[RESOLVED] Very slow access

[OptionBase1]

The site has been borderline unusable numerous times throughout the past 2 or 3 days.

[2kaud]

Today I've have had several 504 Gateway time outs - both with this site and sister sites (eg codeguru).

And when not getting 504s, access is very s...l...o...w...

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Me too!

[2kaud]

Had another 504 today after 'Mark Forums Read' action. When tried to re-display the forum, the forums had been marked as read so the command was received so the issue is probably in displaying the forum.

[OptionBase1]

Tons of intermittent lag this morning, several 503 and 504 errors.

[vb6forever]

This Post is on 6/21/2024.
I echo above. Slow and freezing such that I need to bring down browser (firefox).

[vb6forever]

This Post is on 6/22/2024.
Still slow as molasses in January!

[Steve R Jones]

Thank you for the reports.... Wondering if we should add all the "It's back to normal now" reports? It only stands to reason that the info would be helpful. (almost kidding)

As everyone knows or should know, Intermittent issues like we've been experiencing are hard to diagnose. There is no logical reason why ALL Eleven sites run like a champ one minute and then BOOM... they are slower than heck..... And then back.....

Today/this morning - all the sites were/are at their best... WHY?

One area I've been keeping an eye on is at the bottom of the page were we see:

Currently Active Users - VBF
There are currently 1,299 users online. 13 members and 1286 guests
Most users ever online was 26,752, Dec 20th, 2022 at 10:25 PM.

One of the sister sites: VirtD
There are currently 4,498 users online. 1 members and 4497 guests
Most users ever online was 27,057, June 20th, 2024 at 01:08 PM.

I think the highest number of users has been in the 75k range.... That's a lot of BOTS crawling a site.... BUT - the large numbers don't appear to have any affect. I would think it would.

Any thoughts on this?

[sapator]

From my experience but I'm not a network engineer, those things are mostly handled from your net provider primarily,you can of course put a firewall in after the provider to safe things up but I would first get in touch with them. Also you can start blocking IP's , for us it's easy as we certainly can block Chinese that we get the most attacks from but here we have at least on member so I wouldn't go on that. Also it depends on what the bots are doing, 1300 bots wouldn't be that much if they are just browsing actually. We made a simulation recently for 10.000-20.000 users and we where at 75-80% capacity. Ahh yes also if double a hardware upgrade.
My 2 cents.

[vb6forever]

Working Great today (6/23/2024).

I put my money on the internet provider. System Upgrades or Excess traffic most likely the cause.
Besides that, all it takes is someone to hit a telephone pole, or pull a wrong wire!

[Eduardo-]

It is extremely slow now. Many times it responds with error 503 (Timeout).

[Shaggy Hiker]

Seeing the first byte error, occasionally. It's inconsistent, though.

[Eduardo-]

Any chance to move the hosting to a better server?

This issue is getting really annoying.




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[Zvoni]

Today, quick as hell.
Location: Germany

[Steve R Jones]

Today, quick as hell.
Location: Germany

DITTO.... Which is part of the problem. WHY???

WHY are things normal and then for no apparent reason - we go slow?!?!? Out IT guys can't explain it either.

[2kaud]

Thinking left field, is it anything to do with the network path(s) taken? I'm not a network expert but believe that paths can vary from source to destination - even for adjacent packets. ??????? This might explain the 'random' issues seen.

[Zvoni]

Thinking left field, is it anything to do with the network path(s) taken? I'm not a network expert but believe that paths can vary from source to destination - even for adjacent packets. ??????? This might explain the 'random' issues seen.

Routing through the "Great Firewall of China"?

[Eduardo-]

It is clearly the cheap hosting.
Yes, now it is working normal, but it is failing half of the time lately.
I'm quite sure that it has nothing to do with the country you are from.

[2kaud]

I'm quite sure that it has nothing to do with the country you are from.

Yep - I'm based in the UK.

[Zvoni]

Yep - I'm based in the UK.

In that case, shouldn't you be used to "everything is so slow"?

[Eduardo-]

Guys, we are talking about text pages. Today's connections handle 50 Mbs/s to 1 Gb/s to deliver 4K videos in live streams. Latencies are in general of a few milliseconds.

And we are waiting like 15 seconds for a server to respond to a petition just to deliver a "504 Time out" page? Explain to me how on earth that could have anything to do with anything else but the server itself.

[OptionBase1]

Numerous timeouts today, both just now, and earlier in the day when I was browsing. Basically unusable.

Just to browse to this thread, log in, and make this post, I got 7 or 8 503 and 504 timeout messages.

[Steve R Jones]

As mentioned before - ALL of the 50x Errors show up in Log Files on the Server(s).... I believe the IT Guy(s) get a notification....

I'll see if I can get any feedback from the IT Guys.

[sapator]

At this point I get 50/50 503 errors. Meaning a can view a page or get the error at 50% each. Yesterday (all my troubles seemed so far away) I probably got it at 10% ratio.

LOL, I got the error when posting the issue :P (it passed in the thread but I got the error)

[Zvoni]

Yep, 503/504 back today.

Everytime the site doesn't respond immediatly, i see a "transferring Data from b.6sc.com" (German Firefox, translating on the fly here) in the bottom left corner of Firefox,
sometimes staying still for over 10 seconds.

Then it's a coinflip if i get 503 or 504, or if the request pulls through

[Shaggy Hiker]

Guys, we are talking about text pages. Today's connections handle 50 Mbs/s to 1 Gb/s to deliver 4K videos in live streams. Latencies are in general of a few milliseconds.

And we are waiting like 15 seconds for a server to respond to a petition just to deliver a "504 Time out" page? Explain to me how on earth that could have anything to do with anything else but the server itself.

It's not a simple text page coming from a single source. A single page load in VBF will likely include a variety of ads from a variety of sources, and probably a Google auction for the ad space. Any of those steps could be causing trouble. Zvoni tends to see one particular location, others see other locations.

[Eduardo-]

It's not a simple text page coming from a single source. A single page load in VBF will likely include a variety of ads from a variety of sources, and probably a Google auction for the ad space. Any of those steps could be causing trouble. Zvoni tends to see one particular location, others see other locations.

Do you mean that the "locations" are fetched from the server side? Because if they are in the client side, I mean the browser, the server should respond with the main page and the browser get all the other pages and files.
But the server does not respond for a while, and when it does, it respond when an error page (in the cases it does those errors), so... what you say only makes sense to my understanding if those web pages are fetched by the server prior to deliver the page, otherwise what we see should be something different.

In other words: those pages that we see, the ones that say "504 Gateway Time-Out" and "Error 503 first byte timeout" are generated by the server, not locally on the browser. So the issues are at the server side.

Maybe the server needs to get some texts for ads from other servers before combining them and making the final page, and one of those servers are taking too long. Or something like that. In that case I think that someone could disconnect one by one in the time the forum is failing and see which one ad is causing the issue.

[2kaud]

Whilst I sometimes get the slowdowns when using the sister site codeguru.com, I've never had any 503/504 errors using that site - but it's user activity is much less then this site.

Also for me 503/504 issues occur when a page is to be displayed - not when info is sent. So if I post, the post is accepted and then a 503/504 error occurs. Or if I use Mark Forms Read, the action will be undertaken but I might get a 503/504 on the re-display.

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Especially slow at the moment, seems to happen more on first access rather than subsequent tries. Is it possible that any site cacheing has filled up the local store preventing subsequent cache accesses, so it has to resolve the request by fetching and building a real copy of the page. It initially tries to access the cache and simply fails. Fulfilling all the resulting 'real' page requests might in addition put an unexpected load on the server. Check the space usage where the cache is maintained and refresh the cache. There may be more than one cache, a server cache and an application 'hard' cache where full pages are written.

I have also noticed that one of my browsers has been served some content it really does not like through Vbforums, handling it badly and causing the browser to crash. That has only happened recently and is not a normal situation, the browser I am using is normally very robust. It felt as if the serving of adverts was the delay and in that delay it was serving up something unexpected.

[Zvoni]

pretty much unusable as of right now.
Of 10 requests, i get 6-7 times a 503/504
Location: Germany

[Shaggy Hiker]

Haven't had an issue, yet, today. I'm sure that won't last, though.

[Steve R Jones]

Only time will tell... It's two hours later and we're still flying.

[couttsj]

It may just be coincidence, but the slow response seems to have started about the same time as 4 new external scripts were added. How can I tell? I use NoScript with FireFox, where scripts are subjected to default analysis unless otherwise defined. About 3 days ago, 3 scripts produced NoScript symbols on every forum access, but not the individual threads. When I changed the settings to UNTRUSTED, the NoScipt symbols disappeared. The scripts that I currently have disabled are:
6sc.co
*6sense.com
doubleclick.net
*jsdelivr.net
ml314.com
*ntv.io
quantcast.com
quantserve.com
*technologyadvice.com
zi-scripts.com
The ones starting with an asterisk I believe are the new ones I set to UNTRUSTED (if I can trust my own memory).

J.A. Coutts

[Steve R Jones]

*technologyadvice.com -> Owner of this site.

I'd bet the scripts all relate to the ADS on the site... I just disabled my AdBlock+ and am not seeing any ads on the Right Side of the Site... I don't think there were any ads before I disabled AdBlock.

THOUGHTS??

[Eduardo-]

*technologyadvice.com -> Owner of this site.

I'd bet the scripts all relate to the ADS on the site... I just disabled my AdBlock+ and am not seeing any ads on the Right Side of the Site... I don't think there were any ads before I disabled AdBlock.

THOUGHTS??

It has nothing to do with client site scripts (executing in the browser) because the issue is that the server is not responding, not doing it correctly or taking too much time to respond.

The issue is entirely server side, and there is nothing that one can do from the client side to fix it or influence it in any way. You can do nothing by disabling ads or disabling scripts in the browser.

[Steve R Jones]

It has nothing to do with client site scripts (executing in the browser) because the issue is that the server is not responding, not doing it correctly or taking too much time to respond.

The issue is entirely server side, and there is nothing that one can do from the client side to fix it or influence it in any way. You can do nothing by disabling ads or disabling scripts in the browser.

But the ADS are coming from other servers in other parts of the world. If those connections aren't working well........

[Eduardo-]

But the ADS are coming from other servers in other parts of the world. If those connections aren't working well........

The ads are coming directly to the client (to the browser, as scripts) or to the vbforums server? Because it is the vbforums server that is not responding, not secondary servers that are not responding to the client.

What returns 504 time-out error pages is the vbforum server, so, what other servers could have to do from the client side point of view?

If the problem was a secondary server and the browser can not render the page because a secondary server didn't respond, then I think we should get some other result, a client side error page (and not a server side error page). Or maybe a page rendered without those ads, not sure how the browsers handle those situations. But we would not be seeing an error page from the main server as we do now.

[Steve R Jones]

Our servers are all Virtual Servers.... Maybe the server that is hosting the VS's is having issues.

Then again, if it were that easy, we'd think the IT Guys would know it....

[Eduardo-]

Seeing the history of the tech issues past and present (like uploading images), the IT guys seem not to know much, or more probably don't care.

What I'm saying, is something obvious. The errors that we are seeing, are servers responses, not client side script issues.

HTH

[yereverluvinuncleber]

As a test, try turning the adverts OFF. See if it helps or if the problem persists. I don't need to teach you how to bugfix!