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Board Issues 4


Angalin
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13 minutes ago, Jon's Queen Consort said:

Also, I don't know why but some times it seems that I had signed out when I haven't.

Just came to post that. I have been randomly logged out while browsing a few times today.

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2 hours ago, Buckwheat said:

Just came to post that. I have been randomly logged out while browsing a few times today.

I think I found the issue; it should be fixed, but you may have to log in again for the fix to take for your user session.  (I.e., you might get logged out one more time, but that should be the last time.)

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I do not know if this is the place but I CANNOT get into the forums without endless waits, error messages, or being timed out. Now, I am even being thrown back to the home page. For example, if I have waited the 5 minutes to try and just 'see' a forum, the site decides to send me back to home.  Annoying.  If I try to get here, after the show, on a perfectly ordinary laptop, well, that is just not happening.  Last week it was bad, but this week (yesterday) it was worse so I gave up.  I am not new to this site but this is the slowest it has ever been.  Sorry but I thought you should know. 

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12 minutes ago, lakin1013 said:

I do not know if this is the place but I CANNOT get into the forums without endless waits, error messages, or being timed out. Now, I am even being thrown back to the home page. For example, if I have waited the 5 minutes to try and just 'see' a forum, the site decides to send me back to home.  Annoying.  If I try to get here, after the show, on a perfectly ordinary laptop, well, that is just not happening.  Last week it was bad, but this week (yesterday) it was worse so I gave up.  I am not new to this site but this is the slowest it has ever been.  Sorry but I thought you should know. 

For me the show threads and most of the forums keeps returning an 'offline' message, though when I can get through its obvious people have been posting.  

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12 minutes ago, lakin1013 said:

I do not know if this is the place but I CANNOT get into the forums without endless waits, error messages, or being timed out. Now, I am even being thrown back to the home page. For example, if I have waited the 5 minutes to try and just 'see' a forum, the site decides to send me back to home.  Annoying.  If I try to get here, after the show, on a perfectly ordinary laptop, well, that is just not happening.  Last week it was bad, but this week (yesterday) it was worse so I gave up.  I am not new to this site but this is the slowest it has ever been.  Sorry but I thought you should know. 

For me the show threads and most of the forums keeps returning an 'offline' message, though when I can get through its obvious people have been posting.  

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As background, think of the forum and wiki like a ride at Disneyland.  You can only have a certain number of people on the ride at a time (i.e., the maximum number of PHP instances), but you can have a larger number of people waiting in line for the ride (the pending connections).  Some people are okay just watching a video of the ride (Varnish cache for non-logged-in users), and so they can come to the end of the line, watch the video, and leave.  Others, however, are stuck waiting for a space on the ride.

That long delay before the page starts loading, that's the waiting-in-line part.  As soon as the page starts loading, that's you actually being on the ride; you can see that the latter part has gotten considerably faster, but less so the first part.

Now, there are two factors that determine how quickly that line moves: the speed of the ride (i.e., the server's CPU capacity) and the number of people you can fit on the ride (i.e., the server's RAM capacity).  The faster the ride goes, the quicker you can get people back off and get the next group on.  The more people you can fit on per run, the bigger a chunk of the line you can take away each time the ride comes back to put new people on.

When the line gets gummed up, that's when things go wrong.  Too many people in line, and the amusement park staff cap the line and refuse to let anyone else get in.  (That's the 500 error you get sometimes.)  Enough of those 500 errors, and Cloudflare itself marks the site offline.  So, clearly, we need to keep the line from getting too long, and not just for performance reasons!

But what if we just, I dunno, crammed more people in the ride?  Those safety guidelines are for wusses, right?  Well, turns out, if we risk that, that's when we hit the server's RAM limits.  Lots of page faults, and the processors become bogged down, and we end up in the death spiral.  People flying off the ride screaming, things on fire, things turning just generally Not Good.  That's the part where instead of the server recovering on its own, I get back to the keys and have to try to balance things (or Ran just shuts things off until it recovers).

Now, previously, the Wiki and Forum were two tracks of the same ride; they shared capacity and the line waiting to get in.  This obviously wasn't ideal.  We've split them onto two separate servers—made them into separate rides—with separate waiting lists and separate capacity.  There's still some shared resources (notably the SQL database backing it, off on a third machine), but it's an improvement.  

And for a couple of days, everything ran very smoothly.

However, apparently the forum has proven quite capable of hungrily devouring all new capacity; the faster things go, the more people show up, and the quicker we get back to where we were.  You all collectively are basically Cookie Monster, but for servers.  (Which is actually appropriate, if anyone's seen the very first thing the Muppet that became Cookie Monster came from; he was made for an IBM training film that Henson was hired to do, where he ate a computer.  But I digress.)

To stay with the amusement park analogy; the ride itself doesn't take long to go on, so we can move people through faster that way, but the capacity of the ride hasn't increased much so we still can only run a small number of people at a time.  

As such, we're probably going to increase the RAM of the machine later this week, so that I can increase the number of concurrent PHP sessions (i.e., the capacity of the ride).

...and now I have mental images of Muppets riding amusement part rides, and periodically eating them.  Clearly, I need more coffee.

(This post has been brought to you by the letter W and the number 16.  Status Posts are a production of the Decaffeinated Sysadmin's Workshop.)

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On 5/7/2016 at 11:06 AM, Buckwheat said:

Just came to post that. I have been randomly logged out while browsing a few times today.

This keeps happening to me. Literally it just happened a couple of minutes ago. 

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7 hours ago, Good Guy Garlan said:

This keeps happening to me. Literally it just happened a couple of minutes ago. 

The issue stopped for me after Sparks' answer, I forgot to come to this thread to report back. It is not happening to me anymore, so hopefully it will be sorted out for you soon too.

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R + L = J v 159 link directs to a wrong topic

R + L = J v 158 link directs to a wrong topic

Most of the links in the Compendium of theories don't work and give 404 error

I googled one of my old topics from Oct 2015 (Theoretical exercise: Can George still "back off" from R+L=J if he had a change of heart?) and the resulting link leads to: "Old Nan vs Maester Aemon"

There's likely many more links to old threads that don't work. 

Edited by Hangover of the Morning
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Ah, i see why. The threads are all still there, but we switched form lighttpd to Nginx with thew new server and it looks like our URL rewrite isn't the same.

Add a question mark after index.php in all the links and it'll work fine. That said, I'll look into whether we can fix this.

That said, we'll try and fix it so URLs match to how they were before. Just may take a day or two to sort out.

Edited by Ran
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36 minutes ago, Ran said:

Ah, i see why. The threads are all still there, but we switched form lighttpd to Nginx with thew new server and it looks like our URL rewrite isn't the same.

Add a question mark after index.php in all the links and it'll work fine. That said, I'll look into whether we can fix this.

That said, we'll try and fix it so URLs match to how they were before. Just may take a day or two to sort out.

That works!

The Board FAQ is still gone, though.

3 minutes ago, Sparks said:

Ugh.  I hadn't noticed that nginx blocked path-type URLs.  I've added some rewrite logic which hopefully fixes things.

I had already followed Ran's advice on adding the question mark in the threads in my signature (though removing the questionmark allows the correct page to load as well), but going to the Compendium of Theories thread mentioned and linked by @Hangover of the Morning, the threads in there (I checked the first five or so) are working now :)

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As far as I'm aware, only you and moderators will see your name. Everyone else will not see you. They used to confirm this by having an asterisk next to your name, but they dropped that.

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