[Rickster]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the suggestion! I was myself looking to get a server from SoftLayer Technologies, Inc.- they seem to have quite a powerful selection.

Adam,

You might want to check out MT's client list here. As you might expect, these folks demand serious web server performance.

cheers,
Rick

[vievetrick]

okay today. Even to my iPhone

[Mike Cash]

Thanks, Adam and everyone else as well.

My problem hasn't been so much the pages loading as it has been photos on the pages loading. I've been having similar problems when viewing my own Flickr account and on the Help Forum over there noticed that I'm not the only one.

I found it curious because some people here were commenting on some of the photos I had posted (meaning they were displaying for them) while when I looked at the thread the photos never appeared.

Switching to IE seemed to verify that it was a Firefox-specific problem, since images practically jumped onto the page, both here and af Flickr. Cleaning my Firefox cache and restarting temporarily helped, but it didn't last long.

[quickpix]

Looks like this was definitely a problem over at our end yesterday

The site was quite slow for two reasons: first, I set a mass e-mail New Year's greeting to most forum users (about 4,000), and second, we saw a traffic record, with over 80,000 pageloads. Because the peak in traffic occurred at the same time I sent the e-mails, the server load reached a very high percentage and thus the site began running slowly for the next few minutes. After a bit, though, things subsided and the site was back to normal.

Statcounter and/or Google Analytics may also have been down at that time, but that should not prevent forum pages from loading.

I hate to say it, but this may be a sign that we need to move on to a more powerful server. I'll look into that some more if we experience further slowing caused by high volumes of traffic.

Ahh that would explain I was getting average ping times of 170ms. Now thats what I call bad timing haha

[Adam]

My problem hasn't been so much the pages loading as it has been photos on the pages loading. I've been having similar problems when viewing my own Flickr account and on the Help Forum over there noticed that I'm not the only one.

Hi Mike,

Just to clarify- many of the photos users post here on the forum are hosted on other sites (in your case, on Flickr), and if those sites are down or experiencing high traffic, the images may load slowly or may not appear at all.

[daacon]

It is intermittent - for example this morning nice and peppy - so Adam you may indeed be correct in that from what I have seen tracert times are usually always resonable , so a huge contributor could be server load at peak periods. May have to load balance the load over to the DR site (now that would take a few more donations eh!)

Thanks for the efforts to date and the ones to come.

[LaRee]

I've only experienced slow loading of any page the other day and Mo explained the situation that happened that day. Thanks Mo. I know that the site has been much busier lately and it is to be expected along the way to have growing bumps.

I have been visiting various forms for years and this is the absolute best programing of any I've visited. My hats off to you Mo, you do an amazing job here.

edit: Oh, and not to bash dpreview, but that site has a lot more slow and/or down times.

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Last edited by LaRee; 01-05-2008 at 05:41 PM. Reason: edit

[gpaual]

ok mo......thanks for some clarity....new server ?....i'll put a m.o. in the mail wed'..........

[igowerf]

Adam,

You might want to check out the Grid-Server hosting at MediaTemple.net

I use them for my west coast server needs and they have been great. Their customer service has been superb.

cheers,
Rick

Our office is right next door to Media Temple in Culver City so we've used them before to set up a custom PHP/MySQL development server. I wasn't particularly impressed with how they handled our custom request, but their customer service was always fast and responsive.

By the way, the site has been timing out for me a lot in the past few days. If we need to upgrade servers, I'll gladly donate again. I guess Pentax is getting too popular?

[Adam]

By the way, the site has been timing out for me a lot in the past few days. If we need to upgrade servers, I'll gladly donate again. I guess Pentax is getting too popular?

It seems that between 1:30 and 3:30 this afternoon, the site was either timing out, or running extremely slowly.

The server load doesn't appear to be a problem, so I'm guessing that our host is simply not alotting adequate bandwidth to the server. I'm currently looking into the problem, and I'll post any updates as I learn more. And yes, if these problems persist, I will have to switch servers.

[m8o]

Adam, any chance there's a scheduled automated back-up that kicks in mid-day (for US time-zones) and causes locking & slowdowns, or some other outside influence? There's over 500 active online users presently, and things are snappy. Yesterday with the same user count at the same time you cite, the site as we know was at a standstill. Unless you got the hosting service to already address the matter, there could be an outside influence affecting performance, where the site could otherwise handle the user load if it weren't for that influence.

[smokey]

Just to let you know, this morning between about 9:45 - 10 am CST, the site was unuseable. Pages failed to load completely. Never got a timeout though.

[Adam]

Adam, any chance there's a scheduled automated back-up that kicks in mid-day (for US time-zones) and causes locking & slowdowns, or some other outside influence? There's over 500 active online users presently, and things are snappy. Yesterday with the same user count at the same time you cite, the site as we know was at a standstill. Unless you got the hosting service to already address the matter, there could be an outside influence affecting performance, where the site could otherwise handle the user load if it weren't for that influence.

Just to let you know, this morning between about 9:45 - 10 am CST, the site was unuseable. Pages failed to load completely. Never got a timeout though.

I have a server technician that's currently looking into the problem over at the datacenter. I should get a response about what's causing the trouble shortly, although I do fear that it's the traffic that's causing problems. I've detected the creation of many stray server log files, but that has been taken care of, and it only affected disk space rather than performance.

[ftpaddict]

Then maybe the issue will solve itself on the 24th-25th.

[Rickster]

I have a server technician that's currently looking into the problem over at the datacenter. I should get a response about what's causing the trouble shortly, although I do fear that it's the traffic that's causing problems. I've detected the creation of many stray server log files, but that has been taken care of, and it only affected disk space rather than performance.

Adam,

If you are on a shared server you may have another customer of the system chewing up available CPU time occasionally. You really need to look at a system like Media Temple's GridServer where they have solved the 'bad neighbor' server syndrome --- for only $20/month!

I hear LunarServers in Las Vegas performs really well, too. My cousin has moved about 30 domains over there to a dedicated server and he's as happy as a lark.

Good Luck!