I had some old bookmarks that confused me on Chrome. i.e.

PeachParts Mercedes ShopForum - Powered by vBulletin

It shows the forum, but will not take you to the subsections or threads.

Should stuff like this be a dead link?




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Forum just got hung up while using chrome for a good 5 minutes. Swapped to firefox and was still hanging. Then it was also hanging on tapatalk.

I'm experiencing hangs throughout the day, most are 5-10 minutes before something loads or it just sits there...

I see some gaps in the log file here. I'll take a closer look to see if I can tell what is going on with the server. Last time I saw this, a server reset fixed it. The webserver was working well, but PHP wasn't responding. In hindsight, I probably should have taken a closer look, but I reset the webservice just to get it running again. Odd thing is that this server is nearly identical to Pelican, and we didn't have any problems on Pelican at this time. So, it wasn't a database issue per se, but perhaps a database connectivity issue. I did notice there were a bunch of MySQL threads that were sleeping, and I thought that was odd...

Please let me know if you see something like that again?

-Wayne

Yes, I see some weird stuff in the log file. I'll keep looking and making adjustments until we figure this out. I'll scour the log files for some patterns, and I also restarted MySQL logging, that will enable me to see what the database is doing at the time of the slowdown. Thanks for your patience, we'll get this figured out. The Pelican server is rock-solid, so it must just be a small configuration setting on this server. Perhaps something left over from the old server.

Wayne

Found some issues with PHP, changed some settings. Not sure if it's related to this troublesome problem, but it can't hurt to fix (some temporary files were not being deleted properly, which was causing a large buildup of files in a particular directory).

-Wayne

Okay, I found some more problems, and found the errors where the server was flaking out. I'm not 100% sure what is causing them, but it looked like it might be related to the ages-old phpAds software that was running on the server, so I removed it and replaced it with the one we currently run on Pelican. Other than that, it may be due to some old plug-ins that may not be 100% compatible with the new software that we had to upgrade to.

I have new logging in place, and will be closely watching it tomorrow!

Thanks again for your assistance,

Wayne

That bookmark is missing the /shopforum/ after peachparts.com. That's okay though, I put in a rule on the server to add it in automatically if it's missing.

-Wayne

Forum no longer works on tapatalk. But that was expected since you dai you were acing that.

Right, I saw some Tapatalk errors in the log files - might have been contributing to the issue, so I canned that for now. We may revisit it later on. I'm planning on putting in a mobile theme which will be much more flexible. Unfortunately, a lot of people just don't use Tapatalk, and right now, it's too risky to perhaps have it be the problem with the slowdown (it's running an older version of the software - almost like everything else was on this forum. :) )

-Wayne

So far this morning, no forum slowdown / shutdown, as far as I can see in the log files. I'm still getting errors from the WIKKA software - too many of these may cause a backlog of requests on the server, which then waits for them to timeout (300 seconds or five minutes). I'm keeping a close eye on it. I tried to upgrade the Wikka software last night, but it didn't work, will try again tonight.

Thanks everyone for your patience,

-Wayne

Okay, for those who are interested here's the update:

We had to upgrade the forums software to the latest version because the older version we were running was prone to hacks and had security holes. However, all of the "supporting" plug-ins and software were never updated in the past either. So, updating to the latest version of vBulletin and PHP has caused a lot of issues with these older software programs to surface. So, as of today, I've done the following:

- Disabled Tapatalk (it was an older version that was running, and it was also generating database errors)

- Disabled phpAds (running on another forum we acquired at the same time (986Forum.com). This was causing a bunch of PHP errors.

The Wiki software that is currently running on this site is also an older version, and is generating timeout errors. I did some research and the errors we're seeing are a known issue with the older software. So, upgrading to the newer versions should fix this issue (I'll upgrade the server tonight).

I appreciate everyone's feedback and support as we make this transition. The good news is that when it is all said and done, we will be on the latest platform, running fast, and safe from hackers.

Thanks,

Wayne

Note
 

I am getting a frequent 90 second wait when making a new post, and sometimes editing/save changes in old posts.


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I'm working on the server a bit right now, so perhaps what I'm doing is affecting posting? I checked the log files and I saw a few slow queries, running about 20-25 seconds around midnight, but nothing longer than that as far as I can see?

-Wayne

Okay. I managed to upgrade the Wikka software to the latest version, which should not generate any more PHP fatal errors. I think these errors were what was causing the slowdowns on the server as they were "piling up" for about five minutes. I could see these errors in the log files, and then the server would go "out of touch" for about 3-5 minutes until they automatically cleared out.

Please indeed let me know if you encounter more of the same slowdowns, and exactly what time they were present. That way I can go back and check the logfiles for details.

thx,

Wayne