Slow Site?

[Kalibarr]

Anyone else been having problems with the forum? it's really slow for me and sometimes I get errors when loading a page.

[Romanar]

It seems okay for me right now. Yesterday evening, I had time to run to the kitchen, grab a snack, and eat it while waiting for pages to load.

[Picklepoo]

Anyone else been having problems with the forum? it's really slow for me and sometimes I get errors when loading a page.

The reason why its slow is because sometimes theres alot of people on at a time. This slows down the current web page you are browseing.

[Kalibarr]

ah, thanks

[Mad hatters in jeans]

I get that alot. i wonder if there's any plausible way to reduce this nuisance.

[[violet]]

Our forum traffic has increased a lot recently, which is causing a few slowdowns in peak periods (American afternoon/early evening). It's basically a combination of a few high-load-generating aspects of the forum plus lots of people on at once. I'll fix it.

[Neasmyrna]

NS itself seems to be a little slower the last couple of days. I assume this is for the same reason?

[Flibbleites]

NS itself seems to be a little slower the last couple of days. I assume this is for the same reason?

Considering the site and the forum are on the same server, yes.

[[violet]]

I've seen three load spikes in the last 48 hours; apart from those (which I need to track down) site speed should be normal.

[[violet]]

Tracked down the cause of load spikes! Haven't implemented a fix yet but if the solution I have in mind works, it'll only be a day or two.

[HC Eredivisie]

Our forum traffic has increased a lot recently, which is causing a few slowdowns in peak periods (American afternoon/early evening). It's basically a combination of a few high-load-generating aspects of the forum plus lots of people on at once. I'll fix it.

The latest fix for a slow server included a move to the Jolt and the subsequent leave to a new own forum.

[Pythagosaurus]

No, the move to our own forum was definitely not for speed. It was for "ok, these people are driving us crazy".

[[violet]]

Load spikes fixed now, I hope.

[Andrewboy]

there could be more touble soon tough. march break is coming up and people who arent going away could be coming on nationstates all day.

[[violet]]

The thing with a load spike is that it's one particular function causing way more strain than it should, turning one user into the load equivalent of 100 (or more!). In this case, whenever someone deleted a post, the forum triggered a very large disk read. It didn't matter whether there were 2 or 200 people online; the problem was how many people simultaneously clicked "delete." If it was two or three, the server could lock up waiting for the disk.

Now that piece of code completes in 0.05 seconds, instead of up to 2 minutes. Excepting load spikes, the server only reaches 20-25% of capacity even in the daily peak, so we have no trouble with general traffic increases.