It was fine early this morning (Chicago time), but once many Americans were up and awake (6:45 AM here), it slowed to a crawl, with some timeout errors.
ETA: Ten minutes later, it’s okay again (maybe loads a page slightly slowly).
I actually came close to posting that very bit. Found some short clips on You Tube, makes me want to watch the whole movie again.
Timing out again, for maybe ten minutes in each half-hour period, give or take. 8:45 AM CST.
Again with the 504 Timeouts.
I would actually be surprised if this was a database locking problem. Lock contention in a database generally looks like sluggish performance as the locks queue up and take longer and longer to get resolved. It’s like the line at Starbucks that just gets longer and longer when it gets busy.
But the pattern here seems to be long timeouts and then everything works perfectly. That looks more like some kind of issue which has a long timeout. One possibility is a network issue where a connection gets hung until the timeout and then something is reset and clears up. Or perhaps a failing disk where a write to a certain spot is taking too long.
Hopefully the people at DesertNews are looking into system issues that may also be causing this. They shouldn’t assume it’s the large database. The large database certainly isn’t helping, but it may just be exposing some kind of system problem.
Completely unusable and frustrating.
If I were a paying customer I’d be so pissed.
That would make the Winter of Missed Content seem like some light flurries in comparison. With less content, there would be fewer SERPs with links to the SDMB, so fewer people would learn about the place. Archive millions of posts (where?), and Winter is Here.
The SDMB is not the biggest message board on the Internet. Modern message board scripts, along with newer versions of MySQL and PHP, can handle boards with hundreds of millions of posts with ease. There’s no need to get rid of any content.
The Large XenForo Forums List - this list is from 2014, but there’s some updates in later posts.
The SDMB has 21,982,928 posts. Urban75 is a peer board of sorts, with 16,382,700 posts. It uses XenForo, and it flies. Minecraft Forums uses IPB, and now has 23,356,034 posts; a couple million more than the SDMB. Christian Forums uses XF, and it has 62,025,940 posts. NeoGaf also uses XF, and it has 129,790,252 posts.
I think it might be that something is getting too full, maybe disk space or memory or both. Whatever was done to make it work better for a short while will point to what the problem is. For example if some disk space setting was changed then that is probably what is full again.
Grrrr. I’m getting 504 errors every third post or so. Help!
Needs to be fixed. I hope the owner(s) will consider downsizing to a simpler (cheaper and problem-free) format before pulling the plug. It couldn’t cost that much to maintain something that will get the job done. This place is all about content, anyway.
I have already brought tidings of great sadness, and now I have to confirm that it’s definitely getting worse and starting to move from “frustrating” to “unusable”. I think whatever database magic was done before, temporary as it was, is about due again. At least it lasts a few days while the planning continues.
ETA: Oh, FFS, got “Server Error” just trying to post this!
This is ridiculous. Seven clicks, five timeouts.
Regards,
Shodan
Just needs a whack now and then. Seems to be fine now…
It’s going to be hit and miss here until we move on to what’s next.
Which is not going to be an overnight thing; upgrading/migrating to another platform is not a think about it today and do it tomorrow kind of thing; there’s process and preparation that must come before you can be presented with what’s next.
This will also include testing of the new before it’s open to the rest of the world.
So … it’s going to be stinky for a while.
Some times it will be easier than others. Sometimes it will be unbearable. Management is dealing with this as swiftly as possible, which I and they admit is not as fast as you would prefer it.
It is going to change for the better. But it’s going to take a few red hot minutes before we get there.
I wish I had a better message for you. But that’s the reality of where we are now.
Help IS on the way. But it ain’t here yet.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Could be. But TubaDiva’s post indicated that it was a lock on an entire table, not just a row. The behavior does seem to support that. Next time you hit timeouts, try opening another tab and loading another page 10-15 seconds later. As soon as either one gets a 502 or 504, refresh it as soon as possible, so the tabs are always 10-15 seconds apart. I just tried this a few minutes ago, and when the tabs finally succeeded, they succeeded within a second of each other. That indicates contention for some resource that was finally released, not just individual operations taking a long time.
There’s probably some relatively rare condition that triggers this lock - say two users posting to the same thread at the same time - which subsequently locks an important table for a long time, for everyone, for all operations (read and write). Who knows what that condition is, or what happened in the last couple of months to make it occur a lot more frequently.
Ultimately, it sounds like a design flaw in vBulletin, so although it’s unclear what finally triggered it, it’s always going to be lurking there. I think just about any web host provider would reply to this complaint with “update your scripts”, and they’d have a point.
Count me as another vote for upgrading to modern software. If it can be configured to maintain the Spartan look, the forum structure, and the moderation structure, so much the better, but better some changes than the whole thing collapsing under its own obsolescence…
Thanks to TubaDiva and the others. What are we looking at, days, weeks?
Thanks, TubaDiva, for putting up with all our complaining. It’s tough to be the one in the middle!
I’ve had numerous problems today, but I do appreciate the update, Tuba. Many thanks!
You have excellent taste in comedy movies!
That’s been my experience as well. I would like to add the observation that when I go back to make an edit to something I just posted ( which I do with almost every post, my eyes are bad and I miss lots of typos) it ALWAYS locks up.
I’m used to it now, and even though I get an error, when I finally refresh the page the changes I made are there. It’s kind of the new normal.