Arduino web site very slow

Am pleased to say a noticeably quick response now and PM page seems to work fine . Thanks

I'm trying hard to respond to posts here, but:

Nothing happening ...

I can see the tumbleweeds rolling on the fields...

PS. the problem should be fixed now, no more delays!

Sluggish as hell out here, takes 20 to 30 seconds easily for a page to load

Still see a lot of slowness simply browsing the site. The occasional timeouts still occur. Specific to this site as everything else everywhere works just fine.

I see we're crawling again today. Page loads taking upwards of 30 seconds. It took about a minute for this reply form to come up ... let's see how long it takes to actually post.

KirAsh4,

i'm looking the forum right now, and it seems responsive (about 2/3 seconds max to load pages). Sometime happens that a page takes a little more to load (anyway under 10 secs), but, in my case, are sporadic events. So without other help i cant really help you to find the reason for the slowness.

Can you check with some tools, like firebug, what are the server requests that takes long time to load?

It seems erratic. Right now it's fine. Last night (my time - about 12 hours ago) I couldn't post at all for an hour. I contacted Massimo who said that "there was and extra issue due to two backups happening at the same time and that made the database unavailable for a bit".

This morning while I was making breakfast I got the same message "Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.". After breakfast it seems nice and fast.

So without other help i cant really help you to find the reason for the slowness.

You could talk to Massimo.

Yeah, it seems a sporadic thing. I gave up after posting that message and just now came back. It's loading fine now. Firebug won't help here because it's not even getting data back from the server, it just sits there waiting for a response. Once data starts flowing, it's a quick thing. To me this points to network issues, which isn't necessarily he server. It could be the upstream host. I'll start running traces when I see network crawls, see if we can figure out where it's happening.

However, Nick's error messages are more specific to the server and connecting to the DB itself.

Over here it is more slow than workable.
Sometimes I just give up and go do something else, it's really bad. > 30 second to load a page, if it loads at all, reply window not loading and when it does load most of the time I need to post three times because I get a timeout or 502 error (bad gateway).

This is not just at home, but also at work.

I'll try again ....

Only a couple of weeks after the forum was upgraded to a "new, fast, expensive" server it's performance is flaky at best. Many times these days I find that after attempting to read a thread I just get a blank page. Or "SMF cannot connect to the server". Or when making a post, the refreshed page (with my new post on it) doesn't appear.

I don't care how much the admins are paying for the forum server. I suggest you are paying it to the wrong people. Perhaps they simply don't have a fast enough "pipe" to the Internet. Perhaps the database is misconfigured. I don't know.

The forum is great, in terms of the friendliness of the people on it, and the level of expertise. What isn't great is that it's a bit of a gamble when you make a post whether you see it again.

Its funny Nick -I am at the other end of OZ but fed through Melbourne and I rarely have problems since the upgrade.
I have had "SMF cannot connect to the server" error once only. I see my posts every time and the load times are reasonable for me who comes from the "drink a can while the picture downloads time" .

Wonder if there is something with Windows or Internet Explorer ? I use Linux and Firefox
Does someone have a tap on your feeds?

have to agree with Nick
it's frustrating how often it decides to keel over just after I write a long reply
but it only does it if I don't make a copy of th epost before I hit the button

most of the time I get the SMF cannot connect message, too

I'm using FireFox, but it is definitely a server end issue as lots of other sites are performing while arduino.cc is sleeping

tytower:
Wonder if there is something with Windows or Internet Explorer ? I use Linux and Firefox

It's variable, that's for sure, and possibly you may not see it as much as I do. I think the time of day has a fair bit to do with it. I use Firefox on a Mac, but when I sit there watching the "loading" symbol for the Arduino forum I can promptly browse other sites. And the message about "SMF cannot connect to server" says to me "server problem".


Ironically it happened again while I was typing this reply. I had to refresh about 10 times to even get the page up. Here, look:

See the "Transferring data from arduino.cc" down the bottom? It just sits there doing that, with half a page up. I typed the whole reply (apart from this last bit) and it was just sitting there. It's like the server drops the connection.

Just to check, while I was waiting for this reply to go through, I got onto YouTube, and promptly started watching a video. Now videos have a much higher bandwith than text. So it's not my end.

It's truly hopeless, I don't know of any other site that is like this.

Oh, and while I try 20 times to post this, I now see this:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@arduino.cc and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Now you can't tell me that is a problem in Australia. Clearly a server error.

… inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. …

Yes, I was trying to reply to a post. :slight_smile:

Yes I see its a bit slow tonight
I'll go see if I can fix my circuit

I've monitored the server in these days, i experienced the slowness / malfunction you were reporting, and i've identified the following causes:

  1. the eNotify plugin was literally hammering the server. The plugin is configured to do a check every 300 seconds, but, this is the timeout after the first request that is done at every page load. This was fixed, and now enotify check for new messages every 5 minutes for real.

  2. Sometime happened a "500 Server Error" this was due to shared-memory limits on kernel that prevented php-accelerator to start. When this error happened php was unable to run for about 4-5 minutes. Now i've raised the limit from 32Mb to 128Mb, and looking at the error_log the problem seems solved.
    I've also doubled the limits for mysqld (number of connection, memory, threads, etc).

  3. There was a second backup system that runs on 'odd' days. This backup system was not incremental (this means LOT of disk I/O) and did a full dump of the DB. The locks and slowness you just experienced some hours ago was due to this.

Hope these operations will help to improve the forum experience.

edit:
Obviously, i'm still observing server operativity, this is just to give updates on whats happening in the background.

cmaglie:
I've monitored the server in these days, i experienced the slowness / malfunction you were reporting, and i've identified the following causes:

  1. the eNotify plugin was literally hammering the server. The plugin is configured to do a check every 300 seconds, but, this is the timeout after the first request that is done at every page load. This was fixed, and now enotify check for new messages every 5 minutes for real.

  2. Sometime happened a "500 Server Error" this was due to shared-memory limits on kernel that prevented php-accelerator to start. When this error happened php was unable to run for about 4-5 minutes. Now i've raised the limit from 32Mb to 128Mb, and looking at the error_log the problem seems solved.
    I've also doubled the limits for mysqld (number of connection, memory, threads, etc).

  3. There was a second backup system that runs on 'odd' days. This backup system was not incremental (this means LOT of disk I/O) and did a full dump of the DB. The locks and slowness you just experienced some hours ago was due to this.

Hope these operations will help to improve the forum experience.

edit:
Obviously, i'm still observing server operativity, this is just to give updates on whats happening in the background.

Thank you for your efforts on this and keeping us informed. As long as we know someone is actively paying attention to site performance there is not much reason for complaining and bitching. :smiley:

Lefty

agree completely
you can get away with murder if you keep people informed
(don't try this at home)

cmaglie:
Obviously, i'm still observing server operativity, this is just to give updates on whats happening in the background.

Thank you for keeping us informed. It is gratifying to know that someone is not only fixing the problems but monitoring to see if they are occurring. You are probably in a better position to spot a "trend" for the worse than us users in the field.

If this were mine, I would move everything to a different server in a different datacenter, maybe even in a different country. Or at least have someone new take a look at what is going on. This is one of my favorite forums and also one of the slowest forums Ive ever been to.