I came to this thread to complain, but after reading TubaDiva’s post, I’ve decided not to add to the chorus. One thing that would help,** TubaDiva**, is if we could get more updates on what’s going on. I know you’re busy, but even “They’re still working on it” beats not knowing if anyone is paying attention to the issue.
I am curious as to what the problem might be and what fixes are being tried? I am a tech guy so that’s the main reason I ask.
If you’re a tech guy, then maybe you could offer suggestions.
got a new one that I’ve never gotten before, after getting a bad gateway and a timeout tonight. I got a “Post is too short, please lengthen to at least 2 characters” message as the board consumed my post, I presume to digest it slowly over a period of a thousand years.
it was weird because my post was at least 102 characters long, probably longer.
It hasn’t been too bad in the last few days, but today, it seems to have worsened. I’ve experienced many 502/504/Server Errors today; more than in the past week, I’d guess.
My comment is more for informational purposes than anything else. I agree with nelliebly that complaints don’t add anything at this point. We know, from Tuba’s update, that the problem is known to the PTB and is being looked into.
Thanks for the update, Tuba, and we’ll look forward to others as things progress.
Agree, Spoons, it was bad today.
One of the things I have noticed, is that the more posts a thread has, the longer it will take to load. I’ve had a lot of problems with the Baker’s Dozen thread in the Game Room (70K+ posts), and other such threads where the posts are in the five digits. They eventually appear (or not), but if they do, it takes a while; and if they don’t, an error message (502/504/Server Error) appears after a minute or so.
Could the size of the threads be causing delays? If so, perhaps we ought to start a new Baker’s Dozen, a new Fire and Rain, a new Trivia Dominoes, and so on.
Get Amazon/Google, etc to run the site but that is probably too expensive.
Use monitoring software to find the problem
Get a better / faster server
Add memory to the server if it has open slots
Switch server to Linux if it’s not on that now
Switch the database to a free open source product like MySQL or Postgres
Hire a consultant for a day to check the server settings
Make sure the database settings are the best
I’m not getting much information myself.
I hope to have more soon and when I do I will tell you. Hopefully they’ll fix the damn thing and you’ll see for yourself, that would really be cool.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Hiring a website/database expert for a day is probably well worth it. Those guys/gals may be able to spot the problem very fast and give you the solution.
Do you think the recent problems could be related to why I can’t stay logged in? Because I was just coming over here to if it was me or the server or the browser, and I see this whole long thread here.
(also having slow loading problems, though I haven’t had the timeout error recently)
Make sure that you are coming to us through the entire link:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=22084239
If you use “boards.straightdope.com” (which was the url for many years), the system will see that as not securely logged in and will log you out every time you move from one page to another.
Also check to see what theme you are running: This happens to some people that use the “sultantheme” which is the default. Try Straight Dope v3.7.3, which seems to work better for some people.
Sorry for your inconvenience.
Jenny
If threads with a lot of replies load slow to me that sounds like a database issue. But I am no expert. SQL databases don’t work well with a lot of data but I don’t think this site is too big for a SQL database. A place like Google doesn’t use a SQL database since their data is massive.
I tried looking at the Baker’s Dozen thread, and it loaded almost instantly for me. I suspect the problem doesn’t have to do with thread size, although it couldn’t hurt to re-index everything in the database.
Things were running smoothly until I came to ATMB. Opened a bunch of threads. Several took a long time to open.
This isn’t the first time this particular oddity has happened to me. Why would it be threads in ATMB???
I don’t know what database product is being used, but the size of the SDMB should not be a problem at all for a modern database system.
Given anecdotal information that at some point a huge thread can appear immediately, but at other times it takes 30+ seconds (or eventually errors) makes me think of locking/blocking issues in the database, rather than sheer size.
FWIW yesterday was pretty bad; say 50% when I tried to post and maybe 20% reading. Luckily the new computer handled it and I didn’t lose anything but it was a small pain.
A database needs to be maintained , you just don’t let it sit there. One of the main things that is done is tuning. If it’s not tuned right you can have a lot of problems.
I’m getting a lot of slowdowns off and on over the past couple of weeks. Usually when it starts grinding I cancel the page request and start again, but most of the time that doesn’t work either. Sometimes it works when I close the browser tab completely and then open the site on a new tab. Like now. But not always.
FWIW I find this really annoying, considering I’m paying to be here.
I’ve been getting 502s on every single thread I’ve tried to open for about the last 40 minutes. Sometimes I’ll be able to actually open the thread after two or three tries. Getting to this thread only required two attempts.
I’m going to walk away for a couple of hours and see if things improve any then.