Very Slow Response Jan/Feb 2014

[mickw]

Forum down around 9:50 - unable to load
Now painfully slow 9:53

[mickw]

Seems sorted now 09:59

[JohnP]

Still painfully slow... 23/1/2014 - 8:20am...

[Tony G]

Ditto

Very, very slow between 9.05am until the time of this post.

Tony G

[Mike]

It's been like this all day for me. Anywhere between 10 to 20 seconds for any page click to respond.

[Rick]

Odd. I've had a slow loading page two or three times today, and at least one of those it was my connection at fault. The rest of the time it's been fine. I'll put a ticket in, though, to see whether they can find anything.

[Rick]

Please can (some of the) folks affected by the slow response provide a traceroute, preferably while the site is actually being sluggish, if possible?

Instructions here: https://clients.ezpzhosting.co.uk/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&catid=5&id=135

Some routers, ISPs and so on will drop traceroute packets so you may find it's not possible that way. You may, however, find that your router has a traceroute diagnostic function instead.

Here's one from mine, but at a time the site was reponding nicely:

Code Select Expand

traceroute to 37.26.108.101, 30 hops max
 1  194.159.161.32        20 ms
 2  194.217.23.9          20 ms
 3  194.159.161.94        20 ms
 4  193.195.25.30         10 ms
 5  195.66.224.226        20 ms
 6  93.89.91.13           20 ms
 7  46.17.60.162          20 ms
 8  37.26.111.254         20 ms
 9  37.26.108.101         20 ms
Trace complete.

[Rick]

I got a traceroute while the forum was being very slow for me, and it showed no problem with the route. Information passed back to hosting company...

[mickw]

Didn't we ditch the last host because of crap service ?

I don't recall the last host being this crap for this long

[Rick]

We ditched the previous host because they didn't respond when we complained about problems, and because, with their servers being in the US and most of our users being in the UK, trans-Atlantic connection issues made things worse.

When I have sufficient information(*) to submit tickets, our present hosting company usually take the reports seriously, and usually sort the problem out quickly.

(*) Someone saying "It's been a bit slow recently" doesn't reach my "sufficient information" threshold. Someone saying something like "Between 07:33 and 07:55 this morning it was taking between 40 seconds and two minutes to serve aeach page." does.

[mickw]

Fair enough.
I think "example 1" was probably the norm with the previous host.

We must try harder 

[Rick]

Even "Very slow for the last ten minutes" effectively gives a time because the post will be time-stamped. With intermittent problems, times are important. Without them it's impossible to tie in problems with logs, system monitoring, and so on. Traceroutes only show whether the problem is somewhere in between user and server (or not), but not everyone can run them, and some routers block them anyway...

Anyway, I've shovelled some data into a support ticket. We'll see whether they find anything.

[mickw]

08:39 to 09:03 taking over 2 minutes to open posts or sections

[Rick]

Thanks, Mick. Added to ticket. Did you get a chance to run a traceroute while the forum was being slow?

[Rick]

...and they've reported back thus:

There was an abusive user on this server who's now being dealt with.
Performance should be returning to normal shortly.