I just got a bunch of errors today.
Have y’all tried turning it off and back on again?:o
It seems pretty random on the surface. I went many days in a row without seeing an error. Then I saw a handful yesterday and today. But not enough to really infringe upon using the board.
curious what has been tried to fix it?
I missed out on these errors throughout December, but I’ve gotten them repeatedly this week. I’m home this week due to an injury, which is different from being home during my Christmas vacation because then I got a whole lot done offline because my knee wasn’t immobilized. Maybe people who notice the errors the most are here the most when it’s happening?
Since editing posts is such a dumpster fire nowadays, could we get the editing window extended to 10 or 15 minutes?
As a workaround, we’re asking the mods to close down two long Thread Games threads, Bakers Dozen (70,415 posts) and Trivia Dominoes (46,187 posts). They are being replaced by continuation thread games, Bakers Dozen II and Trivia Dominoes II.
https://is.gd/dtT24W >> end of Bakers Dozen thread game >> https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=22099500#post22099500
https://is.gd/MinlcC >> end of Trivia Dominoes thread game >> https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=22099599#post22099599
https://is.gd/rS2B7M >> start of continuation thread, Bakers Dozen II >> https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=888975
https://is.gd/OpeZoN >> start of continuation thread, Trivia Dominoes II >> https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=888987
Hopefully THAT will avoid the performance bottleneck resulting in 502 / 504 errors!
I second this idea
This morning I got server timeout errors on the brand new Trivia Dominos II thread and later on this thread. I get them so often that I’m surprised when I DON’T get them.
This is where everyone’s experience seems to differ – frequency of getting these errors.
I can say that I have noticed that editing seems to be especially hard on the hamsters. Even when the edits go through the first time without an error message, there is typically a noticeable lag.
I find it interesting that upon editing, it seems to be a “wait 60 seconds” message that pops up (as opposed to the 502/504 ‘I’m busy, dammit!’ errors). The 60-second thing was meant to control frequency of posting (by bots?) and help prevent double-posts. So … is something out there fooling the server, somehow, into thinking that two or more posts are being sent in quick succession?
to me double posts sounds like more of a server problem than a DB problem . But there could be server and DB problems. Or the interaction between the server and DB is the problem.
Several problems yesterday, after none for a while: briefly errors in the morning about loading a couple of pages, then problems with a couple of posts in the evening. Seems OK so far this morning.
All the errors yesterday were temporary problems, and straightened themselves out in short order. The posts did as usual turn out to have gone through, or at least I think so – I thought one of them hadn’t, but then wasn’t sure whether it had blocked on an actual post, or only on an attempt to preview.
I do think it would be useful to increase the edit window.
For goodness sake, feed the hamsters!
Three times today I’ve tried to enter a post or a note, and all three times I got a gateway timeout at least twice before it posted. Pages are slow to load, and this one also timed out once.
Running through Chrome on Wndows 10.
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Enter https://boards.straightdope.com in the URL field, and press “START TEST”
Let’s try another page speed/optimization site.
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Go to https://gtmetrix.com
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Enter https://boards.straightdope.com, or just click on this link.
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Ouch.
How about another one?
For what it’s worth, the SDMB forum home page loads up 1.5 MB of content (5 MB uncompressed). Cite. That’s a LOT of bandwidth for a vBulletin site.
The home page of Giraffe Boards, in comparison, loads 128 KB of content (265 KB uncompressed). GB runs vBulletin 3.8.7, same as the SDMB. The forum home page of Garage Journal, another legacy vBulletin site, loads 740 KB (1.7 MB uncompressed) with Google Adsense ads.
That’s very good info from the tests. On the bright side it’s D or E, not F 
I can tell someone is not an Asian parent!
have they tried a simple server reboot? It can’t hurt.
Loading threads and pages is often a 10-15 second experience in the past week. Posting takes a long time. Posting an edit is painfully slow. I often get timeout errors and have to re-do posts. It’s a constant thing, too. Every page load takes a long time. Every posting, every edit, etc. takes a long time and often fails.
FWIW, I’ve only had a few errors in the past week, and all of them cleared up quickly. None today at all.
So I do think some people are having a lot more problems than others. Why this is, I have no idea.
errors might be based on when you post. If you post at busy times you probably get more errors. Or it could be random.