Dead slow response times

[rdenney]

This is not a cable-company issue. When the forum hangs (which it does for me about one in five times), it stays hung for about 30 seconds, and it's done so in a variety of connection environments and browsers. During the pause, I can do other work on the Internet normally, so the cause is not Internet service.

I suspect it's in the page-drawing engine and not the database, because I've not noticed it with the Tapatalk interface.

My experience is that such problems are usually related to the forum server software going out to the Internet for some external service, and when that service is unavailable, it has to time out before completing the client's page load. I've seen it with ads, counters, other types of banners, and so on. This seems like a similar sort of problem.

Rick "providing a data point" Denney

[E. von Hoegh]

I've noticed that when the forum hangs, I can sometimes click the back button, then try again and it will load immediately. As Rick, it hangs for me about one in 4 or 5 times.

[BrianShaw]

This is not a cable-company issue.

Ya... that's what my internet provider's help desk said when I totally lost service one day and asked if the guys digging holes in front of my house may have anything to do with it.

But it sounds so much mroe authoritative when said with an Indian accent.

[Scott Walker]

The problem seems to be happening more often

[Sevo]

I suspect it's in the page-drawing engine and not the database, because I've not noticed it with the Tapatalk interface.

The one does not exclude the other. Indeed it rather looks as if some sub-element of the page could not be served, preventing the whole page from being rendered - and that may well be bypassed when using another interface that does not include the same components.

In my experience, it is most often due to a mis-optimized database (not unlikely on a fresh server like ours, where the initial tuning probably took part before the database got stirred up by user interaction), or embedded content from heavily loaded sites (notably Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Vimeo etc.).

[Ken Lee]

Our forum is hosted on a server at no charge. The server belongs to someone else, and our forum is not the only application running on that machine.

Some of us have been recording the date/time of these performance drops, so that one of the moderators can inspect the server logs, and (hopefully) discover a pattern which can be corrected.

[Tom Westbrook]

I'm doing some research on this. I'll probably do a mini-outage this weekend to change database tuning to see if it helps. Might take a few iterations to get it sorted, though.

[Kirk Gittings]

Thanks Tom good luck. We had this problem a couple of years ago. Remember? It seemed to sort itself out.

[Leigh]

Hi Tom,

This isn't a database issue. Database hangs may last for tenths of a second, but not ten minutes or more.

I agree with Rick (for once) that this sounds like an external resource problem.

Since the problem started with the vBulletin upgrade, I would contact those folks and ask if the new version uses any resources or has any other interaction with their site that might hang on an access failure.

Stick a line monitor on the Ethernet and capture any interaction with the vBulletin site. I bet you'll find something.

Just a suggestion.

- Leigh

[Leigh]

Just a follow-on to my previous comments...

Note that the hang occurs after the post has been written to the database,
as evidenced by the time stamps in the multiple post sequence that I mentioned above.

- Leigh