Forum speed / responsiveness issues, I need your participation

Mods, sticky please.

There's been a few different problems circulating on this server, but it's all been too sparse to pinpoint or address. I have personally been observing problems. Some of you have also observed them. And some of you have not. Now I need you to help me collect some data so that I can continue my discussion upstream and maybe have this account transferred to a new hardware node.

When you notice that MFGG randomly slows down significantly (like this evening), or randomly doesn't respond for many seconds or even times out, I want you to pay attention and do the following things (and for heaven's sake, write down your results!):

• In a separate tab or browser window, as quickly as you can, check another taloncrossing site (MFGG main site, Kanagi Stadium, Taloncrossing itself) and see if you also experience problems there. If you don't it's _probably_ your browser being flaky, or a very isolated server event that's part of the natural cycle of things. Also check another, completely independent website to confirm it's not your own network problem.
• Still having problems? What exactly is happening? As I said, there are different problems circulating. Does the page eventually load? Does it time out with an error message? I want to know what that message is.
• If the page eventually loads, copy the server load and execution time from the bottom of the page. If the load or execution time is high, you can bet that some element of the server is overloaded. If they're near zero, then something else is up.
• When reporting your findings, include the browser you're using.

If you have the time or knowhow, you can also try pinging taloncrossing.

My main goal here is to see what the real distribution of problems is. At this point I don't know if most of the trouble is load cropping up periodically, or this mystery "no load no response" phenomenon that I've experienced and maybe some of you have as well. Or if there's still relics of a problem months ago with network connections being dropped. Keep paying attention, you may find that you don't observe the same problem each time.

If you want, you can summarize what you've experienced in the past few weeks, which may help give me a general idea of what's going on, but after that, I want future posts to contain data.

This post has been edited by Retriever II on Oct 10 2008, 02:25 AM

Will do.

that help topic i made pretty much explains everything, but:

1. for me at least, slowdowns aren't really random; sure i can't pinpoint exactly when it'll slow down, but i know it'll be at least a few hours after i last cleared cookies

2. again, other taloncrossing sites don't do this as far as i've seen

3. execution time and server load are about the same as they've always been, in the low hundredths

4. pages load at least 98% of the time, but sometimes they'll time out

5. pretty much anything regarding sending information to the server is always slow; anything regarding getting information is slow until i clear cookies, in which case it'll speed up for a short time

6. firefox 3.0.3; again, problems started happening around the time i updated to 3.0.2

pinging taloncrossing either while it was fast or slow got me around 80-90ms each ping so

Taloncrossing usually runs pretty much fine for me, but I'm still getting the same server timeouts that I reported waaaay back when. They seem to happen about once every two hours. All of Taloncrossing goes down.

Timeouts last a couple of minutes on average, and it's not restricted to just this browser. Nothing can connect. But the forums' speed isn't affected otherwise.



On a slightly related note, sometimes when I try to log into these forums the server will time out. But it's fixed instantly if I try to log in again. I'm guessing that's a different matter entirely but probably worth noting just in case.

yeah so i've been using ie on mfgg for a while and can now say it does in fact do the same gradual slowdown thing as firefox

so i guess that might eliminate browser issues

MFGG won't work for me anymore(Neither does TSR nor taloncrossing.com, nor the main site), and I tried with 3 browsers.

I'm using Vtunnel(Though I thought that it was blocked) now to post this message

Its been REALLY slow for me recently.

Can you elaborate on this?

Seems to me that every thing is normal.

The only problem I'm having. And I'm not sure it it's doing something or MFGG's fault. I sometimes hit the "Add Reply" button and nothing happens.

MFGG was down for me a Minute ago

Dude, that doesn't help RII at all. Read the first post.

Ok

The page did eventual load. After a Minute or so.

didn't think to check about RII 3rd and 1st point.

And I'm using Google Chrome

yeah my problems definitely happen all over taloncrossing, now that i've started visiting the other sites more often since then

so i guess this makes it a little... easier? now that it isn't actually an obscure localized mfgg problem

and yesterday he was reporting it was just giving him the server timeout screen

Rage too can't seem to get on these forums anymore. They've not fallen into banned IP ranges either.

A third person on the main site was having problems, but it seems to be a problem specific to just this forum -- Rage could post on KS and stuff just fine.

Yeah, I'm beginning to think it's because of certain browsers -- on one browser, I tried using a "previous" version of Mozilla Firefox, but on other browsers, it operates fine.

right, so i'll quite often get "Network Timeout" pages in firefox while browsing the forums, or more annoyingly when i post

they go away on the next refresh (which i do pretty much immediately) so i really don't have time to ping the server or anything

I simply can't post at all via Reply, Quote, Edit, or even send PMs to people

Attempting to do so results in a 400 bad request error after some time waiting for things to load

It's not browser specific, I've cleared my cache and my cookies, and tried it on Chrome, FF, Opera, and even IE - and gotten the exact same results

Bizarre. You're the third person to say this. But I can't find any indication of the error being logged or anything.

Okay, so, MFGG is REALLY slow for me today.

1. No success
2. MFGG loads, KS times out, TC.com just whitescreens.
3. [ Script Execution time: 30.2070 ] [ 13 queries used ] [ GZIP Enabled ] [ Server Load: 0.24 ]
4. Firefox 3.0.3