[maddenma]

I've been seeing a lot of this lately. Tonight I've been essentially locked out 3 times for 10 minutes each.

Server to busy to process 100 bytes of text.

Not too busy to send me 100,000 bytes of animated advertisements while telling me about how busy it is though...

Have we gone too far with the "features" here?

 

[kcp]

I'm not to busy to reply

There! Feel special now?

 

[Harri Rautiainen]

I've been seeing a lot of this lately. Tonight I've been essentially locked out 3 times for 10 minutes each.

Server to busy to process 100 bytes of text.

Not too busy to send me 100,000 bytes of animated advertisements while telling me about how busy it is though...

Have we gone too far with the "features" here?

This is a very sporadic phenomenon, haven't figured out the reason, yet.
The animated banner gifs have been downloaded once to your cache and can be quickly rendered from there.
Will look into this.

 

[jazzbluescat]

I'm not to busy to reply

There! Feel special now?

Evil, pure evil.

 

[kcp]

Evil, pure evil.

:mrgreen:

Seriously though, I forgot to add that I didn't experience the problem that maddenma is / was having so I can't really be of any help :toothy9:

 

[bandmommy]

I've experienced it and just thought is was an issue with being on dial-up or that there were a LOT of members on and posting.
It is a little annoying, but not enough to complain about.

 

[maddenma]

I'm not to busy to reply

There! Feel special now?

Kim, I always feel special when you respond to me. :flower:

 

[maddenma]

I'm just wondering if it's related to picture uploads or something else that requires intensive disk activity. It feels very much like my wife's PC before I added 1.5GB of memory to it.

 

[jazzbluescat]

I've experienced it and just thought is was an issue with being on dial-up or that there were a LOT of members on and posting.
It is a little annoying, but not enough to complain about.

I used dial-up for about five years. It was sooo slooow that considered suicide multiple times, seriously!

 

[GT]

I get it once in a while on broadband. I think we're just popular!

 

[Harri Rautiainen]

I'm just wondering if it's related to picture uploads or something else that requires intensive disk activity. It feels very much like my wife's PC before I added 1.5GB of memory to it.

I have been monitoring the load now during past 24 hours and haven't seen any load spikes.
Right now we have a busy moment: 1,503 Users Online (269 members and 1,234 guests). Yet, the server load is very reasonable.

The question is, how much we should extend effort because of sporadic denial of service. I understand, maddenma, that it is frustruating when it happens. I will be combing through the forum settings to see if there some paramers that could be tightened.

 

[dvdberg]

I've seen plenty of "server busy" messages in the past 2 -3 months. Plenty meaning that it's a regular, almost daily occurrence for me.

 

[Harri Rautiainen]

In an attempt to alleviate the performance issue I did following tweaking:

1. Changed the frequency of some scheduled batch jobs
2. Disabled the 'Who's Online function'. (Members on-line can still be seen on the SOTW Forum front page.)
3. Shortened the Session Timeout form 90 minutes to 60 minutes

Please report here or by email of any problems these actions may have caused.

Thanks,

 

[dvdberg]

I was just kept ofd the system by a busy server for the past 10 minutes.

 

[CooolJazzz]

I was just kept ofd the system by a busy server for the past 10 minutes.

Same here. It's been a regular occurrence lately.

As an afterthought, I just Googled "VigLinks" because it seems that the busy server problems started around the same time SOTW started using VigLinks. It may just be a coincidence, but I did see a few comments indicating that some people stopped using VigLinks because it was slowing their sites down. I didn't find any technical responses confirming whether or not this is actually a potential issue, but might it be worth looking into?

 

[Harri Rautiainen]

Same here. It's been a regular occurrence lately.

As an afterthought, I just Googled "VigLinks" because it seems that the busy server problems started around the same time SOTW started using VigLinks. It may just be a coincidence, but I did see a few comments indicating that some people stopped using VigLinks because it was slowing their sites down. I didn't find any technical responses confirming whether or not this is actually a potential issue, but might it be worth looking into?

Have to do some googling.

 

[maddenma]

It acts like a memory to disk processing issue. Like there's not enough system memory and it's having to swap to disk to continue to function. Major pauses indicating critical disk functions causing other processes to queue up while the memory swaps to disk. You might not see it in system load stats because the CPU load is near zero during events like that, which is what made me think about picture processing.

I've seen it very sporadically for several months now. Just starting to get pretty regular over the last couple weeks.

 

[dvdberg]

It acts like a memory to disk processing issue. Like there's not enough system memory and it's having to swap to disk to continue to function. Major pauses indicating critical disk functions. You might not see it in system load stats because the CPU load is near zero during events like that, which is what made me think about picture processing.

Ya, what he said! :dontknow:

 

[maddenma]

Haven't seen it tonight. It strikes me it could be batch processes like backup, antivirus, etc., that are causing heavy disk I/O in the 8-12pm US Eastern timeframe that are causing it. I obviously don't know what you are running then, but as I said, it's gone tonight. It's not clear to me that the "who's online" function is the culprit. That doesn't seem particularly disk I/O intensive, but I'm not clear on how that works in vBulletin.

I suspect it's something you have running late at night that might need to be rescheduled during lighter periods, like when the Aussies and Chinese are online. :mrgreen:

 

[Harri Rautiainen]

maddenma,

it may have been a swapping issue. See another thread.