Has anyone noticed that in the mornings, PCQandA has been slow to come up or refresh? This has been happening for about 2 weeks. None of my other sites which I visit regularly is doing that. Any problems that anyone knows about?

Fred

I notice it once in a while but not often. I just chalk it up to network traffic. No big deal to me.

MSU

Yes, I've been noticing that lately as well. Replying to and editing posts has been slower than normal as well.

Could be Network Traffic as MSU stated.

I don't know what kind of clients the hosting company services but maybe their servers are getting overloaded in the morning from businesses opening for the day and all checking in around the same times.

MSU

All plausible explanation guys. Thanks.

I just wondered whether I was the only one experiencing the slowdown.

Fred

Yeah, but this site is hosted on a dedicated server. Only a few of Jason's small projects share the IP.

Well so much for that theory

MSU

I used to get it at night about 10 pm my time(PST) and I just figured it was the backup running for the site but lately I have been getting it in the AM as well.

The theory could still be right if the problem is happening somewhere outside of the server. Perhaps the network is congested at certain times of the day. I haven't noticed much of a slowdown, but it is a possibility.

It still could be a bandwidth problem at the hosting company.

Behind every good computer... is a jumble of wires 'n stuff.

That would be my guess.

Dave

I'm not a morning person, maybe that is true for the forum as well.

Shelly

AHA, the guilty culprit!!!


Fred

I guess this has become a permanent problem.

Refreshes have stretched to several minutes with Explorer failing at a refresh more than half the time.

I guess this will become an "afternoon forum"!


Fred

Since you started this thread I've noticed it more and more. It's very evident between about 7:30 am and 10:30 am. It happens in IE, Chrome and Firefox. It's not several minutes for me. But at least 30 seconds for almost every thread and post I click on.

edit: Oh and many times after that 30 seconds or so it settles on a blank page with just the PCQ&A header and the tabs at the top. I have to refresh and wait all over again to see anything.

MSU

From 6:00 to around 7:00AM the forum loaded normally, which is to say quite quickly. Then, until a little after 9:00AM it was incredibly slow, and often only loaded the top of the forum page - just as you described.

Now, it's back to normal - full speed ahead.

Jim.

Yep, full speed ahead here also now. Like I said earlier in the thread, I had noticed it occasionally and it didn't seem that bad. But it seems to have become more frequent (as in every day) and worse. Almost to the point of being unusable.

MSU

I'm noticing the same thing at my end lately.

Dave

So, perhaps the right question is to Jason or Shelly - what's changed at the hosting company & will this situation become permanent?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but trying to find out what the specific problem is due to & what's the prospects of fixing it.

Thanks.
Fred

During the slow time it isn't just PCQandA that's slow but roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of the other sites I visit every morning.

During the slow time if I open the same forum page - say new messages - twice or thrice, one of the pages will generally load at normal speed.

Jim.

It's only PCQ&A for me. Well there may be a slight slowdown on other sites but nothing to write home about. PCQ&A has become almost unusable during that time. At least in my opinion.

MSU

PCQandA is the slowest but for me only "Joined Threads" is unusable as it generally never loads past the heading no matter how many times I open it on separate pages.

Jim.

Is it only Joined Threads that's slowing down or all of the pages?

If the former, it could be because I wrote Joined Threads awhile back and need to improve the code. If the latter, perhaps there's some kind of server or network problem.

I've looked at the traffic stats and I'm not seeing any large spike (or dip) in traffic in the morning either here or on any of my other sites.

It's only during the AM slow-to-load period that "Joined threads" fails to load completely - at all other times it loads quickly - please don't change it.

Other pages are slow to load but they do load, Using the method I mentioned earlier, I can get them to load faster although still slower than normal speeds.

Right now it's about 6:25AM and everything is opening quickly.

It will be interesting to see if there is a slowdown this morning around 7:00AM.

Jim.

When it slows down, could you run the following command from a DOS Prompt:

tracert www.pcqanda.com > c:\pcqanda-tracert.txt

Then post that tracert file. It will help determine if the slowdown is happening on the server or somewhere along the way.

Well this is a new one. I was trying to post a reply to another thread during this crappy time period. After the obligatory 30 second plus of wheel spinning I got this:

MSU

Attachment #1, (jpg file)

I actually got that error also as well as the server slowdown. I'm going to check to see if anything is running at that time. If so, I should be able to move the time that it runs. If not, perhaps a server reboot would solve the problem.

Here you go.

Tracing route to www.pcqanda.com <66.147.238.27>
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1
2 11 ms 8 ms 8 ms 96.71.46.1
3 8 ms 10 ms 8 ms te-0-7-0-7-sur01.greensburg.pa.pitt.comcast.net <68.85.72.157>
4 12 ms 18 ms 11 ms te-0-5-0-2-ar03.mckeesport.pa.pitt.comcast.net <69.139.195.21>
5 16 ms 22 ms 26 ms he-4-5-0-0-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net <68.86.94.165>
6 20 ms 15 ms 16 ms xe-10-1-0.edge2.Washington12.Level3.net <4.26.6.5>
7 29 ms 22 ms 29 ms vlan52.ebr2.Washington12.Level3.net <4.69.146.222>
8 27 ms 21 ms 22 ms ae-5-5.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net <4.69.143.221>
9 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms ae-4-4.ebr2.Newark1.Level3.net <4.69.132.102>
10 33 ms 107 ms 22 ms ae-22-52.car2.Newark1.Level3.net <4.69.156.38>
11 27 ms 26 ms 24 ms HOSTROCKET.car2.Newark1.Level3.net <4.79.190.46>
12 26 ms 25 ms 25 ms www.pcqanda.com <66.147.238.27>

Trace complete.

MSU

Back to full speed at 10:55:31.

Jim.

Yep, back to full speed here too. I just ran another tracert and got virtually identical results to the first one I ran when it was at a crawl. That and the screen shot I posted have me pretty well convinced that the problem is on the server side of things.

MSU

I've disabled a few cron jobs I had running. Hopefully, this helps speed the site back up. If not, I can try a server reboot.

I guess we'll find out tomorrow morning

MSU

.

.

.

It's doing it again!

Fred

Yep, it's a spinning it's wheels.

MSU

.

The site was fast until 8:06AM. Opening multiples of the same page does get at least one instance of the page to open.

It's now about 8:13 and the forum is fast again.

Now, at 8:14, it's slow again.

Wouldn't post with Internal Server Error.

Jim.

Edit: Despite the Internal Server Error, my message posted (5 times).

Edit: I just posted to another thread and got this:

Occasionally I notice this, but lately it's sometimes just our forum that has the huge delays. It definitely is a lot worse than it used to be a few months ago.

Dave

Edit: Now it's so bad that it took almost a dozen tries to even edit this post. The error I kept receiving was...

Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): The server closed the connection without sending any data

Dave

Possibly Google and other search engines are gathering information?

Les

Naw, they do that constantly. So it would be all the time not just during a certain time block.

MSU

At 1354Z April 5, everything slowed to a crawl then recovered but with a limited amount of archived pages available. I could only get two from the OT Lounge and 3 or 4 on the Computer Forum. I noticed this a couple of days ago when attempting to Search...that function was dead.

Yup. I guess Jason will have to keep looking for the culprit.

This site has been so trouble free for so long, though.

Fred

Yup. I guess Jason will have to keep looking for the culprit.

This site has been so trouble free for so long, though.

Fred

I just rebooted the server (so if you just tried to post and noticed it not working, that was me and not our Mystery Bug). Hopefully, this addresses the issues. If it doesn't, I'll look into it more.

Jason - slowdown this morning again but not as bad as during a weekday. It's 8:15 here on the east coast.

Fred

8:35am here, just as slow as ever in this morning time frame. Just got the internal server error I posted the screen shot of in post #30 again.

edit: And got the blank page with just the header after spinning it's wheels for about 30 seconds when I tried to post this.

MSU

Very slow for me right now, ~8:15am CDT.

Edit - Just checked again, MUCH faster now, 9:25am CDT.

Behind every good computer... is a jumble of wires 'n stuff.

Yep, back to normal here too at 10:35am EST.

MSU

10:03 AM on April 7th (Sun) & am experiencing the problem once more.

Fred

At 6:15AM PST this morning I checked and the site was extreeeemly slow.
Back to normal now.

Les

Right, nothing has changed over the weekend.

MSU

Not doing it this morning - Mon 7:40 AM.

Fred

It's sporadic for me. It'll be fine for a few minutes then almost at a stand still just like before for a while.

MSU

I contacted Mike, he took a look and tried optimizing the database. I also tried launching a post at 7am instead of at 8:30am, but I doubt that'd really have a major impact. (If no slowdown occurs, I'll make tomorrow's post go live at 8:30am. If PCQandA slows again, I'll keep my posts going live at 7am from now on. If it doesn't, then it was the optimization and not the post time that had the impact.)

9:13 AM Aprile 8th - slowed down again, but not as bad as yesterday.

Fred

10:00AM.SLOWWWWW



Dell Studio 540, Windows 8 Pro, Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q8200 (2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB), w/

4MBcache, 4GB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHZ- 4X1GB DIM M, ECS N8400GSC-1GQM-H2 GeForce 8400 GS 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express

I have a couple of other things I can try tonight.

Jason

Why not try looking back over the last month or so and considering backing out any changes in procedure that have occurred. I don't recall these slowdowns taking place before that time.

Dave

Nor do I. And it's so strange that it seems to be pretty much confined to the same three hour time block every morning.

MSU

There haven't been any major changes on the PCQandA side. As far as my other sites go (that live on PCQandA's server), I've had 2 major changes. One site (a Twitter-based application of mine) went through a nearly ground-up rewrite. This application doesn't have a big following, though. It's had 26 page views in the past month. There is a job that runs every 5 minutes (to process data so the user doesn't need to wait), but with no one visiting the site, that script is just starting and terminating every 5 minutes. Still, I can stop it from running for a day to see if that does anything.

The other major change was a reworked theme on a Wordpress site of mine. If this had any impact on the server, it should have reduced the load. (It's a cleaner design meant to load quickly and smoothly scale from desktop to mobile device.)

With all you have stated, it appears the problem may be an availability of bandwidth at the host provider's end during that time frame. If that is the case, are we actually getting what you have contracted for in terms of available bandwidth? The server may be dedicated to PCQ&A, but the provider may not have the total bandwidth available to service all they have sold.

Dave

I don't want to jinx anything but I was on for a while about an hour ago and have been on for about 10 minutes now and everything seems to be working great. No slowdown at all.

MSU

It's 9:20 AM EDT on April 9th.

The problem is as bad as it's ever been, sorry to say.

Fred

Yup. I actually had a script to test something and when I tried to run it noticed that PCQandA was down. Not just PCQandA.com, but all of the sites that run on here. In fact, it looks like mySQL is the problem.

At this point, I'm wondering if a scraper is the problem. Some scrapers try to pull content from sites and aren't as well behaved as Google is. When I looked to see the traffic numbers, I looked in Google Analytics, but a scraper (or some other kind of daily DOS attack) wouldn't load the JavaScript files and thus wouldn't show. I can look through the log files to try to trace it back though.

Thanks to everyone for putting up with this while I try to figure it out. It might take time, but I'll figure it out and fix it.

Jason, for some reason I'm having no trouble at all today. Once again I hope I've not jinxed anything.

MSU

April 10th 7:58 AM - there seems to be no problem.

Perhaps you got it Jason. Good show.

Fred

P.S. I spoke too soon. The problem returned at 8:43 AM.

I disabled a bunch of plugins on my WordPress sites. Some were old plugins that we no longer use and some were SEO or anti-spam plugins that could be causing high database usage. I also banned 2 bots that seemed to be connecting to the sites quite a bit.

What I might do is re-enable a couple of those plugins tonight and see if there are any problems tomorrow. If so, I can disable them again. If not, then other disabled plugins or the banned bots were the culprit.

Jason -

I must have been posting when you were replying.

The problem returned just now.

Sorry.
Fred

I have been having problems for the last week.

Bill

I did see a big drop in the available memory on the server. Oddly enough, I didn't see any processes that were eating up the memory. (Or a combination of processes.) I'll have to investigate further. Thankfully, I have some things set up on my phone now so I can check on the server no matter where I am.

This has got to be really frustrating for you Jason. But after everything seemed fine when I was here yesterday morning my praise must have jinxed it. It's back to a crawl now.

At least it's only for a few hours in the morning. That still leaves 21 or so hours of good performance each day

MSU

On one hand, it is frustrating. On the other hand, there's a part of me that loves troubleshooting problems like this. Doing the detective work to figure it out, eliminating possibilities, learning new things as I narrow it down, tracking down and fixing the culprit.

I'm not up early enough to see the main problem, but did see it last week when early rising was unavoidable. Thing is, since yesterday I think, it's been much snappier at any afternoon/evening time for me. I mean, really snappy, big difference.

The only thing slower than the forum are the forum fundraiser contributions.

Jim.

I've found something else that might be causing the daily slowdowns. Google has a PageSpeed Analysis tool to help you speed up your websites. I took some of its advice, but one item (gzipping the web page) might have caused server strain in the process. I've removed that so we'll see if the site slows tomorrow.

8 AM EDT April 11th.

In posting this reply there was perhaps a 5 second delay to get to the post page.

In going to posts already there - no perceptible delays.

Looks like you got it Jason. Hope others will post if there is a problem I'm not seeing.

Fred

Fingers and toes crossed...

MSU

8:35 AM EDTApril 11th:

It's slowed down somewhat since my earlier post, but not as bad as yesterday.

Hope that helps Jason.

Fred

It's looking speedy from this end. Of course, we know this can change, so I'll keep an eye on it.

EDIT: There was just a slowdown/crash for some reason. But it seems to be better now.

This morning at 8:05 AM EDT April 12 it's still taking about 10 seconds for the page download even though the page is not blank in IE8 while it is doing that.

Better but still not as it was before.

Fred

I've been on for about a half hour and everything loads as quickly as it ever has, including "Joined Threads". No slowdown whatsoever.

Jim.

Response is pretty darn good for me this morning. No complaints.

MSU

Working extremely well this morning.
First time in couple off weeks.
Thanks.

Bill