What is happening with MSE this evening?

sra

Complete refusal to load a page for the past few minutes followed by a database error and it's still very slow

tomstickland

I've had a number of database errors/go slows occur in the last few days, often late at night.

Former_MSE_Webmaster

That's the most confusing part of this. Why are we having slow periods late at night with only 1000 users on?

Another concern of mine is the elongated periods of slowness that some users are experiencing. When we see these slowdowns, they never last for more than 5 minutes and most of the time it's only 2-3. This is basically the server getting too many requests for information, queueing up the requests and taking a few minutes time to catch up and fulfil them. This is reflected on our site monitors but nothing on our monitors is showing load buildup of longer than that.

Has anyone actually experienced a continuous slow period of longer than 5 minutes?

Thanks for posting and thanks for bearing with us. We're working very long and hard to try and sort this.


Webby

iwanttosave_2

I have been getting lengths of up to an hour where it has been slow, so slow I ended up logging off, it was slow for about 40 mins for me last night about 9:15pm, I was able to read emails and post on other websites by the time the pages had loaded.

And I lost the quiz in the arms because I couldnt reply fast enough

skim

beeen on a few vbulletin boards with a few thousand members online at the same time & all seem to be slow whereas I've been on invision boards with the same amount of members online & it's really quick.

Is there a difference in how they manage the database?

Former_MSE_Webmaster

It's possible that the Invision boards you were on may have used a different database (they support Oracle and MS-SQL) whereas vB only support MySQL. There are bigger forums than ours out there still using MySQL so I'm not sure that's the issue.

Our Forum is mostly very quick these days, even with 4000+ people online. What we're experiencing here are intermittent slowdowns.

iwanttosave_2

I take it the site isnt on shared servers? :think: If so, maybe another site in the evening, say an American site, is getting alot of traffic and putting strain on the servers.

I doubt a site this big is on shared servers, just thinkin out loud really.

Former_MSE_Webmaster

The whole site is actually shared across 7 servers wanty although it did start on a shared server, way back when.

skim

I believe MySQL is suppose to be one of the quickest but it depends on the database structure in regard to speed etc.
Hard to say as the invision board forum I go on has over 400 online at any time & still hasn't any speed problems.

I think a lot is also down to the host etc.

I've seen exactly the same setup run like a dog on one host & flies on another.

iwanttosave_2

MSE_Webmaster wrote:

The whole site is actually shared across 7 servers wanty although it did start on a shared server, way back when.

Mmmm

:think:

Maybe the hamster keeps falling off its wheel

In the meantime, have a free official wantyfied christmas avatar to make you feel happier