask for more then that.
I truly appreciate his hard work and efforts and thought you should know about it firsthand.
Thank you Gary, a job truly well done!
Best,
Scott Greczkowski
SatelliteGuys.US
