Slow site performance?

[LunarMist]

I use Weather Underground myself.

I thought they were dead many years ago. Meanwhile everyone blames the clod, but what can you expect by outsourcing the data to the cheapest countries?

 

[Howell]

All this talk made it a self conscious cloud. I haven't seen any alerts from my variety of checks but I'll take a look into the performance issues.

I had consistent decent pings at the same time I could not get the site to respond.

 

[mubs]

I didn't want to be a cribber, but it's been terribly slow for me the last two weeks. Much faster right now; all tabs loaded after a few seconds. Usually it's minutes. I'll switch to another browser and do something else while SF loads. Don't know if it's an across-the-pond issue since I'm on the opposite side of the earth.

 

[Howell]

I've had sporadic problems this morning too. I wouldn't be mentioning it expect that I almost never have problems with the site. Usually what I see is a 5-10 second delay after clicking the "goto last post" button. Chrome tells me it is connecting in the lower left corner. Sometimes the lag is long enough for the browser to show me an error page and then automatically reconnect to bring up the past.

 

[Howell]

Jeanne, we don't host That Fox site.

 

[Stereodude]

I'm getting faint whiffs of a canned meat product...

 

[Handruin]

I removed the user...they were smelly canned meat products.

 

[LunarMist]

Site was dead for me today.

 

[ddrueding]

Down for about 16 hours I think...

 

[Handruin]

Down for about 16 hours I think...

It was down for 5:19:23 according to my uptime robot report. The database process quite for some reason and I was traveling. I was able to get in via my phone and fix the issue but I was busy for a few hours with travel so I couldn't get to it sooner.

 

[ddrueding]

No worries. I thought it dropped for me last night around 10PM PST. That could have been on my end.

 

[Handruin]

It's possible it may have dropped when you checked or it may have been having partial issues at that time. I was only going on what the uptime robot reported. The system was definitely unhappy for several hours.

 

[LunarMist]

It's possible it may have dropped when you checked or it may have been having partial issues at that time. I was only going on what the uptime robot reported. The system was definitely unhappy for several hours.

I don't mean to complain. Do you know what happened, or it just needs rebooting occasionally?

 

[Handruin]

I don't mean to complain. Do you know what happened, or it just needs rebooting occasionally?

The database server ran out of memory and crashed. I'll need to investigate more to understand why but likely due to a shift in load against it. I should be able to tune it to use less memory but it'll take some time.

 

[Handruin]

There has been a higher than normal amount of spammer account registration recently along with a small denial of email service in the past day due to a small loophole that was exploited in vbulletin. I've addressed the email issue and I'm watching the accounts closer. The Stop Forum Spam plugin has been denying hundreds of account-creations per day but some still slip through the filters ranging in about 10-15 of which I mass-delete each day.

 

[ddrueding]

Thanks again Handruin for all you do to keep this place ticking!

 

[Handruin]

Thanks again Handruin for all you do to keep this place ticking!

Thanks I appreciate it but didn't mean my post to impose for compliments. I just wanted to inform people in case they've noticed the upticks in spammer activity.

 

[LunarMist]

I have noticed some weird new member names. I don't understand what they have to gain from spamming a relatively obscure board. Don't they make more money from the big sites?

 

[sechs]

Bots don't know or care how small a site is. All eyeballs are good eyeballs.

 

[LunarMist]

Oh. I thought the bots had been blocked and it was caused by people.

 

[Handruin]

I have noticed some weird new member names. I don't understand what they have to gain from spamming a relatively obscure board. Don't they make more money from the big sites?

Bots don't know or care how small a site is. All eyeballs are good eyeballs.

Oh. I thought the bots had been blocked and it was caused by people.

The more forums and online media they can spam to the more referential link support they get when it comes to search engines evaluating a portion of their page ranking. This isn't the entire purpose but it's a part of getting their spam crap to be found easier in search results. I suspect that Google and others have smarts to help reduce this but people try none the less to gain additional traffic to their site at others expense.

Most bots are blocked but there are three main parts to evaluating a valid user account before allowing access. The account username, IP Address, and email address. If any of these three are found in the spammers database that this site queries their registration is rejected. This query happens hundreds of times a day here behind the scenes. Occasionally all three criteria are met and a bot is allowed in. If they post spam-related content they go through the next filter level to check for URLs in their post. If their post contains a URL they are added to the moderation queue so regular users don't see their post. If their content is spam, one of us mods will then manually delete it and submit their information to the spammer database for future denial of registration.

 

[mubs]

Fantastic. Thanks for all the hard work, Handy and the mods. Because of you, we have a peaceful existence here!

 

[Howell]

I switched to using Edge because I could no longer get Chrome to work and now Edge started to slow down. If I tell Edge to emulate IE10 it performs much faster. Maybe someone else will be helped.

 

[Handruin]

I switched to using Edge because I could no longer get Chrome to work and now Edge started to slow down. If I tell Edge to emulate IE10 it performs much faster. Maybe someone else will be helped.

Are you having issues with this site's performance or is it your browser having issues? I use Chrome all day long and visit several times a day and haven't noticed unusual performance issues related to the browser. Sure, there are days when the site's performance is poor but overall I haven't seen a specific issue with Chrome.

 

[LunarMist]

I have not noticed any issues this afternoon.

 

[Howell]

Are you having issues with this site's performance or is it your browser having issues? I use Chrome all day long and visit several times a day and haven't noticed unusual performance issues related to the browser. Sure, there are days when the site's performance is poor but overall I haven't seen a specific issue with Chrome.

I'm still having the same problem I've had recently here. Posting is a complete non-starter with chrome on W10. I click in the quick box or choose the advanced posting options and I can't get the edit frame to respond. I don't have any problems anywhere else. And I recognize that seemingly no one else is having problems. I get the same thing about half the time on IE11. I'm going to try combinations of compatibility mode to see if I can find something workable.

 

[mubs]

I probably have more SF performance issues than anybody else here on a recurring basis, but everything's been quite good for the past few weeks with Chrome on W10.

 

[Bozo]

Switched to Mint Linux and Chrome. It is at least twice as fast as anything MS.

 

[CougTek]

The forum has been slow for the past 10 minutes. More precisely, it's sometimes slow and sometimes ok. It has hiccups.

 

[LunarMist]

I did not notice it, but perhaps the slowdown was brief.