www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk

Hi,

I noticed in the users logged in section that there are always bots there i.e. Google [Bot]. I have heard before this causing slowness to forums due to number of posts on forum and the crawling that they do. Sections of the site can be blocked by using a robots.txt

I could be completely wrong but thought it may be worth a suggestion

Bots, or crawlers are only the equivalent of a member browsing the forums so they are not the root cause of the slow downs.
Thanks for making the point.

The annoying problem is that when it does go slow, it is not slow for everyone on the site, and we cannot figure out the connection that is making it slow for some but not others.

Some of the tracets show a slowdown in certain hops but not everyone will be routed the same way when on the forums. Packets are sent all over the place to get from the server to your computer and so it makes it very difficult to figure out the problem.

The problems only really started when Scruff got his new mega powered computer and I, personally, think his computer is sucking most of the server signals to him and slowing him down with overload and slowing everyone else down with weak signals.

mod5

Scruff thinks they have a problem at source, which is why it's crashed a couple of times, and had to be re-booted.

Scruff also thinks one or two of the servers are faulting and over loading the remaining ones.

Scruff doesn't think it's traffic volume either, because it plays up mostly early morning or late at night when the traffic would be at it's lightest.

Scruff has other thought as well. including flash ads and the number of them at times. We had the same problem a year ago.

Support are still looking into this.

It is a strange problem

The weird thing is that the server crashed yesterday and not one member complained about it

Apache seems to be causing us a few problems, but now a cron job has been set up to restart it every 6 hours, so hopefully that will help

a cron job has been set up to restart it every 6 hours,

Do you know what time those restarts are so that any slowdown for a couple of minutes can be ignored as scheduled reboots.

dave

ultimatehandyman wrote:Support are still looking into this.

It is a strange problem

The weird thing is that the server crashed yesterday and not one member complained about it

Apache seems to be causing us a few problems, but now a cron job has been set up to restart it every 6 hours, so hopefully that will help

I posted it was slow at 9:39pm.

This is regularly timed out when I run the scan. 206-16-200-109.rackcentre.redstation.net.uk timeout


Forum activity was very slow yesterday throughout the day.

I did say Doughnut are having an almost identical problem

dave.m wrote:

a cron job has been set up to restart it every 6 hours,

Do you know what time those restarts are so that any slowdown for a couple of minutes can be ignored as scheduled reboots.

dave

No, I do not know.

Apache should only effect ptople who are posting at that exact time. It should not take long for apache to restart, it is not like restarting the server which can take minutes!

Just changed some server configurations to see if we can speed this sucker up. Let us know if problems persist or if I've just created new problems

Thanks.

P.S. cache should build up quickly, I hope, so slowdowns may have been experienced while it was first doing that. Not sure how long it takes but shouldn't be too long.

Been ok all day David

I think you've transferred the problem north - this is the first time in ages that I've had a problem. Very very slow and it's possible this post might take a week to go through

southwood3 wrote: it's possible this post might take a week to go through

Hmmm, Did you post this last Thursday?

Very Droll......I haven't had a problem with forum speed for a few days now...

Down from around 11:15 for about 40mins. see pm.

1,77.102.254.1,8ms,cpc2-bath5-2-0-gw.a,----
2,80.1.243.189,11ms,bath-geam-1a-ge26.n,----
3,195.188.230.61,8ms,aztw-geam-1a-tenge9,----
4,80.1.241.9,7ms,aztw-core-1a-ae0-0.,----
5,213.105.175.157,9ms,winn-bb-1a-as0-0.ne,----
6,213.105.172.234,48ms,brnt-bb-1b-as5-0.ne,----
7,213.105.159.50,14ms,brnt-tmr-1-ae5-0.ne,----
8,62.253.185.74,28ms,telc-ic-1-as0-0.net,----
9,130.117.15.69,13ms,te1-3.ccr01.lon04.a,----
10,130.117.3.189,14ms,te2-8.mpd01.lon01.a,----
11,130.117.2.26,32ms,te3-1.mpd02.lon01.a,----
12,149.6.186.90,15ms,None,----
13,----,Timeout,n/a,----
14,----,Timeout,n/a,----
15,----,Timeout,n/a,----
16,----,Timeout,n/a,----
17,----,Timeout,n/a,----
18,109.200.27.10,22ms,10-27-200-109.rackc,----

thescruff wrote:Down from around 11:15 for about 40mins. see pm.

Down for me too, just got back on.

Glad you said that Pete I don't feel like I'm making it up when someone else has a problem

Are you on Firefox by the way.

Firefox was trying to update during the down period.