Recent speed issues

Took me over 30 seconds to log on.

Inconsistent - some fst - some slow.

But to load some threads, took over 30 seconds.

Mark Griffin
 
Thanks mark. We are still working on this. Will be bringing the forums down for a little while tonight for maintenance.

Mike
 
Hi folks!

Mike and I made a change to the server's network configuration last night, and we're watching the performance of the forums closely.

Keep the reports coming in on your general impressions of the forums, good or bad. What we're looking for is general snappiness of the forums, and any SIGNIFICANT "out of the blue" performance changes you encounter. Any server is prone to the occasional hiccup where it has to go retrieve data off of disk that is not in cache, so the occasional "it seems to be performing good, but when I clicked 'here' or did 'this', I experienced a split-second pause" is usually normal. However, something like a 30-second pause is definitely NOT good.

But keep the reports coming. It's been a lot of work and coordination, but we are indeed making good headway!

-Sean
 
Previously when I click on "User CP", it took a while to load. Now it is quite "snappy".
 
Slow this Mustang down

Much improved for me. Loads and navigates much quicker on Firefox and Chrome(staying away from IE lately) today.

Thanks to AZ ownership and members for addressing this issue and the apparent success of those efforts.
 
I seem to have problems with this site when using a 9600 bit/seconds v.32 dial up modem.

Seriously, I've noticed improvements when originally loading and when going from area to area ... but replying to messages and PMs take a while still. Any improvements you make and have made are appreciated, this is the only site I visit more than once a day. :)
 
I got knocked off the forum like lightning a bit ago.

Oh wait, it was lightning.

Forum is working much better than just a few days ago - the ultra long stalls and failures to load a page seem to be gone.
 
Hi folks:

Thank you very much for continuing to send in those performance / incidence reports!

I have a piece of wood near me, and I'm knocking on it that the network issue we found / resolved, was the cause of the severe delays, partial renderings of pages and then hanging, as well as the outright timeouts.

However, we're not counting my chickens before they hatch, so we're going to keep monitoring the forums closely to make sure it isn't merely "new cue-itis" (i.e. false/misdirected belief).

Additionally, performance tuning is ongoing, and we'll try to keep you notified if something we do needs to take the forums down for a spell.

Keep those reports coming in!

-Sean <-- wrapped in network cables and has display monitors duct-taped on objects around him
 
Just got a timeout posting a reply, sad to report.

just a thought, but it feels like I timeout more often if there's a long delay between when I open a tab with the thread, and when I actually post my reply. If I start a reply, then get sidetracked (or take a long time typing it) it seems much more likely to time out, though I won't say it's guaranteed to time out.

Something else. I remember in the past I used to compose a long post, then click submit, and the cookie expired (or whatever) and the forum forgot I was logged in. As soon as I logged in, the post could go through. Sometimes prior to posting, I'd open a new AZB tab and log in again (if necessary), then click submit.

I no longer ever bump into that, I just get the timeout page. But is it maybe related?
 
CreeDo said:
Just got a timeout posting a reply, sad to report.

just a thought, but it feels like I timeout more often if there's a long delay between when I open a tab with the thread, and when I actually post my reply. If I start a reply, then get sidetracked (or take a long time typing it) it seems much more likely to time out, though I won't say it's guaranteed to time out.

Something else. I remember in the past I used to compose a long post, then click submit, and the cookie expired (or whatever) and the forum forgot I was logged in. As soon as I logged in, the post could go through. Sometimes prior to posting, I'd open a new AZB tab and log in again (if necessary), then click submit.

I no longer ever bump into that, I just get the timeout page. But is it maybe related?
Click to expand...

CreeDo:

When you say a timeout, do you mean there's a significant period of time before the page finally displays? Or the page NEVER displays and instead gives you an error that the server didn't respond / page not found?

I'm not sure the cookie incident is related to this, as like you said, this was in the past and preceded my involvement (i.e. methinks Mike ironed that one out -- might've been db/content-related, I don't know). Thanks for sharing that, though -- if you encounter that again, let us know.

I do know this, though -- if you start a post reply, get side-tracked (for a significant period of time), and then come back to your reply to finish it, only to encounter an expired cookie or a timeout -- is NORMAL on a cookie-based website. That's a function on the expiry time on the cookie itself, and in the case of replying to posts on forums (which is a dynamic entity), those cookies (and the TCP session associated with it) are usually short-lived. This happens on shopping carts on websites as well -- it's normal for these (the cookies and the TCP session) to expire in a short amount of time, both for security reasons, as well not holding resources up on the server (i.e. the TCP session itself). What I typically do, just before I walk away on my "sidetrack" -- is to copy the text I typed to the clipboard (press [Ctrl] [A] to select all, and then [Ctrl] [C] to copy it to the clipboard). Then, when I come back to it, I know I'm going to have an expired session, so I just press the [Back] button on the browser, refresh the thread, re-respond to that post I was previously responding to, and press [Ctrl] [V] to paste what's on the clipboard back into the reply text field. I can then finish it from there.

I'll try and see if I can duplicate what you encountered, by replying in a couple threads. I'll also PM a couple folks, just to see if I can exercise it from that point as well.

Thanks for sharing this!
-Sean
 
Thanks for looking into it sean... yeah, if I ever got lazy about ctrl+C-ing all my posts... recent events on AZ has cured me of that habit. I now have a 100% consistent PrePost Routine ;)

Timeout = standard browser error page. "The webpage has expired" Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.

I am coming to realize it's probably nothing to do with my personal posting habits. I can't reliably reproduce it. I thought I just "induced" one a second ago by middle clicking a dozen links rapidly. I got the timeout so I could copy/paste that error message.

BUT, it turns out this post then timed out... twice in a row... and when I went to refresh another page (like I wanted to help forum remember that I'm still logged in) that page also timed out.

So it seems like the server's somehow overloaded, and anything I do (new post, user CP, view post) will timeout.

Or maybe I actually caused it by opening too many links at once. Maybe the server isn't amused with me opening a dozen connections and has decided to ignore future requests (only from me) until some of these connections get closed or die off.
 
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