Painfully SLOOOOOOOOOW

[mickw]

Nuff said 

[Rick]

When?

[Mike]

I've had that quite a few times over teh last few weeks. I go to other websites and they load immediately but the OAS Forum page takes an age to load up with the odd timeout message.

Not impressed with Powweb lately !!

[mickw]

It's OK now, but horrible at about 4pm

[Rick]

Thanks. It helps to know whether it's just the main site, or just the forum, or just the gallery, or some combination, and a rough time window is also useful. I've not had any problems today apart from ones I can blame my employer's networks for, but I was doing actual work around 4pm...

( Of course, merely typing the phrase "not had any problems today" is almost bound to cause some... )

[Ian]

but I was doing actual work around 4pm...

On a Friday Rick???

[Rick]

Yeah. It's those folk over in Houston. No sense of responsibility. They're always submitting urgent tickets at 9am their time. Somehow they just can't get them in by 9am our time...

[Rick]

Ugh. Wading through treacle today...

[Mike]

Yeah - same with me. Happens a LOT !!

What is Powweb's response to your complaints Rick?

[Rick]

It usually gets blamed on transient high loading on the database server. :/

Posts on the PowWeb forums ( http://forum.powweb.com/ ) make it look like a fairly common problem.

[Carole]

I'm glad it's not just me.  It's been so slow this evening I have ended up abandoning postings, came back later to do it again and then found the first posting took eventually anyway, so they went on twice.  Sorry Rick same happened to my PM to you.

Carole

[Rick]

Yeah. I had the same thing happen to me. I've given my on-going ticket in PowWeb's support system a kick, but I expect it'll get the same answer. Yesterday was a bad day for some targets. I even saw some unusual denial-of-service traffic launched against my home system. At work we had a couple of total outages, and our main Net gateway was slow enough that I didn't notice how much slower PowWeb was until I got home...

[doug]

     I thought it was me or my laptop.....  I`m glad I`m not alone !!!!!

[doug]

     Today I have been trying to access the Forum.  At long last, it decided to allow me in after quite a while.  Why, oh, why isit taking sooooo long ?   Is it because it is incredibly busy, or because my mouse is having kittens ?? Somebody must have an answer.

[Carole]

We had a conversation about this last night in the pub.  It's probably because lots of people are accessing, either our site, or other sites using the same host and it's very busy.

Very frustrating.

Carole

[Mike]

So what? We are paying for a service that we aren't getting !! We should ask for a refund or to be moved to a different server.

[Rick]

It's usually (almost always?) the fault of the mySQL server machine, as far as I can tell. That's a shared resource, and I've no idea how many other websites use the same server, but the number's probably large. If one (or more) of those other sites gets heavily loaded (by fair means or foul) then at some point the server stops coping with the load, and all the websites it's doing the database stuff for suffer...

...and PowWeb forum reports suggest this problem affects all the mySQL servers at some time or other, so switching server isn't something that makes any real difference.

[Rick]

Anyone else find chunks of the web including the OAS sites painfully slow or impossible to reach earlier this evening? I'd have blamed PowWeb, except that it seemed a bit more widespread from here...

Things came back to life around 10:30pm(-ish)...

[Rick]

*sigh* We're being struck intermittently by another bout of extreme webserver slowness. This is, apparently, something a number of PowWeb-hosted sites are experiencing. Apparently PowWeb are working to fix the problem...

[JohnP]

Yep really crap again... isn't there a more realiable server we can use....?

[Mac]

well. its 21:42 and i've jsut caught up on 11 unread topics, its taken about 15 mins for all of the pages to load, and most of them dont have either the correct colour, backgrounds or pictures.

see attached screen grab.  Its not IE7, as every outher site i am looking at is working fine.

Even the OAS main site is the same.

even refreshing them didn't change them.

[Carole]

Yep, getting the same as Mac.

Carole

[Mike]

Last 2-3 weeks it is has been getting worse for me too. At times I find the site unusable. Rick when does our subscription with PowWeb expire as I recommend we try someone else. They seem more concerned with quantity than quality nowadays.

[JohnP]

Still not acceptable though in 'this day & age'... I vote with Mike we should look for someone else...

[Rick]

I've shifted the discussion about alternative hosting providers to Behind the Scenes.

http://forum.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/index.php?topic=3618.0