Server slow today

[Pauldelbrot]

Your web server is very slow and balky today. Why? Requests often don't complete, and successful page loads take half a minute or more. And it is this site and not my network connection. Other websites load as fast as usual.

Obviously, you changed something sometime in the last 24 hours. And, obviously, the change, well-intentioned though it no doubt was, did not turn out to be one for the better due to unforeseen side-effects of some sort. Please roll back that change and try to give more thorough testing to any future attempts at changes before applying them to the live site. Also, during testing, the test machine should be placed under a simulated load reasonably representative of real-world conditions. A change that substantially increases the CPU required for each server request might not cause noticeable problems if you test with only a few requests at a time, but make the server very slow when used on the live site under normal levels of traffic, causing symptoms very much like those caused by your most recent change to the site, so if you are testing changes before going live with them it is likely that you haven't been giving the test rig enough simultaneous requests to reveal problems like this, with the unfortunate consequences I've just reported.

[cKleinhuis]

? you talk about fractalforums ?! i cant experience the things you mention .... might be something ... but ME DIDNT DO ANYTHING

[Pauldelbrot]

If not you, then someone else with elevated privileges. I can't believe you haven't noticed anything -- the site's unbelievably painful to navigate. And as I mentioned I verified that the problem is not at my end. Not only am I not seeing it at other sites, but I restarted the browser, firewall, and net connection at my end to see if that resolved it.

Furthermore, both fractalforums.com and nocache-nocookies.digitalgott.com are displaying problems. Both are very slow to complete an HTTP handshake and start transmitting the body of the response to a request. The former, once it does start, transmits the body quickly, but the latter seems to have the upload speed of a cheap dialup ISP, which since it's where all the images are hosted, is the worst possible choice to have that additional problem. Adding to that, the former is now sometimes sending spurious RST packets during HTTP negotiation, which hadn't been happening earlier.

Pretty much every hypothesis other than a bug in a change made to the site's code is eliminated or rendered highly improbable by that data. Problems at my end wouldn't be selective to two specific domains and no others and wouldn't survive restarting everything relevant. Routing problems could affect some domains and not others, but would be exceedingly unlikely to happen to knock out both fractalforums.com and digitalgott.com while missing every single other domain I tried. If narrow, they'd tend to hit only one of those two, and if broad, they'd tend to hit something else I use. I even considered whether I could have wound up with a large garbage file in my cookie directory that the browser treats as a fractalforums (or digitalgott) cookie, but to cause this there'd have to be one of each, rather than just one, so that hypothesis also requires two independent failures close together in time and, in a sense, in space -- unless the hypothetical Godzilla cookies got set because of a bug in a change made to the site's code which affected both parts of it (and made the latter's domain name unintentionally ironic in the bargain).

[Sockratease]

No problems here.

Must be your ISP - I have ruled out pretty much everything else   

[Pauldelbrot]

It was fixed a short time before you made that post.

[cKleinhuis]

how was it fixed ?!

[cKleinhuis]

it may have been a hoster problem, they sometimes do some changes, rebooting and stuff, but i havent heard any word from them

btw. this forum is running extremely stable since it was born ( in 2006 ) i have never believed that a forum software with many plugins and users and a lot database access can run that long and that stable, so: thank you simple machines forums for providing such a stable piece of softwar

although i would like to change to smf v2.x it is currently no need in improving anything, web-space is more than 2gig available, and database is up to 1gig ...