I’ve been having trouble connecting to the SDMB today. I’ll be browsing just fine, and then when I go to preview or post suddenly the site is offline or returning server errors for a while.
Is it me causing problems? Is it just me experiencing problems? What’s going on?
~Max
I stopped trying the SDMB for a few hours today because I got a “Down For Maintenance” page, or the site was failing to load pages when I could get here. Seems better now. (Just for the record I used those few hours to get some laundry done and to make some dinner, so it was kind of frustratingly useful.)
It’s not you. Earlier today there were three different error types appearing at various times, often in sequence:
Error: Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in 30 seconds.
Temporarily Offline for Maintenance
We apologize for any inconvenience.
504 Gateway Time-out
This has actually been going on, off and on, for months. It seems like these might be DDOS attacks. If not, it sure seems like a flaky infrastructure.
I know it’s easy to whine and complain and sometimes hard to actually find and fix a problem like this, so I’ve resisted complaining, but it’s obviously very detrimental to the usability of the board.
I was on the board off and on all day and never got any error messages and never had trouble getting on. Am I speshul?
There are other errors:
I got a search time error (must be 5 seconds between searches), where it had been substantially longer than that.
I also did a duplicate post: I posted, it then froze up leaving the content in the edit window, so I posted again. Result was two duplicate posts.
I think the issue is that it’s intermittent, and usually doesn’t last very long. I thought it could conceivably be network issues between me and the site server, but (a) at some point during most outages there is usually an SDMB splash screen as noted above (“temporarily offline for maintenance”), and (b) on at least one occasion I tested via the “Is it just me?” site and it confirmed that, no, it couldn’t reach the site either.
I’ve been getting those errors today, and it was especially annoying as I was trying to read and post to the thread about the new Avengers movie.
Good to hear, I thought my BBcode errors in post previews were crashing the system or something.
Also not good to hear that this has been going on for months. I hope they get it fixed. A denial of service attack would suck… what does anyone have against the dope?
~Max
Yeah. Happneed to me too.
Yeah, I posted about it on the FB page about 90 minutes ago.