Please complain here if the Forum or Wiki is slow

[gogoblender 3,069]

Good moooooooooooooooooorning!

 

We had mentioned a few weeks back that we had undergone a server move and that the site was going to be closed overnight. The server move went well, and we seem to have gotten here in one piece with all of us intact.

 

Our hoster, a few months back, had offered us tremendous value on Semi-Dedicated hosting, and as our bandwidth usage was increasing and we had wanted to add a download section to the SacredWiki and DarkMatters, we had thought it an opportune time to secure good future growth at a good price.

 

A wee while back, we had received a letter stating that ever since the upgrade all across the servers that host us, there were tremendous difficulties with the new technology, and we had been told that August 25th was the last day for remaining on those new servers, leading to us having to pick where to go.

 

In the case of MDD Hosting, we were lucky enough to be able to use the Advance Shared Hosting package a step down, which is able to handle our largish bandwidth use (about half a terabyte/500 gigs last month) as well as squeeze in our disk space use which now has grown from about five megabytes in our first year to about 10 gigs six years later :trans:

 

Our hoster had mentioned that he would be making moves till August 25th, and so this has impacted the day to day functionalities of the sites, which we'd like to apologize for.

 

We'd also like to keep this topic open for the community to make notes upon, if they incur larger than normal lag, or difficulties with making posts, or contributions to the Wiki.

 

Until August 25th, there will most likely be instances of this, but after August 25th we're expecting much clearer sailing, and of course if it remains rocky, we'll start looking for shiny new digs!

 

Please post if you gots troubles or feel stuff being unfairly slow!

 

 

gogo

[cider_steve 26]

Everything is groovy here for me thanks Mr Gogo.

 

No complaints to report sir !

 

Steve.

[Legend Aadil 4]

Only occasionally, at random times does the posting or changing pages be very slow. Otherwise, it's fine!

[Dragon Brother 619]

I haven't had any issues since the downtime the other day, so hopefully that doesn't change *knocks on wood*

[Stormwing 40]

Nothing to complain here either. only slowdowns I've experienced are due to my crappy connection.

[Knuckles 904]

I've noticed fairly slow load times when trying to view threads.....anywhere from 5-15 secs....refreshing page takes the same amount of time. Other websites load within a few seconds

[gogoblender 3,069]

Thanks Knuckles, I was actually noticing that too. During sporadic times during the day, lag can get pretty bad when I try to hit a link. He's told us that he's going to be making moves till August 25th, day after tomorrow, we'll get a decent feel on what these new servers are like for us. We've also been getting some PMs from Wiki Contributors saying that uploads are taking time as well.

 

Glad though that you guys are getting through this, thank y'all!

 

 

gogo

[Legend Aadil 4]

Same problem as Knuckles

[Ryanrocker 200]

Same problem as Knuckles

 

Ditto as well. Pages just taking a weeeee bit longer to bring up, but it's bearable

[gogoblender 3,069]

I'm here at work now, and noticing just today that the lag is getting much longer. We're going to forward today's issues to our hoster.

 

thanks guys for confirming this with me

 

 

gogo

[gogoblender 3,069]

Well, our hoster sais that the shared hosting environment is different from the semi-dedicated environment^^ He says that our sites supposedly kept maxing the CPU Cores we're on, and that this takes resources from websites. They decided to throttle us yesterday, but after we complained, they have given us back the juice, which I could notice almost immediately. The lag yesterday was unbearable, I myself was very frustrated having to post, so we're looking for solutions. Our hoster said that we could look up caching the Wiki, as well as forum, which would reduce by a multiple the number of times each page is being created for readers, and have it read from a static dbase instead.

 

After doing some research last night, news to us...Wiki's are resource hogs! Or, at least the functionality we have built in that creates thumbnails is. We used to use photobucket before to do this, but now, since we're using the Wiki's own Dbase to create thumbnails, apparently the drain on CPU is enough to bring the entire server with others sites on it to its knees (lol, sorry I know it's not nice, but I still giggle a bit) We have looked up caching solutions, and there are numerous strategies available for Media Wiki, which we've been given a few days to implement before the throttling goes back on again.

 

Guess what Schot's gonna be busy this weekend doing

 

 

gogo

[Dragon Brother 619]

Well, our hoster sais that the shared hosting environment is different from the semi-dedicated environment^^ He says that our sites supposedly kept maxing the CPU Cores we're on, and that this takes resources from websites. They decided to throttle us yesterday, but after we complained, they have given us back the juice, which I could notice almost immediately. The lag yesterday was unbearable, I myself was very frustrated having to post, so we're looking for solutions. Our hoster said that we could look up caching the Wiki, as well as forum, which would reduce by a multiple the number of times each page is being created for readers, and have it read from a static dbase instead.

 

After doing some research last night, news to us...Wiki's are resource hogs! Or, at least the functionality we have built in that creates thumbnails is. We used to use photobucket before to do this, but now, since we're using the Wiki's own Dbase to create thumbnails, apparently the drain on CPU is enough to bring the entire server with others sites on it to its knees (lol, sorry I know it's not nice, but I still giggle a bit) We have looked up caching solutions, and there are numerous strategies available for Media Wiki, which we've been given a few days to implement before the throttling goes back on again.

 

Guess what Schot's gonna be busy this weekend doing

 

 

gogo

 

Poor schot...if I knew anything about any of this I would offer to help in any sort of way...but don't really know anything so yeah...good luck for the weekend schot!

[gogoblender 3,069]

heh, he was pretty busy this weekend. We are looking for all kinds of options for where to keep us housed, and right now we're gonna see if splitting up the sites into two with wiki, downloads and fdm on our mdd with the map running off godaddy will help with the resource use.

 

Godaddy has pretty sick prices, but usually anything that "good" isn't but... we are betting that it will be able to handle of the processing, and if it does, and does it well, we may even be tempted to unload more of FDMMania on them to see how it handles

 

 

gogo

[lujate 575]

I finally got back to a little wiki work. It was working better than when I first complained but not as well as it used to. Then it stopped working altogether, giving this message:

Error 401 - Authorization Required

 

Oops! Looks like there is a server problem. Please submit a ticket to Booyah! Web Hosting support using your Booyah! Client Portal

 

Make sure you typed the correct URL or followed a valid link.

[gogoblender 3,069]

Ah Lujate, I'm so sorry. It looks like the sites are going better now, are you still getting that error message? And is it showing up when you try to do an edit to Wiki?

 

the problem is likely that after uploading all the images from a single quest, the next step is typically to embed all those uploaded images into the quest page and then preview immediately.

 

this causes our cpu to have to generate all of those images simultaneously as thumbnails which is a hugely complex and and resource demanding process as servers go.

 

Any chance of maybe doing two or three for preview at a time for now? Then preview next two or three?

 

Previewing a whole/huge batch at once seems to be the slowdown.

 

 

gogo

[gogoblender 3,069]

Last three days have been going insanely fast on these servers, hope you guys are getting good results as well?

 

They haven't cut us back on the horsepower yet, I'm hoping they maybe forgot about us

 

 

gogo

[lujate 575]

Ah Lujate, I'm so sorry. It looks like the sites are going better now, are you still getting that error message? And is it showing up when you try to do an edit to Wiki?

 

the problem is likely that after uploading all the images from a single quest, the next step is typically to embed all those uploaded images into the quest page and then preview immediately.

 

this causes our cpu to have to generate all of those images simultaneously as thumbnails which is a hugely complex and and resource demanding process as servers go.

 

Any chance of maybe doing two or three for preview at a time for now? Then preview next two or three?

 

Previewing a whole/huge batch at once seems to be the slowdown.

 

 

gogo

You are right. I typically do the write up and then upload all the pics at once. I will try to do the pics as I go from now on.

[Knuckles 904]

Last three days have been going insanely fast on these servers, hope you guys are getting good results as well?

 

They haven't cut us back on the horsepower yet, I'm hoping they maybe forgot about us

 

 

gogo

 

Hit or miss for me...clicking one on thread may take a second and the next will take over 20 secs....totally random which result I get here

[gogoblender 3,069]

Sorry about that Knuckles. We're still getting the extra juice, but it's not gonna last much longer. One of my friends has offered us space on her own private VPS (Virtual private Server) And she's going to allow us to locate from her at the discounted rate we were paying for the Semi-Dedicated before they closed contract on us. If this works out, it could be the beginning of a great new concept for us, instead of using shared hosting, we can locate with a friend or maybe more for higher quality equipment that will give us a smoother ride at a decent price.

 

It's important for us that posts go up quickly, smoothly and extremely important that when peeps are contributing to the wiki and make thumbnails and throw up maps, that they don't have to wait till the cows come home because we don't have enough processing power.

 

We're waiting for some real muscle to show up

 

 

gogo

[lujate 575]

...

We're waiting for some real muscle to show up

...

Do you have an ETA on that, because OMG! I had two little quests to post, now I am just hoping to make it through the lag and time-out errors to get the first posted.

[gogoblender 3,069]

I'm sorry Lujate, we're looking into this now, thanks for posting.

 

 

gogo

[Schot 407]

Sorry about the trouble lujate! Can you tell us which part of the process you noticed was the most problematic? During the upload of pictures or during a preview of all the pictures in your quest? Thanx!

[lujate 575]

The two time out errors occurred, one on a page preview and the other opening an image category page for edit. I was uploading the images as I went along, in another browser tab. The uploads were not terribly fast, but none of them errored out.

[gogoblender 3,069]

Lujate, I was seeing you had made a good number of pic uploads to the Wiki dbase for quests.

 

How did Schot's suggestion work out?

 

Does doing previews in groups of two at a time help with this? If it does, we can hold out with this forum engine for a wee bit longer.

 

But if even dropping to previewing when uploading thumbnails two to three at a time is not helping, we will keep looking for better solution.

 

 

gogo

[lujate 575]

What I have been doing is ALT-TAB'ing between wiki work and an SP game. I will submit something to the wiki, play a few minutes, then pause the game and check whether the wiki operation failed or not.

-

Jury's still out on Schot's suggestion. I will try to give it a thorough go this coming week. I am a little concerned about loosing my write ups, so am going to start saving the write up prior to uploading the pics. I will then upload the pics one at a time, refreshing the quest page every time.