Site Instability Blues

It is a bit slow - breaking news is removed see if that helps.

Its not that blooming webcam link again is it ?

Back via Firefox. Portal very odd but doesn't seem as slow.

Quicker for me too.

The two sites that were causing the difficulties were breaking news and illiweb.com. The breaking news site was merely a pain and would resolve with a smack of the refresh button or two. The big problem was illiweb.com, it was being contacted alright but it wasn't giving an answer for God nor money. This is a strange problem as illiweb.com infests all our pages. There must be some unique address from illiweb.com being called for on the portal page as the portal page was the only place giving problems.

Okay, I did a bit of sleuthing and came up with the following.

There are more requests for icons etc. from illiweb on all the other pages than there are on the portal page. There is only one request on the portal page that is not to be found on the other pages. That's the following:

https://2img.net/i/fa/subsilver/icon_calendar.gif

I'll test it in my browser the next time. At least then we'll know for sure. One way or the other mind you, illiweb was the main offender this evening.

I cannot figure out why this particular gif is causing problems, it's contained in the same sub directory as many other gifs that are used on each page. It might not be the gif, it could be that some script on the portal page is referencing illiweb in some fashion. If killing the gif in my browser doesn't work, I'll try killing all the scripts one by one.

Sometimes our buddies at servimg.com give us a headache too, but nothing to the degree we experienced tonight. Couple of refreshes normally sorts them out as well.

Okay it's 5.11am.

The portal page loaded with me being able to see all links to latest posts. However, the page was still loading five minutes after I opened it. There was a two minute delay whilst I awaited a reply from ytimg.com. However, the very last load was from illiweb. The calendar gif file. That took the full five minutes to get loaded.

The problem I think is twofold. I said a few weeks back that a queuing issue was most likely a major factor. When we load up the portal a series of requests are sent to various web sites to fill our page with icons, pictures, news stories and what have you. The problem arises when items to be displayed, like our set of links to current threads on MN get queued behind calls for items that are stuck and we are left waiting for a response for them before the links will load. Depending on what delays are experienced, items like our list of links to threads will get shifted into different queues. Tonight's problems arose, I believe, because there were at least two significant sets of delays in effect. The call for both breaking news and the call for the gif file at illiweb both conspired to cause a log jam behind the two stalled calls (possibly more - like ytimg.com and servimg.com).

Off all the delays in the various calls, the only one that wasn't set to right, or at least queued elswhere in the jam as opposed to being part of the blockage, was the calander gif from illiweb. So depending on what's slow to respond seems to determine when our links to current threads will end up stuck behind the calander gif in the queue. One of the combinations of delays that causes this is the breaking news call and the call to the illiweb gif.

It seems to me that this gif file is a big part of our problem. But it might be hard to kill the call for this gif as it's a part of the webpage itself. We can get beyond this problem or at least experiment with a solution. If the only combination that causes this problem is the one I've outlined, we could try moving the breaking news call to maybe display on thread pages. There is no call for the calendar on these pages. On the other hand, the breaking news call might conspire with other calls on these pages to cause delays. At least then we'll know how the problem manifests.

Another idea might be to replace the breaking news call with an RSS feed reader that pulls headlines from various media organisations known for their reliability.

Hermes wrote:

Okay it's 5.11am.

The portal page loaded with me being able to see all links to latest posts. However, the page was still loading five minutes after I opened it. There was a two minute delay whilst I awaited a reply from ytimg.com. However, the very last load was from illiweb. The calendar gif file. That took the full five minutes to get loaded.

The problem I think is twofold. I said a few weeks back that a queuing issue was most likely a major factor. When we load up the portal a series of requests are sent to various web sites to fill our page with icons, pictures, news stories and what have you. The problem arises when items to be displayed, like our set of links to current threads on MN get queued behind calls for items that are stuck and we are left waiting for a response for them before the links will load. Depending on what delays are experienced, items like our list of links to threads will get shifted into different queues. Tonight's problems arose, I believe, because there were at least two significant sets of delays in effect. The call for both breaking news and the call for the gif file at illiweb both conspired to cause a log jam behind the two stalled calls (possibly more - like ytimg.com and servimg.com).

Off all the delays in the various calls, the only one that wasn't set to right, or at least queued elswhere in the jam as opposed to being part of the blockage, was the calander gif from illiweb. So depending on what's slow to respond seems to determine when our links to current threads will end up stuck behind the calander gif in the queue. One of the combinations of delays that causes this is the breaking news call and the call to the illiweb gif.

It seems to me that this gif file is a big part of our problem. But it might be hard to kill the call for this gif as it's a part of the webpage itself. We can get beyond this problem or at least experiment with a solution. If the only combination that causes this problem is the one I've outlined, we could try moving the breaking news call to maybe display on thread pages. There is no call for the calendar on these pages. On the other hand, the breaking news call might conspire with other calls on these pages to cause delays. At least then we'll know how the problem manifests.

Another idea might be to replace the breaking news call with an RSS feed reader that pulls headlines from various media organisations known for their reliability.

Thanks Hermes.

Is it that slow always for everyone ?? I can't believe it is as it's very rarely slow for me which is probably why the portal is crammed with stuff. I've removed the calendar and a few other modules with images on them to see how it goes.

Breaking news is also gone still which is a pity but there is a news feeds reader like you describe above in blue - it's in the News Feeds button above.

It's intolerable if the site takes 5 minutes to load - is it always that way for you ? It loads in a second for me.

There was a particular problem of very slow portal loading for me yesterday evening towards 12.00 midnight. As it coincided with having pressed the red button and hit that Gaza webcam, I wonder could that possibly be still causing problems? Perhaps it should be deleted?

Generally this site is much faster than some other boards but every now and again there is a slow patch.

Could have been a webcam - as it's on another server and the process can't be killed from here then it could still be running there waiting to be killed by forumotion. Maybe not though.

So it's every now and then then ? How now and then ?

Last night for about an hour. When you took off Breaking News it got better.

The site was down just then ?

Yes - it happened yesterday as well. On and off. Very slow as well.

I've just gone and deleted that Gaza link just to be sure, but I think it was disconnected.

Seemed to be but seems to be back fine now.

Fine for me too.

I've switched to Firefox and the site runs much smoother for me now.

I put Breaking News back on - if it's too slow let me know and I'll take it down again.

delete - prob seems to be intermittent

oops


The power of '1' - 14 or 114 .....

Why are so many forums locked?

evercloserunion wrote:

Why are so many forums locked?

Which ones ?

We're doing a spring clean. There are twenty still in operation how many do you need ?

Apologies for the sudden change - work to do...Back to normal soon

EvotingMachine0197 wrote:

Apologies for the sudden change - work to do...Back to normal soon

Re change: Like it, love it.

A new sticky thread has been opened for anything to do with the move.

I think the slowing down may have something to do with a wider internet problem in Ireland. I have found at work over the last 3 days that the internet has almost become unusable it has gotten so slow. I gave up trying to open the Irish Times page. I could not get into Wikipedia.

Other people I know are having similar problems. I know the internet in Ireland is bad but in the last few days it has been pathetic. So it is not exclusively a MN problem.