Anyone finding boards slow tonight?

jimmycrackcorm

The leaving cert students got fed up with the cao site dos and decided that boards would be a much better bet

Hedman

It's Tubridy refreshing the thread about him every 2 seconds.

Jesus Wept

Just you.

Sharpshooter

mike65 wrote: »

Just a quickie, the admins will moan if I post in Site Development. Seems very sluggish at times.

Admin never moan.

Pass it on....


Moved from After Hours.

randylonghorn

Sharpshooter wrote: »

Admin never moan.

Even when they get lucky?

Oh, wait ... nvm! >_>


Srsly, though, was hanging a fair bit last night and it's doing it again this evening.

mike65

Yeh happening again, that its been in the evening when user numbers are lighter must indicate, something...

Conor

mike65 wrote: »

Yeh happening again, that its been in the evening when user numbers are lighter must indicate, something...

The slowness almost exactly tracks the number of page requests being made.

If it isn't load-related I'd be very surprised.

RolandIRL

yeah, happening to me as well.

though there's only ~6000 on boards this evening. wonder why it's slowing down lately?

Solitaire

As has been said in another thread the hamsters have an embarrassing allergy to the Follow button :pac:

If anything its even worse tonight!

mike65

6000 people at 10 pm?

[Does a quick refresh of front page]

Christ, whats going on, have you people got nowhere to go, anything to do?

RolandIRL

says he with the highest post count :P

Conor

whiteman19 wrote: »

though there's only ~6000 on boards this evening. wonder why it's slowing down lately?

The number of people on the site doesn't matter, the number of pages being fetched does. We could have 50,000 users online doing feck all and be much faster than if we had 5,000 users pounding the site.

At the moment, we're serving roughly 500 requests per second, of which roughy 75 are dynamic (and hence generate most of the load).

banshee_bones

A good few times tonight I have gotten "page timed out, the server at boards.ie is taking too long to respond" etc etc

RolandIRL

Conor wrote: »

The number of people on the site doesn't matter, the number of pages being fetched does. We could have 50,000 users online doing feck all and be much faster than if we had 5,000 users pounding the site.

At the moment, we're serving roughly 500 requests per second, of which roughy 75 are dynamic (and hence generate most of the load).

if you don't mind me asking, how would that compare with another time of the day (eg morning)?

Solitaire

Weird. Is this some kind of failed DDoS attempt or something??

ibarelycare

Ridiculously slow for me. Timing out nearly every time I try to load a new page :mad:

RolandIRL

Solitaire wrote: »

Weird. Is this some kind of failed DDoS attempt or something??

maybe by the same crowd who attacked the CAO website?

a lot of time-outs for me. only able to have one boards tab open at a time.

Sharpshooter

The Big Brother final might have something to do with it.

The thread in Reality TV is flying.

Conor

whiteman19 wrote: »

if you don't mind me asking, how would that compare with another time of the day (eg morning)?

I typically don't check the numbers unless it's particularly busy (usually trying to see are we getting unusual access patterns) so I can't give you any reasonable numbers.

The numbers I do record are more heavily processed than the ones I gave above, so it wouldn't be comparing like with like.

Solitaire wrote: »

Weird. Is this some kind of failed DDoS attempt or something??

I doubt it. Traffic patterns are normal, just (slightly) bigger. I'm sure someone was trying to DoS us, but if they were, they weren't the cause of any slowness.

We get DoS attempts all the time (either deliberate or just crappy spiders - it's hard to tell the difference) but they either get soaked up by our capacity or dropped at the firewall. It's a rare DoS attempt that even gets my attention, most are handled automatically.

whiteman19 wrote: »

maybe by the same crowd who attacked the CAO website?

Highly unlikely.

Butch Cassidy

I'm getting 503 errors "Service unavailable"

jimmycrackcorm

Really slow these last couple of days though was better in work during the day.
However, the m.boards.ie is fast - both on the same servers?

eimearcmh

Its working fine for me.

Conor

jimmycrackcorm wrote: »

Really slow these last couple of days though was better in work during the day.
However, the m.boards.ie is fast - both on the same servers?

Yep, m.boards.ie is on the same machines. It's really only another skin.

m.boards.ie will always be faster than the full-featured skins. It has no images, no Javascript and almost no CSS.

On the full site, the first 15% of a page load is spent generating the HTML on the server, the remaining 85% is spent downloading images, CSS & JS, rendering the page and running the JS. Most of that should be cached by your browser after the first page load but the render time and JS runtime can't really be helped too much (though we do try).

The #1 best thing you can do to improve the speed of boards.ie (and most sites) is to upgrade your browser to the latest version. Browsers are getting faster and faster, so having the latest one is a great way of getting a (free!) speed boost. Chrome, Safari and the newer Firefoxes are generally faster but even if you prefer Internet Explorer upgrading to IE8 should give you a speedup.

The #2 best thing you can do to improve the speed of boards.ie is to turn off the display of signatures. Sigs often load contain images that don't cache properly and/or are served from slow third-party servers.