Forums Unbelievably Slow after Daylong Outage

[Lady Fitzgerald]

After being down since yesterday morning, the Forums are back this morning but are slower than a dead turtle with four broken legs laying on its back. At my age, dying of old age while waiting on pages to load is a real danger.

[mikeflan]

This forum is broke. Yes, it has happened before. No, it is not the biggest deal in my life.
I suspect it will return to normal again one of these days.

Lets see. The forum uses php. That is probably the main problem, but what do I know.
Anyway, I have laid out an area to discuss this if anybody wants to. I would like to know what archiving, or some other activity, creates this problem.

[AndyMH]

For me started 1800GMT Friday, timing out, securi screen, not working this morning. Now loaded but extremely slow. It had forgotten me, no auto-login.

Now will this post...

[rickNS]

This forum is broke. Yes, it has happened before.

Yeah, and if I may a little too often (lately anyway).

It took 2 minutes to open this thread (estimated), and at least that long for the reply box to open.

Yesterday I kept getting the scurri error, and at least once "is it down for me" said the site was up. So I fiddled with getting a vpn running, had not done that in quite awhile, so that was a good thing...to jog my memory on that. Every once in awhile I need one.

For the past while, not just yesterday, or today even when the site was 'working' it was working quite slowly. A little sad that it hasn't got sorted by now, makes for poor advertisement. (hope that's not too harsh xenopeek.)

EDIT, I spoke too soon, the speed seems to be back to normal....for how long though?

[xenopeek]

The problem started yesterday. It's being worked on since then. Some good progress has been made with troubleshooting. But it may take more time.

[Night Wing]

I've had the same problems the last two mornings as I've also seen the "scurri" warning. Most of the time it happens where I cannot get to the Mint forums site using my main Pale Moon browser or my Waterfox backup browser. I get timed out.

I'm typing this post using my third browser which is Firefox. I hope this is not a portend of things to come by discriminating against less market share browsers and trying to push a "Chrome" (and it's ilk) browser on this site.

But if this is not the case, then when they "improved" this forum site for whatever reasons, the old version of this phpBB was better than this new version.

[AndyMH]

Mods - maybe merge with the topic LadyF started?

[SMG]

Mod note: Topics merged.

I am having much better speeds now. Hopefully, others are as well.

[AndyMH]

Yes, better here as well. I sympathise with whoever is/was trying to fix this. Been there, done similar, it is a nightmare.

[Pierre]

it was actually off-line, at this location,
for most of this afternoon - Sat 18th.


it's still not quite right, even now.

[AZgl1800]

for me,
it asked for my password ??
huh?

I thought maybe it was because I was using a different IP source?

nope, changed to 3 different Internet sources, and it still claimed I needed a password.

screw it, left it for a day, and now it is working again

[xenopeek]

The root cause of the slow downs was found to be that yesterday several search engine crawlers ("bots") suddenly became very aggressive with their indexing of posts on the forums. This caused very poor performance of the forums. Earlier today Clem blocked all these bots and that immediately returned performance to the forums.

Google, Bing and Yahoo are well behaved bots and these are not blocked.

During the troubleshooting several things were tried and tuned. One was that all session were reset, meaning all logged in users will have to log in anew.

Hoping performance stays good from here!

[AndyMH]

several search engine crawlers ("bots") suddenly became very aggressive

Are we prepared to name names?

[bjmh46]

Forum was unusable (timeouts) at 5:00am local this morning. Seems back up now, if a bit slow. I have to agree with a previous poster who said the problems started with the forum software "upgrade".

Bob

[Cosmo.]

Sounds similar to a DOS attack. Why did Sucuri not help? (What did Sucuri do at all in the last 7 years (rhetorical).)
Another observation: In one of my attempts to connect I got a SQL error; I do not know, how bots can do that, except by behaving as malware (what leads back to Sucuri).

[trytip]

this was last year or earlier and took a few snaps. are these legit bots?

[xenopeek]

Everything marked as bot is a legit bot. They are identified by the phpBB software, from a configured list of legit bots.

[coffee412]

Everything seems to be working fine so far this morning. Speed is back also. I wondered what was happening. Figured I would read about it later though. What was funny is that yesterday the login button at the top right was missing. So, Thought logins turned off until the problem is worked out?

Thank you for all your hard work Xeno

[manno]

Last night regularly the notification server down, but eventually being able to create an account.
This morning I wanted to log in, my account was gone and I had to create a new one........
When entering the Facebook credentials, the notification; use only alphabetical characters ??????

[AndyMH]

Suggestion - we get board issues from time to time. Could we have a sticky, say under Important notices (it needs to be "up front"), where we can report problems? We currently have two topics running on essentially the same issue, there were three but I requested that mine be merged.

It would need to be closed and re-opened every six months, that's probably a good thing.