The forums have finally died
By
BanzaiBadger,
Posted on: 2010-12-25 09:21 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Speaking of the slow loads, I just had one about ten minutes ago and I was navigating back to the forum listing so it wasn't "someone's avatar."
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It sounds like you are indeed not behind a proxy. However, it does sound like this device you're using may be the culprit for at least some of your woes. You might want to fire up Wireshark and see if you're getting a lot of dropped packets or something. Some web sites and/or servers are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others, and given my own experience, I'm guessing that they've tweaked the forums server to be a lot less tolerant of traffic faults.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
No, none that I'm aware of. I suppose my provider may be using [a proxy server], but I've no way of knowing. I know I don't have any proxy settings set up in either browser, though my network goes through a router (they called it a modem when they installed it, but it's a router if ever I saw one) which does tend to block some of my ports (and to which I lost the access information O.o), but this hasn't been anywhere near as bad as it is today. Ever.
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Do you have alternate locations you can check connectivity from? Like maybe a mobile device, or a buddy's house where you can pull up the forums and see if it is limited to your specific location?
We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.
(If you love this game as much as I do, please read that post.)
I recently changed from Firefox to Chrome - that made things MUCH better. This forum in particular ran horribly in Firefox and a couple of other sites were clunky and dog slow.
I tried Chrome on the basis of a recommendation and I have noticed a much improved experience. Logouts are fewer (they still do happen though) and pages load much faster - whereas one of my bugbears previously was it would take an age to get from the top to the bottom of a standard page.
I use Fedora as my OS to read the forums so your experience may be different but it may help you to look at that. If you don't want to try Chrome, Opera may be an alternative.
Thelonious Monk
QR: I use Opera, and for those who dont want to even try it due to lack of lastpass support... Opera 11 has extension support, and lastpass is one of them (now just waiting for XMarks to get ported 
)
When I get slow loads here, I can get them doing things that clearly have nothing to do with massive avatars. Examples:
- Refreshing a page I've already loaded, and which was not slow the first time.
- Posting a quick reply, which should update the existing page in-line.
- Loading pages with no avatars, such as my own personal info page, searches, etc.
(Note that such problems do not relate directly to database size, though size can affect query run times, and thus indirectly affect available connection pools or other resources that are affected by concurrency. That means that while pruning the forum DB, such as by deleting old posts, might help, it might not. The fact that the problem comes and goes without the devs pruning old posts in this forum suggests to me that the issue is not strongly related to the DB size.)
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
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Actually, now that you mention it, I WAS getting lost packets that day, and I know because I kept checking the City of Heroes /netgraph to find out what the stuttering was about. Whenever it's bad, it's always high levels of "Duplicate in" packets that seem to go missing, though I've never quite learned what the three types of lost packets on that mean.|
Originally Posted by TonyV
It sounds like you are indeed not behind a proxy. However, it does sound like this device you're using may be the culprit for at least some of your woes. You might want to fire up Wireshark and see if you're getting a lot of dropped packets or something. Some web sites and/or servers are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others, and given my own experience, I'm guessing that they've tweaked the forums server to be a lot less tolerant of traffic faults.
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I guess I may not have been seeing this on other sites because I they weren't as discriminating about the packets that got lost, which would explain the problem. Then I may have to modify my gripe in that these forums may be a little too sensitive to these things, but with secure authentications, I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about it.
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| Do you have alternate locations you can check connectivity from? Like maybe a mobile device, or a buddy's house where you can pull up the forums and see if it is limited to your specific location? |
It's rare that I've seen the forums as bad as on that day, however, but I HAVE seen them act like this before. It's just that when I usually do, I tend to ignore them and go do something else.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Oh, yeah, and then there's that. I've seen that DB error a few times, but it's exceedingly rare. At first it looked like the standard "Page cannot be found" error I get from time to time, but this was different. I forget what the error said, but I'm pretty sure it was an internal error in the "site" itself somewhere.
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Originally Posted by UberGuy
Every now and again, when getting a really bad influx of slow performance from the forums, I will get a vBulletin error page saying there was a database problem. A few minutes later, it will work again. Because of this, I think that some resource contention relating to the DB is the most likely culprit for why these forums do that. I suspect the DB is running out of some resource and can't service the forum software requests. Our browser gets a conversation started with the web server, but we don't get web page info back, because that's constructed by the forum software based on info pulled from the DB. Such a problem might be in the DB tuning, the tuning for the forum software, bugs in the forum software (leaking connections, cursors, etc.) or hardware constraints on the DB server.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Yeah. My guess is that we may not always get that error, but that the back-end being slow may always be related to what sometimes gives us that error. It's hard to say, of course - there could easily be multiple things wrong.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.