I have noticed this too. Robin, is storage drive filling up?

donate!

Pinside is running like a drunk turtle, but whether it be a server hardware issue, software/database issue, or Internet bottleneck to and from the server, Robin will get it sorted out.

Just gotta be patient...and maybe not keep starting threads about it.

Pinside will get my donation in mid-July. Been buying too many machines lately and have to restock some funds haha

Yeah, it's blazing fast for me!

I count one thread with a few replies what am I missing? Seems worse today. If you want to see some posts, allow two weeks to go by with no comment from the Admin.

Robin are you out there? What is the situation?

Slow for me too...some times wont load updates to read threads and says they are new. other times, not. weird. im sure itll get fixed. frustrating for sure

It took forever for me to just load this topic to read it.

Incredibly slow since yesterday.

Agree... and its not the :"internet": its this site.- about 2 days

Robin said he knows about it and is working on it. It happened after he rebooted it because of updates.

3 days very slow for me as well.

Yea. I wasn't going to say anything, but I have noticed how slow the site is lately.
Glad to know it's not just me.

It was slow then I donated and its rocking!

Still slow here, and I donated also.

nice try!

I'm not donating again until it is blazing!

Aware of the situation and working on a solution! But first I got to find out what the heck is causing this problem. It started after a system reboot yesterday. If you're a linux system admin and would like to offer your expertise, do PM/email me!

Looks like you resolved the issue. What was it? Are you running MySQL? Did you have a bunch of audit stuff on or the tables needed to be optimized? Memory/file handle issues?

Still slow.

Not for me...

Still Sllllllooooooowwwwwww.

yea, but it's faster than it was the other day IMO, and I was getting all kinds of SQL errors like the database was going offline. So things appear to have improved a little bit.

I'm thinking traffic is just catching up with the system... This is the bad side of such a fancy, dynamically-generated site. It can't easily scale up to match increased traffic. I'd try to cache stuff more, but it's going to be hard for a site like Pinside that has so much customized content everywhere.

If I'm not mistaken the hosting has been upgraded multiple times in the past year to keep up with traffic. This is the type of problem everyone dreams of needing to solve (too many visitors), but until Robin gets ahead of the curve it will continue to spring up.

Well, it depends upon the nature of the traffic and whether or not it helps pay the bills. You can create a ton of traffic and not see a penny from it, and that's far from a "dream" people want to have. This may be traffic-related. It may also be database-related. The system could be hitting some kind of bottleneck.

I've dealt with web sites that have had tens of thousands of users on them simultaneously. So, 300+ in the context of a normal web site isn't really a lot, but in the context of this site and how richly dynamic it is, it's probably very resource-intensive. There comes a point where it no longer becomes economical to beef up hardware unless revenue is coming in appropriately. Only Robin probably has those details. But my guess is the database is straining right now, and one way to fix that is to remove some of the dynamic elements. Perhaps caching poster information might help... I bet every time a user avatar is displayed those are all real-time calls to the DBs... or maybe reduce the number of messages displayed per page? There are lots of tricks to make things run a little faster when there's peak activity.

Donate more. Stat.

Seems to be up and runnin' now!

Slow for me all day. Still is for some things.

I optimised the query that fetches the front page posts.

You hit the nail on the head. Caching is difficult because the site is so dynamic. There is basically nothing to cache!

But you are right, 400+ visitors should not make a website crawl (althugh keep in mind there a lot of non-logged in members too). I think at the moment my hardware is beefy enough, what I need now is time to work on optimisation. But that takes a lot of time. And my family also need to eat, so that means Pinside will need to generate more income allowing me to work on it in the daytime. I have been thinking about this aspect a lot but I'm not prepared to fill the Pinside with banner ads.

Actually this is one of the things that is fairly cacheable and it does. You can try, if you make a machine rating, you will see that it takes up to 300 seconds to update the number under your name. This is one of the things that uses "short caching".

I'm gonna work on optimising queries some more, get some help form Martijn who is very knowledgeable on MySQL, do some tuning and tweaking and hopefully get the site quick again!

Was slow for a couple days for me.
Seems fine and fast now.

Thanks Robin!

Robin,

Lets talk today. I saw a few things that are problematic with what you sent me. I will need a few logs to get to the root. Especially your I/o wait times.

You have already identified good area to investigate with caching, and I can verify real example. When site was running slow yesterday, I noticed that the avatars that are usually shown when you quote somebody, instead were blank placeholders and they took much time before they filled in. Later when speed picked up they appeared immediately per normal. I think you are on the right track.

You go Alex...geeks to the rescue!
(And yes I can say that because I fall into the same category so it's not an insult!)

Maybe people can stop posting animated gifs for no reason and pinball flyers on every post. It's ok to have nothing to add to a thread and just read it. No need for a manatee floating gif and a pinball sales flyer in every post.

I heard some people had to actually go and play their machines due to the delays

You're right Atomicboy. When I got home from work and Pinside was still not running correctly, I had to play my spiderman for about an hour. It was awful.

Yep...agree. I ignored that user who was posting the flyers everywhere.
Not sure how much the animated GIFs really impact the server, but they do get annoying

There is an option to not autoload image that would let you avoid the annoying animated GIFs and reduce the load on the server in the process:

At the top, under Ratings and stuff
* Forum images are enabled (Disable)

Of course, if the issue is slow SQL queries rather than a lack of bandwidth, it probably wouldn't speed the site up much.

The images in posts are static content and not contributing to the slowness of site. The query for posts takes the same time whether someone puts just a . in their post or a full image url. The image itself is served statically and not from the DB so it's not the root cause of the pinside problems. At All.

Post images all day and all it does is eat harddrive space. Not causing these problems.

Not entirely true. All uploaded images are processed by the server in various ways:
- They are resized to be able to display inline. This takes up CPU.
- Their metadata (like width and height) is stored in the Pinside database. This adds some insert/update queries.

I'm not saying the images are the cause of the problem, but any upload does put *some* load on the server.

Ahh we should move the metadata out of the DB and use a native function with an fopen(read) [ i believe the function is exif_read_data if i remember]. It would be significantly faster to read height/width/exif data directly from the inode than from the db. 100x faster. If you are going to make a function call whether it be a db connection factory or other, reading direct from the FS is always faster if the data is available and doesn't need a specific reference. I'm not sure if the column for height/width is either split and is INT vs Varchar either Text blobs no bueno..

What he said!

thumbs_up.gif

I'll just put this right here...

tumblr_m6yvhgBLnG1qk8zxso1_250.gif

If yer referring to me...I've gotten MANY emails and PM's from members saying how much they love the Members Clubs and GIF's. If you don't, please feel free to put me on Ignore. (I won't be offended)

Yea, I would offload image referencing to Apache and not the DB. That would probably improve throughput a lot. Just save references to the files instead.

Attaching animated GIFs and stuff really don't bog the server down. Those are processed by the client and limited by bandwidth and not cpu power generally.

I am thinking some MySQL my.cnf optimization is in order, as well as some streamlining of the code. But all in all, I think the site is a work of art in terms of how nice it looks. Great work!

I don't think putting a banner ad at the top or bottom would bother anybody, and you could generate a little extra recurring income.

i could never ignore you - you are larger than life

Mk

Still as slow as can be, and lots of errors.

it was good for a few hours but now back to snails pace, along with data base errors

Yup!

It's the burgers! ....

I need you at my new game room next month. I am setting up all four of the monsters for you. SS, creech, MB and BSD.

Mk