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Why is ScienceForums going so slowly these Days?


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I think he was just putting that out there. We have scores of non-US folks and many of them have reported similar experience. This is at the host/software level. Question is how much is within the control of our site admins to address. 

That said, my experience this past half hour is markedly improved. 

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I just checked earlier today and it doesn't matter if I'm on 4G/LTE or public IP cable hardline at home it's all the same (I'm in Europe) It looks like the issue/issues have to be on the server (database?) side.

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The board has peformed much better today. 8 hours ago everything was fine pages loading in 4 or 5 seconds. By noon (4.5 hours ago) the wait times had increased to about 15 seconds on average and the occasional 30 to 45 second wait. 

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46 minutes ago, Outrider said:

The board has peformed much better today. 8 hours ago everything was fine pages loading in 4 or 5 seconds. By noon (4.5 hours ago) the wait times had increased to about 15 seconds on average and the occasional 30 to 45 second wait. 

I can confirm that, everything loads faster today (middle of the week-everybody at work-less load) I got a 502 gateway error only twice on iOS wif today. It looks like a bandwith issue due to a higher load of the new forum engine?

Edited by koti
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36 minutes ago, Dave said:

Okay all, I have changed another couple of IPB-specific options. Initial observations are encouraging (disk I/O has been reduced considerably), so let's see if this performs any better...

Sounds awesome because it does seem to work (last 1 hour or so is a lot better) Whats IPB? Lower server disc I/O would not target the gateway problems would it. There seems to be a problem on the overall bandwidth/routing the new forum engine is generating not just the DB on the server side. I think youre dealing with quite a few problems at once here Dave and one of them might be highly increased traffic load due to some shitty new engine functionality (which is probably not even there)

Can we roll back?

Edited by koti
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IPB is Invision Power Board, the old name for the software we use. (Eventually they rebranded as Invision Community or something.)

There are two separate problems we're experiencing:

  1. The new version of IPB was saving a bunch of cache data to the hard disk with every request, causing enormous load on the hard drives. That seems to be part of why SFN was so slow -- every request was delayed waiting for its turn to use the hard disk. Dave switched it to use the database instead, which can be much smarter about keeping the data in memory instead of on disk.
  2. The "bad gateway" errors are a bug in PHP which make it crash occasionally. Our HTTP server, nginx, notices that PHP has crashed and failed to produce a webpage, and reports "bad gateway" to you.

If Dave's tweak is right, it should fix problem #1 but not problem #2. I've searched for solutions to problem #2 and haven't found anything yet -- either we're the only people experiencing the problem or it's an artifact of something unique in our setup. But if you encounter the "bad gateway" errors you should be able to refresh and get the page loaded quickly.

We'll monitor the changes over the next couple days and see if problem #1 is conclusively solved or if we need to make more tweaks. Big thanks to Dave for spotting the issue and fixing it.

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So things look like they have improved quite a bit over the last few hours. Looking at our server load averages for the last 12 hours, it's been quite clear that the load has reduced and SFN feels a lot more responsive. We'll see how we can do in relation to the 'bad gateway' issue over the next few days.

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1 hour ago, Dave said:

So things look like they have improved quite a bit over the last few hours. Looking at our server load averages for the last 12 hours, it's been quite clear that the load has reduced and SFN feels a lot more responsive. We'll see how we can do in relation to the 'bad gateway' issue over the next few days.

A definite improvement, everything loads normally now. Thanks for the tweek!

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4 hours ago, Dave said:

So things look like they have improved quite a bit over the last few hours. Looking at our server load averages for the last 12 hours, it's been quite clear that the load has reduced and SFN feels a lot more responsive. We'll see how we can do in relation to the 'bad gateway' issue over the next few days.

It's a good job we've got you and CR that are familiar with the guts of running a website. I wonder how many IPB site owners are having these problems and not knowing where to look?

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18 minutes ago, studiot said:

Definitely snappier.

Solution:-

Replace IPB with a Dave.

:)

We're lucky to have him on speed-dial. The man dates far too many gorgeous women and I used to think that was his fault, but now I see why they want him. 

He does the math.

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