Forum is slow and glitchy

Well, I for one won't post anything about a slow site, if someone already has recently.

And I'll never post anything about site administrators not caring, or ignoring an issue.

 

Hopefully Scotty will reach out to me soon. I am waiting to help, I also have the infrastructure to host the forums in a stable and performant environment if he would like to move.

 

Ah, so you think I'm one of the bad guys? Note taken.

Edit: I'm not sure it's any of the admins that don't care, it's the site owner. See when a problem exists, if you care, you fix it. Problem isn't getting fixed so what else am I to believe?

 

No sir, not at all.

Nowhere did I suggest anyone of being a bad guy. Your post merely provided an opportunity for me to continue supporting the site administrators.

My comments were not not directed towards any member other than myself.

 

I was just gonna tell ya I didn't care what you think anyway.


This song played shortly after I made that comment.

 

Scotty Overkill

 

Scotty Overkill

 

Ok, trying for constructive information, rather than venting.

1.. it may not be solely an FHC issue.
If the site is hosted on its own dedicated server, then it would be, but if the site resides on a shared physical host, it could be an issue with a different site hoarding resources, which will be intermittent.

If it is on a dedicated server, I would first be suspecting a physical issue on the server, bad RAM springs to mind. That would also be somewhat intermittent depending on load.

While I would agree with Nord , the software is outdated, but barring being hacked, that should yield no degradation of performance.

Porting the site to newer software is a huge project, filled with plenty of unexpected side effects.

Nord do you have the capacity and ability to mirror the site for load balancing?

That could alleviate a lot of problems in the short term, while a more permanent solution is decided on.

As to the donations, just like others, I'm more than willing to help with the site financials.

Jeffrey Svoboda I wasn't pointing any fingers at you nor any others specifically, just that it seemed to be a routine for one to post a complaint, and others join in.

The complaints are legit in and of themselves, but it seems to be a human trait to gather together with the pitchforks and torches.

I have zero experience with cloudflare, but I had VERY poor experiences with a hosting provider back in the day.

Bringing the site in house wasn't realistically viable due to the lack of high bandwidth providers in that timeframe.

Heh, that's when I was introduced to an AS400 server, a new learning experience to say the least. It was my first IT gig, and wasn't too bad, but had some severe drawbacks.

Either way, Scotty Overkill should likely look at leaving Cloudflare if they aren't addressing his concerns appropriately.
$.02

One can only put in so many trouble tickets before it is just ridiculous.

 

Good post!

 

Thanks.

 

This passed through my ears, and it's appropriate.

Things can be bad, but that doesn't mean it's forever.

 

Back to painfully slow for me this morning.

 

Making posts like this will make some of us miss you more!! Stay safe and live life my friend

 

Here’s the error I received a few times this morning:

 

First time I’ve been able to access site in several days. Forum dues have been getting some traction or mentioned a few times. I’ll bring back an old trope: the swag shop was supporting the site fine in the past. How about we do that again

 

It's win/win...people get the gear they want, and the site gets supported!
(Here, take my money! )

 

Chaz

I would be surprised if it was on a shared host, I know not one shared host who would run a PHP and Mysql version which were EOL 10 years ago. More likely a VPS or dedi server. Running such old software does have substantial performance degradation especially if it has been forced onto a newer operating system as it generally requires some "dirty" workarounds to get it to run properly. You also need to take into consideration how much software and its optimizing has improved in the last 10 years, everything has vastly improved performance wise, the bots as well and what is considered acceptable from them as far as browsing and scraping. What is fine on a modern stack and acceptable will choke a 10 year old stack.

Yeah taking the forums from 2016 to 2026 will mean many incremental updates to everything involved, this means custom builds of php and older versions of mysql slowly until current. I have done it a few times, and it is no fun, but doable.

I think load balancing it would probably just add problems, but this is built into cloudflare even on the free plan. If you create two a-records pointing at different IPs for the root domain and one goes down it will auto route traffic to the other one. The mirroring though is a bit of a can of worms because in the background you need scripts checking and firing to keep the sites a mirror of eachother, this is usually something I setup on high value mission critical sites and apps.

Cloudflare is not the forums host, it is just the CDN in front of the server.

I am happy to help get things updated and even host the forums, but I won't host old and vulnerable software on my server for any longer than it takes to bring it up to date, its asking for trouble and would also be a timesink.

 

Nord I appreciate the information, as stated, my experience in the arena is older than the software in question.

Umm, thank you
Am I going somewhere?

I know I've been ghosting about for a while, but I do check in on occasion.

Staying busy with work, and kinda self isolating in my off time.

Just hanging out with my dog and keeping the workers at Anheuser Busch busy.


I do appreciate the kind words.

 

Site response this morning is good.