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1 hour ago, stevegrant said:

Well I'd take 1000ms over 30,000ms :lol:

So last night I went through the general permissions across the site and turned off search for guests. Turns out that guests seem to do a lot of DB-heavy searching - who knew? 🤷‍♂️

Great stuff!  Working great today.

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I've not paid for membership to deliberately save the (wasted) time I wouldd otherwise spend posting bollocks. But no idea Steve was having to put his hand in his own pocket to keep this afloat - although with all the live football and cricket he's been unable to attend since March no doubt he can afford it 😜. I'd be happy to contribute if it helps keep the place going,

Have you considered Patreon as a way of members funding the site ?

Like others above, it seems fine today

@stevegrant

 

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5 hours ago, stevegrant said:

Well I'd take 1000ms over 30,000ms :lol:

So last night I went through the general permissions across the site and turned off search for guests. Turns out that guests seem to do a lot of DB-heavy searching - who knew? 🤷‍♂️

Well done. Maybe some kind of bot brute force hunt for passwords etc? Were you seeing big bandwidth demands at the same time as the latency spikes? Seems fine now anyway!

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3 hours ago, Plastic said:

Well done. Maybe some kind of bot brute force hunt for passwords etc? Were you seeing big bandwidth demands at the same time as the latency spikes? Seems fine now anyway!

No, that was the frustrating thing - the number of requests hasn't changed at all, but perhaps there were some bots running searches on the site rather than spidering links like most would do. All a bit weird.

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I don't think it's traffic-related, we've had many more people online simultaneously compared to this morning or yesterday. We'd basically had 3 days of pretty much seamless running, the latency was minimal so everything was fine. Then at around 2:25pm yesterday, it suddenly spiked and it's been up and down quite a lot since. I've seen similar issues on another site running this software (bigger site, but near-identical infrastructure setup) and it's probably going to be a case of working out which database queries are causing the bottleneck, and that could be a slow, painful process - the software is not open source, and the company who developed it have gone to a lot of trouble to make it very hard for outsiders to debug anything, and their tech support is worse than useless. Basically they want people to commit to paying a monthly fee to them for hosting on their own platform, rather than a six-monthly self-hosted licence. We're not going to be doing that because it's laughably expensive.

I guess the off-season is the ideal time for this to flare up, if ever there was an ideal time for it...

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1 hour ago, stevegrant said:

I don't think it's traffic-related, we've had many more people online simultaneously compared to this morning or yesterday. We'd basically had 3 days of pretty much seamless running, the latency was minimal so everything was fine. Then at around 2:25pm yesterday, it suddenly spiked and it's been up and down quite a lot since. I've seen similar issues on another site running this software (bigger site, but near-identical infrastructure setup) and it's probably going to be a case of working out which database queries are causing the bottleneck, and that could be a slow, painful process - the software is not open source, and the company who developed it have gone to a lot of trouble to make it very hard for outsiders to debug anything, and their tech support is worse than useless. Basically they want people to commit to paying a monthly fee to them for hosting on their own platform, rather than a six-monthly self-hosted licence. We're not going to be doing that because it's laughably expensive.

I guess the off-season is the ideal time for this to flare up, if ever there was an ideal time for it...

cheers for the update Steve 👍

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1 hour ago, S-Clarke said:

Happy to up my subscription fee if needed so you can purchase more backend resources, I'm sure others will agree as well. I don't want to lose a good community here, but it's going to die very, very quickly if it carries on like this.

Couple of points:

Firstly, as I've said before, it doesn't seem to actually be a case of resources - the CPU usage on the one single server we're currently using is barely getting above 30% at peak periods (we have auto-scaling in place to build extra servers to take the load if it goes above a 5-minute average of 40%). There seems to be occasional bottlenecks that don't correspond with traffic spikes; for example the evening after the Man City game we had 1160 people online at the same time and it coped with it without too many issues. I, and a few others I've spoken to, believe there are a few flaws in the way this software works, but the developers obviously aren't willing to accept that and are pretty unhelpful when it comes to trying to debug things, so we're largely left to our own devices. I've made another slight tweak this evening to the way emails (registrations, daily digests, etc) are sent out, because that was something I saw a huge problem with on another site, and I suspect that might be an issue here.

Secondly, while your sentiments are noted, I must admit I don't particularly share them. The previous iteration of the site was largely left to run itself for a number of years which has seen a tailing-off (which was a mistake on my part but I simply didn't have the time to work on a full migration which the terrible world situation has afforded me this summer), but I've still not seen any other Saints site that has as many users as this one. It's not perfect, but to be honest I'm not losing any sleep at the prospect of a few people getting pissed off at some technical difficulties after a big migration.

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4 minutes ago, stevegrant said:

Couple of points:

Firstly, as I've said before, it doesn't seem to actually be a case of resources - the CPU usage on the one single server we're currently using is barely getting above 30% at peak periods (we have auto-scaling in place to build extra servers to take the load if it goes above a 5-minute average of 40%). There seems to be occasional bottlenecks that don't correspond with traffic spikes; for example the evening after the Man City game we had 1160 people online at the same time and it coped with it without too many issues. I, and a few others I've spoken to, believe there are a few flaws in the way this software works, but the developers obviously aren't willing to accept that and are pretty unhelpful when it comes to trying to debug things, so we're largely left to our own devices. I've made another slight tweak this evening to the way emails (registrations, daily digests, etc) are sent out, because that was something I saw a huge problem with on another site, and I suspect that might be an issue here.

Secondly, while your sentiments are noted, I must admit I don't particularly share them. The previous iteration of the site was largely left to run itself for a number of years which has seen a tailing-off (which was a mistake on my part but I simply didn't have the time to work on a full migration which the terrible world situation has afforded me this summer), but I've still not seen any other Saints site that has as many users as this one. It's not perfect, but to be honest I'm not losing any sleep at the prospect of a few people getting pissed off at some technical difficulties after a big migration.

That’s what the owners of blockbuster said when they heard a few of their customers were streaming films online.

we must guard against complacency Steve.

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2 hours ago, Nolan said:

maybe worth taking a look at the "search box" functionality.

just tried a search and it was hanging pretty terribly (and eventually giving me a 504), while the rest of the forum seems to be fine. 

 

So the issues are potentially when any user performs a search, it's causing a peak in latency for the whole site for all users?

Ditch the search :hunt:

__

Ooh just got a 502 error posting this comment, makes a nice change from the boring old 504!

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Its the Russians and Chinese Steve.  

Found it fine some days and bad others. Get on site ok but then cannot get forum topics to load. Found by clicking on last post time I get a better response and then use next unread topic indicator to carry on through. Not perfect but it is a bit quicker at times

 

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Very slow at times this afternoon. 

We should sponsor Vestergaard next season.

Despite the suggested improvements on the board, I rarely encountered the same delay/502 & 504 error messages that are becoming a recurring theme.

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It’s rubbish at the moment for me too. There’s a couple of issues that I’d like to draw to Steve’s attention.

The response is slowest when I ask for unread posts. Just getting to this stage is tricky. On my iPad I have to turn the screen to landscape or the two options for ‘unread posts’ and ‘mark forum read’ do not appear near the top right of the screen.
 

On my Android phone I have to request ‘desktop site’ before I see these two options and then I switch back to mobile site in order to read the posts.

Still no indicator of the Number of the post.

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TBH and all joking aside this ain't good enough. I have PAID MONEY (albeit small) for the enjoyment of this website and since these so called 'improvements' I aint't getting it. Never had these problems before, whatever it is you are trying to do please stop doing it.

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It's been off all evening for me, pretty dreadful all be told. Can anything be done, or is this just a 'forum' problem? and the lack of development of it makes a fix unlikely?

How about trying another forum? XenForo, MyBB, Flarum, or go totally old school with phpBB..!

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