Yesterday the server was slow again, even though the CPU stats etc. didn't show anything unusual... everything is way below what the server should be able to handle. In any case, I optimized the forum to serve pages faster, just in case there is any relation. According to my speed tests serving the overview page (the thing I optimized so far, as I suppose some people, like me, hit refresh at the overview page) went from something like 0.29 seconds to 0.00012 seconds now. (Now IF the server troubles are unrelated to the forum serving speed that won't help much because a server that's down will be down even for theoretically fast pages, but let's see what the future brings :))
If you notice any forum quirks at the moment, as some things in the code changed, please drop me an email or add a comment here in this thread.
(And for reference, here is the open thread that was displayed during the maintenance: http://beta.friendfeed.com/blogoscoped/34bdec51/open-thread) |
> Yesterday the server was slow again, even though the
> CPU stats etc. didn't show anything unusual...
I've had exactly the same problem at Uclue for the past two weeks. Very strange. |
My problem is also around two weeks old, on and off. Near the beginning they told me it's a DDoS attack. Coincidence, or maybe a new botnet having fun on the internet? (I recently did read about a new large botnet being deployed, not sure...) |
My situation "feels" like a DDoS attack, except that there's no evidence of it in the webserver logs, error logs, process tables, load averages etc.
My best guess is that it's a DDoS attack on someone else at the same ISP, which is overloading some data pipe at the ISP and affecting everyone else down.
Right now, the Blogoscoped forum overview, the individual forum topics, and the Blogoscoped home page are all extremely fast. Probably as fast as they have ever been for me.
I sometimes use the OctaGate SiteTimer to see how a site is loading from another place:
http://www.octagate.com/service/SiteTimer/?Target=AJAX
When I run the SiteTimer on http://blogoscoped.com/forum/ it tells me that blogoscoped.com/forum/image/splitter.png is referenced but missing, so you can save one HTTP round-trip by fixing that. |
I don't know why, but Blogoscoped seems to load slower for me, like not too much, but enough to be noticeable enough... maybe it's the way my browser renders the new code?
I don't really know what I'm talking about... |
James, it's not unlikely that the general server stress is still slowing down the forum, even when the forum theoretically serves faster on its own.
There's still an outstanding optimization change I aim to do to the threads themselves (as I only optimized the main view so far). |
It's strange seeing "just now" and "yesterday" as post times, I'm so used to all of them starting with numbers :P |
Yeah, I know what you mean. It's actually a reason why I might switch it back, because knowing that it starts with a number can help scanning. Consider it experimental for now :) |
FWIW, I agree I like the numbers better too. |
And actually posts within a minute are posted 'just now', not only very fresh, posted some seconds ago.
I prefer numbers too. |
I switched this back to numbers. Due to the way the forum overview page is now cached, the time stamps can now be 1 minute off. |
A good decision – thanks for the job. |
The server returns Internal Server Error (500) some minutes ago... |
Yes, thanks. I was with support for some time. Currently, I've turned off CoverBrowser.com which I suspect to may be overloaded. Still working on it... |
(CoverBrowser has now been relaunched with some optimization changes in terms of how pics are loaded. I hope this helps relax this server!) |
