Really, really, really bad today.
Meh. It’s cheap at twice the price.
(He said, from the comfort of his half-the-price membership.)
I’m amazed they are still collecting money for this site. It’s like a car rental place charging for a Honda Accord and you get a 1975 Ford Pinto to rent.
Can we not get a Sugar Daddy to step up and house us in accommodations we deserve? 
Come on- it’s pennies, it’s still a deal.
This. FFS. :rolleyes:
I think the issue is that the owner doesn’t really care. If the board “owned” itself, I think it could have found better accommodations by now. But you can’t move stuff without permission of the owner.
According to TubaDiva, the owners do care and are trying to figure out how to proceed. It’s a massive undertaking to migrate the boards to an entirely new message board system.
We’ve been told that the very old version of vBulletin we’ve been using forever just can’t handle the volume of posts anymore. And apparently the modern versions of vBulletin are completely different and not very well rated compared to alternatives. Meaning even if we stayed with vBulletin – which would be a bad option – they’d still have to do a major data migration to go from this to that. Since you have to do that anyway, might as well make a smarter choice and pick a better modern message board software to migrate to. But once committed to that, you’re looking at a massive project that doesn’t happen quickly.
Color me skeptical. We’ve been using vBulletin 3.8.7 forever, and last year it was fine. Not great, but a solid good. Then at Christmas the boards went offline for several straight days, and after coming back they have been this intermittent time-out nonsense ever since. I mean, that Christmas event seems clearly suspicious to me.
Tuba has publicly assured us multiple times that she has been assured multiple times that the problem is the old vBulletin software can’t handle the load. The owners want to keep the board alive so they’re currently researching the appropriate modern message board software to migrate to. The assumption is this will fix the problem, and in all honestly it probably will. I’m not convinced that that’s the only or even right path, but that’s the word. I’m hoping the migration is on a months timescale as opposed to years, but so far we’re coming up on 5 months so it’s starting to look more like years.
I am convinced that there is a problem that manifested on Christmas and lingers to this day that could be fixed, and if fixed we could keep using this decade-old vBulletin for years to come without issue. That’s not Tuba’s area, and the people whose area it is decided that the problem is the old software so that’s why we’re limping along indefinitely until that massive overhaul happens.
And one thing is certain: The lockdown sure hasn’t sped (speeded?) that project up. Call this a three-month pause and counting…
I thought the issue was that the server itself was too small, not the software. But i may have missed some posts. I still think the root cause is that the owners don’t care very much.
It’s not a massive undertaking. It’s time consuming, yes, but it’s fairly easy to move a vBulletin 3-based message board with few mods to a new platform. Most modern message board packages have conversion scripts that make migration easy.
I’ve said this before. $140 for XenForo, $100-$150/month for a basic dedicated server or high-end VPS with a reputable host, a day to set up XenForo and permissions/templates/etc, a long weekend to do a test run and make the actual conversion, and it’s done. Other message boards with post counts in the tens of millions have made the switch without any great effort. The SDMB is only unique in its behind-the-scenes bureaucracy that keeps this from happening.
At this point, if I had to put money in it, I’d say 2:1 the SDMB has a terminal death under VBulletin 3 before the end of 2022 — hacked with no recovery or backup, server dies, permanent timeouts, owners pull the plug, whatever.
they said Google hosts the site like they do for many companies. I assume they could upgrade server capacity with google but that would cost more and might not fix the problem anyway. I agree that it should not take months to find out what software is needed to run this size site.
Worst day I’ve experienced in months.
Constantly getting 502, 504, timeouts, etc
Perhaps the board’s name should be officially changed to “504 Gateway Time-out”.
It’s PHP and mySQL. The chances that PHP or mySQL ‘can’t handle the load’, because they are ‘old software’ reminds me of Chris Stohl’s comments on read errors: you should always buy new copies of the author’s books, because old copies accumulate read errors 
It’s possible that the server has run out of memory (possibly they moved to a new host at Christmas?), or that the host operating system is incompatible with the host hypervisor (vBulletin was cross platform), or even that the host is just too cheap and limited in some other way that they think could be mitigated by newer versions – and it would be nice if they told us so.
I just edited a post, and the edit went through about a second and a half after I hit the submit button.
“It’s a miracle!!!”
But how many times did it go through? 
Not sure if this belongs in this thread or should be in a new thread:
I’ve seen many instances of duplicate posts, where the duplicate appears long after the original – in one case, over an hour later, and with several other posts intervening.
We know that the board can hang for a while when you submit a new post, and if you click Submit again the post appears twice in a row. That’s happening a lot. But why are we seeing duplicate posts separated by a long time?
Ahhh, the irony.
I got an email informing me of a post into this thread. I clicked the link. I got the stock 504 Timeout. WHILE WAITING to get into the thread about timing out.
It is to laugh. Or weep. What have you.
I blame the hamsters.
Okay, I found an example I can cite:
From the thread Quarantine Zone –> Do masks help prevent the spread of COVID-19?
some posts from a few days ago that I just came across:
Post #26 by vislor on 5/14 timestamped 10:35
Duplicate post #30 on 5/14 timestamped 12:39
(ETA: The timestamps may be different for your timezone, but in any case, they are over two hours apart.)
Just one of many such cases I’ve noticed lately. (The left hamster must not know what the right hamster is doing. They aren’t dividing their tasks in a very organized way. Maybe the hamsters are identical twins?)