Topic: An Official observation.

I wish to state this, for the record.

I am sometimes (but not always...and that has a huge "?" over my head) not being able to load the Ozone in my browser. And it doesn't matter which one, either.

Case in point - just now, at 22:45 until 22:50, I could not get the board to move further - the hourglass. I did a Tracert - 6 links, all showing very nice 250 ms times direct to Dreamhost - so it is not the connection, either.

And this seems to happen more and more often. It is not my firewall (I have checked, I have de-installed it, re-checked, re-installed it, and checked again) - and other sites work fine.

I have also noticed this behavior after a post, as well - the re-direct jsut hangs...and hangs...and hangs.

I sometimes just close the browser entirely, start it back up, and call up the website - and what do you know - there is my post! What the...??!!

Is anyone else having these types of problems? I post on a number of different forums and boards - and I only have this problem here.

It is quite...spooky, really.

Any ideas?

Yes, acutally, I just had that very problem after posting. It hung forever on the redirect. I tried restarting my browser and it still didn't come up. I tried in another browser....nada. I messaged Emps and he said he couldn't get here either, so I figured it wasn't my end.
Obvioiusly, after a bit, I was able to get here

Yes, it was again going well, from 22:50 (GMT + 1) until 23:23 - and then the long post-Post time cut in - 3 minutes!

I've been experiencing this a great deal lately.

I often end up giving up...

Same thing here but for me it started under somewhat 'suspicious' circumstances. Maybe about 10 or so days ago I fired up Firefox and instead of starting it presented me with a box saying something to the effect that no user profile had been established and did I want to set up a new profile or use a default. Had never seen this before.

I 'cancelled' because FF had never shown the screen on any other install but that box would not go away. So I clicked default... but in the process... lost all bookmarks...plug-ins... that speed 'tweak' everything gone gone gone. Then FF went for an automatic update... 1.0.6.
Ever since this place has been SLOW SLOW...especially on the Reply.

I do realize the FF problem can't be to blame but for me that's when the slowdown started.

I'm right pissed off about the bookmarks.

Same thing here but for me it started under somewhat 'suspicious' circumstances. Maybe about 10 or so days ago I fired up Firefox and instead of starting it presented me with a box saying something to the effect that no user profile had been established and did I want to set up a new profile or use a default. Had never seen this before.

I 'cancelled' because FF had never shown the screen on any other install but that box would not go away. So I clicked default... but in the process... lost all bookmarks...plug-ins... that speed 'tweak' everything gone gone gone. Then FF went for an automatic update... 1.0.6.
Ever since this place has been SLOW SLOW...especially on the Reply.

I do realize the FF problem can't be to blame but for me that's when the slowdown started.

I'm right pissed off about the bookmarks.



Edit/ And just to prove me wrong...this post went lickidysplit. Go figure./Edit

quote:

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Same thing here but for me it started under somewhat 'suspicious' circumstances. Maybe about 10 or so days ago I fired up Firefox and instead of starting it presented me with a box saying something to the effect that no user profile had been established and did I want to set up a new profile or use a default. Had never seen this before.

I 'cancelled' because FF had never shown the screen on any other install but that box would not go away. So I clicked default... but in the process... lost all bookmarks...plug-ins... that speed 'tweak' everything gone gone gone. Then FF went for an automatic update... 1.0.6.
Ever since this place has been SLOW SLOW...especially on the Reply.

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Happened to me around the same time, NoJive!

It even destroyed my MozBackup 1.4, whatever did it. So I had to re-install FF all over again, brand new, and painstakingly re-create all my bookmarks. I find it very spooky, that it also happened to you at around the same time.

I know have a BU of MozBackup 1.4 - just in case.

Ok, I see this problem with access and posting is happening to others, as well.

Folks, hate to say this, but we obviously have a problem on the Boards here. I think it is time to get the Managements attention, and track the critter down, and squash it.

I though it was only me... I was just about to say something yesterday, around 12 GMT! I also gave up after 4 or 5 unsuccessful loadings. I also have problems posting messages.

Well, dreamhost has been having database issues once in a while... most of the time in the last few months when I couldn't access the asylum, I found all tables to be in 'locked' state.
Once it was some runaway bot, doing backlinksearches en galore - I blocked that. But othertimes I couldn't figure out what it was, and it does disappear after a while. I assume self healing kicks in (or DH kills mysql ;-)).

In other news the code hasn't changed very much in the last few months... The InI fix, and the runaway-bot problem was pretty much it.

I'll try to monitor the problem, and we'll see what comes up.
So long,

->Tyberius Prime

Did you work on the Asylum last night (German time)? I wasn't able to reach it for hours last night, and when I could, it took at least 30 minutes to call up a page.

No, I did not work at the asylum at all. Actually, I was playing World of Warcraft ;-)

(Not that I would voluntarily break the asylum for more than a couple of minutes. You remember, last time we had a pretty big storm around here. boy was that a scary night...)

me too for the record. And I assumed it was the Dreamhost MySQL and/or the neighbors on the same server issues.

TP, Have you ever received mail from DH about excessive resource consumption?

quote:

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NoJive said:

Same thing here but for me it started under somewhat
'suspicious' circumstances. Maybe about 10 or so days ago I fired up
Firefox and instead of starting it presented me with a box saying
something to the effect that no user profile had been established and
did I want to set up a new profile or use a default. Had never seen
this before.

---

That happened to me as well, though, I clicked cancel and it went away with no ill effects.

The Dreamhost newsletter did say that they were still updating servers, so maybe that's causing problems?
I tried for about an hour or so to get here yesterday morning and it just wasn't happenin. And as soon as I click the "submit reply" button below, it'll hang...... but I'll be brave and click it anyway

Yeah, this happened yesterday, although it did happen about a month ago too. I tried posting but the hourglass just kept on...forever...In the end I closed Opera, re-opened and tried to go to the Asylum. It didn't work.

WebS / Lacuna

I don't frequent the FF forums but do you think it's worth cobbling something together from the 3 of us and posting it over there somewhere?

Clearly there was something other than 'coincidence' going on.

Well, JKMabry, I wouldn't be the one receiving the mails, the Doc would.
Otherwise the grail is, compared to other forums, very very timid in it's resource usage.
Most (*) page views are handled without any database query at all. That's what leads to the 'asylum works, but I can't post' phenomena.

I again have disabled the back link search till I have something better (which hopefully will work rather soon),
in case it's some 'no robots.txt following bot' again. (That part is the only really resource intensive thing around here).

So we'll watch and see how it goes, and try to log the downtimes here, will ya?

So long,
->Tyberius Prime

(*) - The last 200 pages viewed or so are cached. Since we very rarly have 200 threads a day, that means most views come from the cache. We implemented that back when Dreamhost still made you pay for excess MySQL queries, and it has served well.

Good idea, NoJive! It does sound like more than coincidence to me.

yeah, that is a good idea, nojive.

fwiw, i didn't have any problems with posting or anything yesterday. everything was as it should be.

quote:

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Lacuna said:

yeah, that is a good idea, nojive.

fwiw, i didn't have any problems with posting or anything yesterday. everything was as it should be.

---

Ah yes but you weren't around at the time - Mr Mabry was and dropped me a line.

We can put this one down to the LA outtage (and now I can say to my grandkids "Ahhhhhh I remember the Los Angeles Blackouts of 2005 it was a painful time"):

The men in black strikes in L.A.

The GN and other DH sites I checked were also down.

However, as people have said above this isn't the only outtage and it is a good idea to track them. People should also try tracing the route - Mr Mabry was having troubles with it at the time and another site I know has reported some oddities so keep an eye out for that too.

___________________
Emps

The Emperor dot org | Revenant: The Zombie Magazine | Wonders | Justice for Pat Richard | FAQs: Emperor | Site Reviews | Reception Room

if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

I have been having all of the troubles mentioned above for months off an on.

But I don't use Fire-fox...whatever that is.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov
US science fiction novelist & scholar (1920 - 1992)

the asylum's working badly right now - if I manually kill the locking proccess in mysql it instantly resumes it's work... narf.

ok... I tried checking and optimizing the db... we'll see how that holds.

Thanks, TP.

I am still experiencing problems, especially when I hit "Submit Reply" it just sits there.

Then whe I get po'd, quit and return, I find my post is there!

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov
US science fiction novelist & scholar (1920 - 1992)

That's because the package of data containing your post had already bee nsent to the processing script. What wasn't loading was the page tellingyou that that had been done, but it actually happens before you leave the page.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

It's sloooooooooooow again...

I went through 18 threads, with corresponding posts on the Bioware website, just to post once here (I use FF, with tabbing )

Unfortunatly, I was out of town on the weekend so I wasn't able to check what the exact problem was (ie. I couldn't look into the database admin).

That you can browse easily is a given - most pages here do not require an access to the database (they're cached), but once you hit 'submit' of course the database has to be accesed in serveral ways (look up your user, change/create a record, regenerate the displayed page...)

I'm having an eye on it

there it was again - database having an updating process that took 250+ seconds.
Once I killed it, everything quickly went back to normal.

hm.

the really weird thing is that the post still makes it...

I have no idea. The table now weights about 300 megabytes, with 60 megs of indices.

hm. it appears to get worse the bigger a thread is...

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 09-26-2005 15:46)

Thanks Skaarj and TS. I tried again this morning and couldn't get on, it locked with about 5 of the little bars at the bottom showing. Waited over 5 minutes.

Then tried on FF (yah-I donloaded it!) and got straight in.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov
US science fiction novelist & scholar (1920 - 1992)

Well, after getting on in FF, it would send my post after a wait of about 30 minutes.

Tried to access OA my usual way and couldn't get on at all.

Not bitchin;, just providing input.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov
US science fiction novelist & scholar (1920 - 1992)

The above one went through effortlessly.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov
US science fiction novelist & scholar (1920 - 1992)

And just to add more input -

For me, the slowness seems to be random. I use Firefox at home, and Mozilla at work. Sometimes just trying to laod the main page goes so slow that I give up; sometimes the main page loads ok, but the Quick Changes page takes forever.

Sometimes, once the main page loads, everything else go just fine; other times, everything is slow...

Sometimes everything goes fine until I submit a post, then I have the same issue many others reported (the post goes through, but I give up and leave long before I get to see it).

FWIW

^ I can only report similar behavior.