Forum very slow recently

[Athlai]

Anyway it can be prevented?

 

[James]

Anyway it can be prevented?

I'm continuing to look at ways of increasing performance of the site. Site performance has improved over the past year, and the actual occasions where we do have problems are rare with an average load over the past month of 1.22.

 

[Athlai]

How's the hits going along? Is our old girl worth anything yet?

 

[Johnners]

I'm continuing to look at ways of increasing performance of the site. Site performance has improved over the past year, and the actual occasions where we do have problems are rare with an average load over the past month of 1.22.

really?

Forums have been a shocker this year compared to previous in terms of downtime imo.

 

[James]

really?

Forums have been a shocker this year compared to previous in terms of downtime imo.

In general yes, load averages are a lot lower. There's far less activity with the new design released earlier in the year being less server intensive, which has a run on affect into how the forum performs.

Perhaps it's just affected you more this year when it has occurred.

 

[Johnners]

Interesting. I guess the reason I'm surprised is because I know I'm not the only one who has commented on the fact (maybe not on the forums, but msn) that for such a big community, the slowness/database errors/downtime over the past 6 months have been terrible.

It's quite possible that it is an overexaggerated problem for me due to my connection. That being said, I don't get nearly the same amount of problems on a few other forums that are just as large

 

[Matt79]

I'm continuing to look at ways of increasing performance of the site. Site performance has improved over the past year, and the actual occasions where we do have problems are rare with an average load over the past month of 1.22.

really?

Forums have been a shocker this year compared to previous in terms of downtime imo.

Nah, have to agree with James - about this time last year, if memory serves, there was a shocking patch where outages were almost the norm. There still seems to be slowness and outages (more than I'd like obv.) but its def. improved since that low point.

 

[Goughy]

Shocker today. Seemed to be down at least 30-45 mins of every hour for a number of hrs.

 

[James]

Yeah it was absolutely shocking.

I'm having our hosts look into the problems. It certainly isn't being ignored.

 

[James]

I know we've just had around an hour of downtime. Completely shocking I agree.

Some more changes were made this afternoon Sydney time and some just now after the server came back. I apologise completely for the downtime, and I'm doing my best to get it sorted out.

 

[Jakester1288]

It's been terrible today and yesterday as well, the page doesn't load up, and when it does, takes a long time. This post will probably not make it though the way we are going at the moment.

 

[vic_orthdox]

Must say, this is just about the worst it's been in my time at CW. Not that I'm knocking you James, know that you're doing all that you can.

 

[James]

I'm doing all I can here, I can promise everyone that.

It appears from what I've been told that due to the amount of people hitting the site the past few days, the server is running out of memory and is disk swapping causing the load is sky rocket. I'm trying to organise an upgrade as soon as I can to get more RAM put into the server to cope.

 

[vic_orthdox]

Have we had a lot of new users join recently? Would this have anything to do with the new game?

 

[James]

Have we had a lot of new users join recently? Would this have anything to do with the new game?

Could be, not sure to be honest with you.

I'll try and keep everyone updated with progress through this thread.

 

[James]

From our hosts, obviously time for an upgrade:

I also finished investigating the log files, once the load has went down. At 6AM(EST) this morning, 1000 pages were served within a 3 minute time span, at about 7:30AM(EST), when we noticed the spike in load, it was serving about 1000 pages in 1 minute. This is basically triple the amount of traffic it was an hour and a half earlier. A drastic increase in traffic like this on an already resource starved server is obviously going to cause issues.

 

[James]

Further details. Andrew is head of Technical Support.

Andrew typically starts his day around 9AM (about an hour and 20 minutes from now). Assuming we have the memory in stock for that particular server, we should be able to have it installed fairly quickly. But, that would be something Andrew would have the final say in. I will make sure he contacts you ASAP with further details.

 

[G.I.Joe]

James one reason for the increase in number of pages served could be the forum upgrade. I've noticed that earlier punching in quick reply or editing a post wouldn't result in the entire page reloading, but now it does. I have no idea about webpage design, but my guess is its the new php to html conversion that is at fault here?

 

[biased indian]

hmmm was not able to access for last 3 hours ..when ever i tried it was getting stuck....

hope by Monday when i am back we are back to normalcy

 

[James]

Thanks for your post.

We've had problems like this in the past (not this bad though), so it may be related to that yes, but I tend to think its a combination of many things.