Hi Geoff,
It sounds to me, like this could very well remain one of life’s little mysteries. It would appear that you have some really up-to-date, top-notch equipment there, so if you can’t get a speedy action, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of us with ordinary gear (a £300.00 Acer lap-top with Virgin Wi-Fi).
Fairies - obvious !
There is definitely an issue with some part of whatever hosting platform the forum uses. I get page load times (per the indicator at the bottom) between .3 and 70 seconds, seemingly at random, and anything requiring a search (for example “unread posts”) tends to be slower. I also got some nginx 404 errors this morning while trying to open threads.
EDIT: Submitting this post took around 70 seconds and came up with a 404 error, but has posted the content. Whoever looks after this site should be able to identify the problem very quickly.
Well clearing “unread topics” seemed to speed things up for a couple of minutes, now slowing down again here.
It is a mystery as to why this forum is like it and others I visit not so. It seems to go in spits and spurts, not when the forum is at it’s busiest either.
Judging by the number of double posts we get on some threads it hangs for some when posting, maybe not others.
The underlying issue is high disk IO for the DB which causes problems. It’s difficult to quickly pin down exactly what causes this, but whenever I’ve looked at this in the past it’s purely down to volumes of traffic. Right now we’ve got at least 3 search engine bots indexing us, which adds significant load that we can’t practically do anything about.
I think a big part of the problem we face is that we’ve got a huge number of forums and subforms – way more than almost any other forum I’ve ever seen – and that makes things like the forum homepage a computationally heavy process especially when having to process unread post status, etc. This makes things worse for individual users, but also across the board because as with any computer system, there’s a finite amount of resource available.
We have in the past considered forcing every user into an ‘all posts marked as read’ state just to try to tidy things up, but it’s not the simplest thing to do and no doubt will upset a lot of people. May be time to revisit that though.
Sounds like either a tidyup/consolidation or increase in resource is in order!
Never done anything to any posts, got crap wifi,a router that sulkes and the site works fine.
Never done anything to any posts, got crap wifi,a router that sulkes and the site works fine.
^^^ So why the double post with a 2 ish minute interval?
From the number of edits to that post in quick succession, it looks like things are pretty speedy at the moment 
I thought I would see how many people are on the forum at the moment: 60 active users, 9 members, 51 guests for last 5 minutes It took me 15.8 seconds to get to the front page from this thread, somethings wrong Ramsay
Is it because you got fed up waiting that you posted this twice?
32 secs to get from home page to forum.
Is this ok?
Have you tried using a robots.txt file to manipulate the behavior of bots? Or indeed block any that are particularly resource heavy but bring no benefit?
It’s not mandatory that bots adhere to this, but generally they do. Given it is a resource issue I would look at adding a crawl delay first. This will limit the database load that bots can actually cause by preventing them from hammering the side, by putting a delay in page indexes.
Googlebot ignores crawl delay, but you can adjust how google indexes the site in the google search console.
Just attempted to post a response and it hung for 43 secs then timed out File Not Found error 404?
The challenge is that we want the bots to crawl, as we want to be returned in search results, but what we don’t want is them all to decide to crawl us at the same time – but if there’s specific things that you think we can do to solve that, I’m all ears :)
The nginx 404s are a bit of red herring in that it’s what nginx does when a POST times out – this is because they’re being queued on the forum server and so it doesn’t get a response in time, even though it has – in effect – been accepted.
Sorry guys, but these last few posts sound like gobbledegook to me - that’s my fault I guess, I am a ‘techno-thickie’ after all.
I think I’ll just wait and see if any of you clever chaps can sort this web site out - good luck gentlemen !
Um, why has ‘GOBBLEDEGOOK’ been censored ?
You are not alone
My wife thinks I’m wonderful when I sort out her techie stuff PC wise, I’m just bluffing it really but whatever I do it works. I’m learning everyday but to be quite honest technology is passing me by now. Even my new TV is challenging now, I still haven’t figured out how I get back the sound setup I had before (linking a soundbar) everything was messed up when my wife connected her new iphone (well SH from my daughter) via Bluetooth to it.
Just tried this, took less than 5 seconds.
Gra
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