Posting Troubles
 

Is it just me, or does it seem to take forever whenever anyone posts? When I press the submit button, the web browser just sits there for over a minute before it takes. But editing a post seems to go really fast and surfing the site and all that seems to be zippy as normal.

Edit: Of course, it posted QUICK this time. :)

I've been getting connection timeout messages. Guess it's probably because of the popularity of the board and everyone reading, posting that the server could be bogging down a bit.

I've noticed this since last Friday.
Its a gamble whether when I press the SUBMIT button it will actually appear or not; I usually end up just exiting the site and hoping the post appears.

Huh, so I'm not the only one. I'll check with our Jeff, our servermeister. This board ain't *that* popular so something else is amiss and definitely needs fixing.

Meantime, if you get an error page upon posting, click your browser's "back" button and you should be returned to the reply-to-post page with your text intact. Then try submitting again.

We'll get this hammered out A.S.A.P. plus fix the e-mail feature, hopefully. Thanks,

I didnt think it would be due to popularity, because it only affects the posting bit and it is either working at its usual lightening speeds or going really slow... never really in the middle.
Lets hope its fixed soon.

FWIW, I've also noticed that posts have become extremely slow during the past week or so. Just posts...not thread lists or message retrieval.

Same here... posts are extremely long (sometimes).... not always.
However, if I wait long enough they will show up eventually
without any intervention at all...

Chris,
I don't know if this is related or if others are also experiencing this, but I've also been receiving multiple email notifications of thread posts. I sometimes receive 3-4 notices for a single post, with the messages generally time-stamped within a minute or two of each other.

email
 

ahhh..


this morning i recieved 20 individual email replies for a post that was never
posted to one of the threads.

i noticed that when you reply to a post and the reply never goes through
or if it takes to long and you decide to retry...the post actually goes through
everytime you try even though it never submits..

i found myself deleting duplicate post of mine..

Please stand by while we go about stamping out these pesky little bugs.

Just testing...

Yet another test? Oh the humanity!

Chris,

Might be as simple as rebooting your server...if there are unnecessary processes running, they'll slow things down.

Or, if you're sharing a server with other domains, could be there's a new domain on the block that's hogging all the bandwidth (video or mp3 download site, for example).

Seems the site is getting pretty buggy, though. Are you NT, UNIX, or Linux?

The server's running FreeBSD 4.5, and has been up for 3 months, but I don't think it's a process issue. The machine runs more than 95% idle all the time, and has plenty of free memory. I think the bug's in PHP or the message boards, but I'm tracking it down.

Thanks, Jeff.

Just wondering because we're in the process of finishing up a new custom system for our site that includes a message board we put together from scratch (for member students to communicate with one another). Wanted to discuss the things happening here with my programmers to safeguard from having the same things happen to us (we're UNIX/Solaris, coding in JSP and some PHP). I showed our programmers how long it was taking to post on this site, and how many times I get "Timed Out" or "Connection Refused" error messages...and so now they've scurried off to their programming nook to figure ways to help avoid this problem in the future with our board.

Thanks for the info.

I think it has something to do with database corruption on this forum in particular. I'm posting to the Gl1 forum and it's lickety split. I'm guessing that this older version of vBulletin has a database corruption issue. Unfortunately, these problems aren't exactly easy to diagnose, and they're rarely the same thing twice. (And with JSP you'll probably have more problems with memory bloat than database speed.)

Dum de dum, fixing tables and breaking databases...

Ladies and gentlemen, Jenn Kramer. Many thanks, Jenn...

Ditto, Jeff. Thanks...and thanks for the head up on issues that I should pass on to our programmers.

Jeff,
You're closest to the situation so take my suggestions for whatever they may be worth, perhaps nothing.

Before spending too much time trying to diagnose you might want to do a server restart. I know that you reported that the system is largely idle. But I have a suspicion that the message database's indexes, not the tables, may be contributing to the problem. If the indexes are maintained using ISAM or a close cousin (as many such products' indexes are) chances are that they are mainly resident in memory. The posting delay we're seeing is a typical symptom of a system having difficulty adding entries to an index. Restarting the server will clear memory and restarting the bbs may enable the indexes to be rebuilt from the tables.

Again, just an idea from afar. Thanks for your efforts on our behalf and good luck!

I already restarted MySQL several times and repaired the tables (and vBulletin seems to have some bugs there, too, the tables are a mess), to no avail. I'm hoping that the newer version of vBulletin has some fixes. I'm betting that they're trying to clean up the tables on every post, which is taking forever. Perhaps the new version either has a cleaner way of doing it, or doesn't do it at all. (But I haven't heard back from vBulletin yet.)

I did manage to dump all the tables to a backup, so if worst comes to worst I can just re-install from scratch.

Seems to be working *much* better now... many thanks. This fix should hold until we're able to upgrade to the most recent version of the forum software (within the next week, hopefully).

Much better!
Thanks Jeff, thanks Chris.

Very nice. Thank you, Jeff!

Hey, this isn't really a problem. I write my post, hit the Submit button, go to work, and when I come in the evening, it's posted! So.....is it not supposed to work that way? :)

Cheers

Faster than an aussie to a free beer. Thanks guys