Bonneville America Forums Forums Off Topic Discussion Forums Forum Help and Information As of late

Lately... that is to say over the last month or so, I've experienced slower response times to clicks in and around the forums. Not so much that I get the 404 message... just that it takes forever to get the results of a click on this thing or that. Often I give up and move on to something else. Is this common to other users or am I just paying off some sort of karma from my not-so-enlightened past?

I've been getting it a lot lately. I cut down the number of responses from the database when viewing some of the more active forums like the lounge, but it doesn't seem to be helping. My next test is to deactivate the homepage and see if it isn't more of a conflict between Vbulletin and WordPress. I figure either the forum will start behaving or we'll start getting more "traditional" looking 404 pages. Also, the LAST TIME WE DISCUSSED THIS I set up some error logging to capture any database errors. Now I just have to see if I can discern anything from those logs. Might have to get Dreamhost involved.

I gave up trying to read anything on here yesterday, I kept getting the custom 404 errors and extremely long times if a page did load.

+1

I can't even get to the homepage now to shut it down for testing. When I get home tonight I'm going to have to nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. I can only do so much from behind NG's firewall (and I'm supposed to be doing other stuff).

Because we cannot reply to "Big Problems" I'm posting here but... things still seem slower than "a turd rolling uphill." But what do I know... I'm the guy that wrote the song, forgot the lyrics and can't remember how to play it. Hopefully the steroids kick in soon!

There was a brief burst of speed. I hope that means they are working on it. It doesn't seem quite as horrible as earlier today.

I was able to access the home page when I logged on today, but everything is still taking so long to load I can click a link go have coffee and come back to see it load.I hope the home page being back is a good sign.

Was dead as a doornail ealier, but seems to be working fine right now. (12:47 CDT -5 GMT)

It ebbs and flows with the memory usage.

Opposite of flows...

She's cooking now john. I've Been on and off all day and right now, even on this crappy free airport wifi, BA.com is loading quickly.

Been fine here last few hrs too, been on and off during the day too.

Yeah, I have no idea why. The ISP gave me a lot of source/suggestions for optimizing things, but I haven't been able to change anything yet. As far as I know (suspect), they just increase our memory allocation.

Seems to be up to speed again!

That-a-boy John!

I wish I could claim credit. All I did was whine at the ISP.

Sometimes the squeaky wheel.......

I just checked the site statistics and the Google and Bing search engine bots account for nearly half our traffic. There are several other bots indexing the site but those are by far the largest culprits.

That means the search engines are bogging us down and using up memory on the web server. Think of it this way, an extra 20+ thousand visitors stopping by in each month but not interacting, just causing the server to do all the extra work. That doesn't even count the smaller search engines and spambots that are trying to scrape personal information.

tons of 404 errors of late, and also really slow.

I had some this weekend but last couple days it's been fairly smokin' and error free...

Still getting the 404 error on occasion.

Been pretty good here lately ever since that really bad spat that John called about. Still get a 404 once in a while but no more than I did before. Speed has been good.

Last couple days has been bad again. lots of 404 messages and very slow page loading on multiple platforms (IOS, Win XP and Win7) on multiple devices (Macbook, PC, Xoom and iPad) with multiple browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox, Dolphin and Atomic Web).

Painfully slow for me too today. Error messages a plenty.

Huh. Google Chrome, Windows 7, cable modem (at home, corporate T1 with all kinds of bandwidth killing network security and overhead at work), plenty fast, very very few errors.

Seems to me that weekends are the worst.

wow John lately it has been terrible in my parts anyways both at work and at home, we are talking time out errors just trying to get into the site and then when in, if i can itls like 20 seconds to move a page, in here that feels like forever, i have good stuff, no nannies etc etc, just been painful.

Yep John. It's bein' painfully slooooooooooooooooow today, dude.

At first I wasn't sure if it was just my slightly slower Cenury Link service here in Sedona as compared to the Cable One setup I had in Prescott, but after comparing the response time I'm gettin' from my other frequently visited website(TCM.com), and from what Mike here is sayin', it appears it's probably the BA.com server again, eh?

Well, if I initiate the migration and upgrade process it's likely to be unavailable for a while, at least a few days. That's a necessary evil I suppose. I'd have to lock the board but it should still be available read-only.

Interesting, I do not have the issue when accessing the site with my Ipod but any other source (windows) is terrible.

John, what did yo do... its like someone put a turbo on this pig all of a sudden.

I know. Here's the deal. I'm not sorry if I get a tiny bit technical...

We use the shared hosting plan, aka the cheapest, on Dreamhost.com. What shared hosting means is that we share a server with god-knows how many other sites, with god-knows how much other traffic. All the web sites on our server share the same memory (RAM) and the same hard drives (file storage). This is why it's fairly inexpensive but it's also why I haven't pushed for any more contributions or started running ads. Yes, it's all your fault.

But something has changed. I suspect they aren't properly balancing the load or spreading the more active sites across different servers. Tech support said we'd run out of memory but I don't know if that's our allotted memory or total memory on the box.

So when the memory fills up, the site slows down. I don't know if the memory frees up naturally during weekday evenings or if the staff at Dreamhost is doing something to clear things out.

So, the long-term solution is one of the following:

1. stay with Dreamhost, carry on exactly how we are, but upgrade to what they call a Virtual Private Server. This would give me more control over how much memory we can use, however, this would triple-to-quintuple our monthly hosting cost. And we'd still be using this crusty old version of UBB Threads until I can find the time to attempt another upgrade. But I'm a web designer, not a programmer or system admin.

2. move to another host (I've been talking a bit with URLjet) and not only upgrade our plan similar to Dreamhost's VPS (similar cost as well) but have them convert the forum to VBulletin as I've been planning/trying to do for close to a year. There is a fee for that service but for all the hassle it would save me I don't care how much I have to pay. I'm just not sure how long the process will take. The site has to be locked down so we don't lose anything; at some point if I leave it up things that are posted here will not be included in the conversion and will be lost. I picked URLjet because there is lots of great feedback about them on the VBulletin forums, nary a bad word about them, and they specialize in VBulletin hosting. Going this route I'm 99.5% sure the WordPress homepage would go away, but I'd transition all the content, manually if necessary, including the featured member rides, to the VBulletin publishing system (separate from the forums).

This is not meant to be a fund raiser. If I need money I'll spread the word. We have enough left in the coffers to do the conversion. Right now it's all about timing.