Fed up with forums not working properly!

[#1]

I bet if you turned one server off and configured it to run on one server it would be much better!
My putting an entry in the hosts file to force use of a single server seemed to make a difference.

[#2]

We suspect there are multiple issues.  We're sorting the easy ones, but the difficult one is the one that's causing the timeouts.
Sadly, we couldn't just run on one server.  The blogs get a lot of traffic!

[#3]

Oh dear..:

[#4]

and even now a simple post with no attachments just hung at Connecting but opening another tab and it is loaded

[#5]

It has been a 'feature' for so long that I've just learned to live with it.  Happens most days if logged in for a couple of hours.
And yes I also believe it is very frustrating that it just has not been fixed.
Maurice

[#6]

Quote from: MauriceC

It has been a 'feature' for so long that I've just learned to live with it.

Indeed.
It used to happen to me when I was with Be and still does now I'm back on PN.
I just refresh the browser, which usually gives a "hard" error from the Forum about a blank submission, then use the "back" button to recover what I was typing and resubmit.
Mostly that works on the first retry, occasionally it needs 2 or 3.  
It seems to happen more when editing a post (like this line I'm adding) but not consistently. In fact it just did!

[#7]

Seems to me that this is a php sessions file issue.
By default most webservers will lock the sessions file until the process has finished with it. This means other processes (eg other http threads) can not access the session until the other process is done.
Why have I concluded this? Because when the go slow occurs the other tabs i've opened also do not get any content. If I stop the first http request and leave it for a bit then re-try its almost instant.
This suggests one of two things: The smf forum code is ugly, bloated and using queries all over the place and running them in loops causing it to take ages to complete OR that plusnet are running something that goes through all the session files periodically which takes time to complete.
As an ISP the latter wouldn't surprise me for their statistical purposes but I'd say the former is more likely. If you ask me this forum needs to be canned and converted to another - while having the database converted.

[#8]

Just had the loading message again

That was after the post was accepted & page refreshed to show it had gone through
& after using the

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Edit:
I can pretty much re-inact the issue every time, using FireFox 27.0.1

[#9]

Forums have been extremely slow tonight!

[#10]

I thought it was just me.

[#11]

Forum pages have been taking tens of seconds to start loading this evening, but once started completed quickly 
Other websites seem OK   

[#12]

I wonder if the forum problems are to do with browser web requests getting replies from servers that have a different IP address from the one being queried, or replying incorrectly.
Looking at my internet facing router firewall logs, it is full of blocked incoming packets from the Plusnet community servers, which look as if they have been blocked by IPv4 NAT because they do not match up with outgoing web requests.
Why can't we have the forum on IPv6 and avoid stupid NAT problems ?   
The example below is for 84.93.230.178 ('community04.servers.plus.net') -

[#13]

I have questioned the same thing previously. IPv6 probably won't help as such, the 2 different IP addresses are probably due to load balancing (there seem to be 2 different IPs behind each of the 2 IP addresses for community.plus.net).
I have also tried, unsuccessfully, to forward the packets from the wrong IP addresses to my computer (and perhaps if I could do that, also convert the IP addresses and probably convert the source port for https also). But it didn't seem to be possible with my router.

[#14]

Quote from: buntrob

Forums have been extremely slow tonight!

And then a bit more!  I gave up at 21:30 with each new page taking up to a minute to load.  Happily browsing and interacting with Amazon and E-bay during the Forum sulks.
The Networks guys need to get their thinking heads on and bottom this problem out.
M

[#15]

Why is it that it is ONLY the Plusnet servers that fill up my firewall logs with this junk ?. 
It is a real nuisance having a firewall log that has more than 95% of blocked entries coming from Plusnet servers, the remainder coming from unsolicited port probe attempts.
I also get bucket loads of similar junk from the Plusnet email servers, although I have not investigated whether these are POP or IMAP related.