Slowness and Adverts

[James]

The backup script runs between 6:00pm and 8:00pm NZ time each night. It will be slow during these periods, and there's not a lot that can be done about it.

I'm looking at rather than running it everyday, only running it a few days a week.

A website is a 24/7 business which doesn't allow you the chance to run high usage jobs out of normal business hours. Generally visitors are at their lowest at that time of day, which is why I chose that as the time to run it.

 

[Smudge]

Generally visitors are at their lowest at that time of day, which is why I chose that as the time to run it.

Really? I'm usually quite chirpy and happy between 6 and 8pm.

 

[James]

Really? I'm usually quite chirpy and happy between 6 and 8pm.

You and what army?

 

[Smudge]

You and what army?

The one led by the very dishy SuperGran.

 

[James]

OK guys, the backup script will now only run on Wednesday's and Sunday's at 2:30pm NZ time, 12:30pm Sydney time, 3:30am British time.

Hopefully this affects less of you.

 

[Slow Love™]

It's terrible for me, right now. Slow as molasses, loading up about two-thirds of a page and then hanging. Pretty much unusable.

 

[James]

I've been looking at, and have logged a support request for our hosts to take a look too.

 

[James]

Just got the below:

Hello,

We are currently having issues with our data center. Our admins are working as hard as they can to solve the problem and get the servers back up functioning normally.

Regards,
Eric

 

[James]

Problems sorted.

 

[GIMH]

The whole site was inaccessible for me for a while last night. It was around 8pm. Just thought I'd chip in lol it was probably my own system fault

 

[James]

A few updates, my email discussion with our hosts:

Hi there,

Everyday at 1am, I'm getting really high load, but I can't work out why.

Can you have a look please and tell me what is causing it?

Cheers,

James

James,

That's the default time for VPS's to do various work on themselves automatically. They are collectively straining the machine a bit more than normal at that time.

James,

I've checked and I've actually gone over this system to spread out the nighly processes before. The only thing left was backups, which only two VPS's had enabled at 1am. I've spaced out their backups by 2 hours and we'll see how that improves things.

 

[James]

How have people found the speed of the site the past 36-48 hours?

 

[NZTailender]

Pretty good. Except for between 4-4:30pm for me (NSW)

 

[GIMH]

It's been slow for me at work and home

 

[James]

Yeah, nightly processes on the server running mate, we'll need to ride it out.

 

[age_master]

The speeds in the last day or so have been better, still not great for me though, still takes ages to get from thread to thread at times.

 

[Loony BoB]

Are you running a lot of cron jobs or anything else that might affect the server speed? If the forums are updating things such as user ranks/titles quite often, you could look into that.

 

[James]

Nope, it's all round general load, no one cause to the problem.

I've been talking solutions with a few people the past couple of days and will have something in place by the end of next week hopefully

 

[alternative]

Is it just me, or is the forum going very slow today... taking me ages to actually post something..

 

[James]

Nightly processes and there's a lot of activity round the site today.