Slow Again?

[DellParticipant @dell]

Slow is not the word it’s almost stopped

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

It’s been slow for the last hour for me. This is Andy’s reply from Yesterday

The intermittent issue means I can’t see an issue with it at present, I’m going to enable a server monitoring tool we have called New Relic that keeps a log of any bugs or scripts that cause a slow response, while it’s on it causes around a 10% efficiency impact, but should help point us in the right direction when we check the logs next week.

 

If you notice the slowness at any point, please drop us an email with the date/time and it will give us a period to check on the logs also.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Wading through Treacle

… on Full Fibre to the Premises

MichaelG.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Makes a glacier look fast

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

At this rate observing paint as the solvents evaporate may be more entertaining ?
WHAT IS WRONG ? Timed at 10:20 01/03/25 Noel.

[roy entwistleParticipant @royentwistle24699]

Very slow for me this morning

Roy

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

I’ve just installed AdBlockPlus on the iPad … logged-out and then back in

There is still some obvious latency, but … by comparison the site is now loading like greased lightning

 

MichaelG.

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https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/adblock-plus-for-safari-abp/id1028871868

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

From what SOD has diagnosed there may be a specific external site which is being accessed to fetch an advert and that site may be responding very slowly.  Perhaps the advertiser should be named and shamed on here so they are aware they are p******g off their potential customers?

[VicParticipant @vic]

Very slow for me on an iPad. When I go to the home page it says I’m logged out, but when I click on a thread link I’ve posted in it says I’m logged in. It also got stuck in a loop yesterday asking me to accept cookies over and over again. Very frustrating. Also some white text or other items ghosting over other text.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

ChatGPT wasn’t much help … but at least it wasn’t wrong

This much I knew already:

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MichaelG.

[Tony Pratt 1Participant @tonypratt1]

Wouldn’t load for me to start with.

Tony

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

..back in at 12:00 and it was all fine again..

[Mark EasingwoodParticipant @markeasingwood33578]

(I posted this at about 8-30am, but it hasn’t appeared, don’t know why).

As I posted earlier in the month in the previous thread about this problem, when the forum is slow, turning on Adblocker allows it to load quickly.

The little pop up box at the bottom of screen keeps showing, “waiting for Advintage”.

Probably advert related.

Mark.

[Andrew TinsleyParticipant @andrewtinsley63637]

Very very slow at around 9 45 AM this Saturday morning. Took about 1.5 minutes to load a page. After 10 minutes of this misery, it suddenly speeded up to its usual (though not brilliant) pace.

Andrew.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Bedtime report, I wrote a program that calls a group of 7 advintage adverts every two minutes, with a 12 second delay between each.   Throttled well back so as not to flatten advintage.net with hard work.

Graph is revealing:

Advintage does a good job with 4 of the seven; they consistently reply within 0.2s.   Much less satisfactory are the 3 calls to classicmagazines.  At best these are always sluggish (1.5s or worse, poor) and inconsistent.

At the right of the graph (between 9pm and 10pm) the classicmagazines group go really pear-shaped, taking up to 14 seconds, again inconsistently.  14 seconds is very poor.

The 3 misbehaving classicmagazine links all call php scripts.  Not straightforward, whereas the fast responders are all simple images.   I think the php scripts roll a selection of adverts, which is more complicated.

Broken code or a corrupt list of adverts maybe.

Dave

 

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Fine work, Dave !

MichaelG.

[John MCParticipant @johnmc39344]

The speed of the page has remained the same for me, best described as “sluggish”.  What is getting worth is the jumping about and what appears to be, the page reloading itself.

Another foible is that after a jump, the page reappears, the latest replies bit is in a much better darker blue rather than the washed out blue, then it reverts, shame that.

This happens over a period of a few seconds, not long, but frustrating never the less.

[John MC]

On John MC Said:

The speed of the page has remained the same for me, best described as “sluggish”.  What is getting worth is the jumping about and what appears to be, the page reloading itself.

Another foible is that after a jump, the page reappears, the latest replies bit is in a much better darker blue rather than the washed out blue, then it reverts, shame that.

This happens over a period of a few seconds, not long, but frustrating never the less.

I’m sort of seeing that too, but in much milder form, not bad enough to annoy.

I think the jumping about and reloading may be due to the advintage problem.   When a browser fails to get a reply within some time limit, it might be configured to wait forever, or to wait a while, and then carry on.  When the delayed request arrives later, the browser might display it, causing the whole page to reformat, and reload.

I normally access the forum with Firefox and Ubuntu (Linux), and the result is well-behaved.   Last few weeks I’ve been using Solid Edge CAD on Windows 10, accessing the forum with that.  Same computer, same version of Firefox, different operating system.

Windows does something odd:  pages are downloaded and, after being displayed in one font, are redisplayed again in another.  Clunk!  I think Linux has the required font to hand and displays it immediately, whilst Windows displays a default alternative whilst retrieving the proper one, before switching.   When network, forum and computer are all running fast, the font change is so quick as to be invisible.   But any delay makes it obvious.  If I had the time I could probably fix it: a windows configuration issue, not a bug, but life is too short.

The code sent by the forum to our browsers is remarkably complicated.  The web designer’s editor allows him to specify what the site should do and look like without understanding how it works under the bonnet.  The code is generated from generalised templates and plug-ins, each of which can have a multitude of complicated options.   Our browsers are sent a huge list of instructions, and it’s far from clear what they do, or even if they are active at all.  Generated code is great when the website is small & straightforward but complicated and/or heavily loaded websites are hard to debug.

Although the forum isn’t big by Amazon or Facebook standards, it’s not a tiddler.  Big enough for performance to need attention, and surprisingly complicated.   Roughly 3x more complex than the old forum.  I think a lot of complexity comes from the new forum imitating the look and feel of the old forum.  Done to keep loyal members who hate change happy, but it would have been safer to ignore them and keep the website plain.

The old forum had to go for three or four good reasons, notably impossible to maintain because it was bespoke and didn’t support small-screens.  It presented badly to new members with smart-phones or tablets.

In theory, replacing bespoke with WordPress should have made the forum much easier to support and change.  In practice Mortons’ tiny web team have ended up with something of a monster.   After long painful development by third parties, one of whom was probably financially and technically out of their depth, Mortons ended up holding the baby.  They decided to cut their losses and deploy the new forum despite many minor defects. The need to fix major performance problems just before roll-out ate most of the developer time that could have been spent improving functionality and cosmetics.

The result mostly works, but the shortcomings annoy us and the platform is hard to maintain.

Just my personal perception, not in any way official.  Could be wrong!

Dave

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

Well they didn’t do a great job of supporting smartphone screens.

[John MCParticipant @johnmc39344]

Its getting worse!  Now, when I open the forums page the cookies dialogue box appears, I’ve clicked my choices and the page reloads.  Cookie box again, page reloads, click another choice, cookie box again and repeat.  Ignore cookie box, got to a page I want to read and all’s well.

What’s all that about?  Can we have the page fixed properly please.  Also, I’m not interested in what makes the page play up, but for those who are, carry on discussing!

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Been running fine for me all day. On Chrome with all the adverts.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

OK on my MacBook

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Very slow again – as time-stamped.

Edit: as I went to browse Warco instead, managed to grab this screenshot on the way over .. ..FWIW..

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

..and now Warco’s banner has disappeared.. ..should be at the very top, no..?

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Busy with the family yesterday but I ported my monitor program to a raspberrypi and set it running.  Engineering reason: raspberryPi’s use much less electricity than a PC or laptop and can be left running headless (no screen or keyboard) in a corner, continuously.

Every two minutes it measures how long ‘the forum’ takes to respond to 7 different adverts, plus a delay of 12 seconds between each individual call, so the advert times are taken once every 204 seconds.   Simulates a fast-ish human typist tirelessly browsing the forum with a stopwatch and it takes no comfort breaks.  And is super-human in that it records the time taken by internal calls, not just the whole page.    Engineering reason for measuring internal calls is that it helps pin down what’s amiss rather than simply noticing “the forum is slow”.

As I type this the forum appears to be in good order, responding quickly, though AdBlocker is ON.   My individual observation doesn’t mean much because whatever is slowing the forum down is intermittent.    It was OK for me Sunday morning, and again when I logged in briefly before bedtime.   All fixed then?

This morning’s graph suggests not!

 

• No problem between 1700 and 0100
• Just after 0100, there are 4 separate major slow-downs, with brief gaps, making the forum unusable for 5 hours
• A few minutes after 0600 today, just before I logged in, the forum started responding normally.   Long may it last.

The first run of this program strongly suggested the classicmagazine php adverts were causal.  The latest graph shows all  advintage adverts are affected.   The Amadeal advert normally vends in less than 0.2s, last night it was taking 10s, an x50 hit.  The already slow classic mags group normally taking about 2s average 10x delay, and one of them takes over 36 seconds to arrive.

Last night’s performance figures are dreadful.   Cause unknown to me.   Possibly overnight maintenance, not necessarily human.

At work, had an incident like this, always out of UK normal hours.  After a long-winded technical analysis failed to find anything wrong, eventually twigged the problem was due a cleaner working an irregular schedule.   This lady had a key to the secure computer room and had got into the habit of unplugging a big network router so she could use the socket for her vacuum.

The socket was marked “ELECTRONICS ONLY” in red, but her common sense prevailed and of course the vacuum cleaner worked perfectly. To her that red warning was officious nonsense.   The big network router was backed up by a smaller one with a slow network connection.  The system didn’t fail, but the slow connection caused massive queues.  Cleaning done, the our lady plugged the router back in and 20 minutes later the queues were cleared.  This system ran 24×7, busiest during the UK day, but also supporting shift work and many international connections.

Lesson learned:  brief the cleaners, taking care to explain they must follow the process, observe notices, and above all not apply  ‘common sense‘.  Turned out that the cleaner had an extension lead she was supposed to plug into the utility socket provided.   But so much easier to unplug a mission critical router from the clean UPS protected circuit, taking the router out of service and squirting electric motor muck into other sensitive equipment.

No medals issued for sorting this out.   The powers that be said it had taken the techies far too long to identify a simple cause.   Engineers always get the blame!

Dave

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