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I've had similar issues off and on for the past month or so. Occassionaly a page will hang almost entirely, as if it is waiting forever for an ad to be delivered. When that happens a reload is the only viable fix -- though occassionaly infinite patience works if the browser does not timeout befre the rest of the content is delivered.
Further info... Usually one of two behaviors will be exhibited: 1) A portion of the page header is delivered but hangs around the ads OR 2) the page header and ads are delivered but the thread content fails to load. Occassionally a third result presents itself and that tends to be a page with little to no content delivered and a timed out connection (with no related connectivity issues with respect to my internet connection).
In the case of #1, hangs with regard to images (esp. remotely served ads) can often be remedied by hard coding the image dimensions in the HTML img element, allowing the browser to render the remainder of the page while reserving space for the as yet undelivered image. Without hard coded dimensions the browser can not properly render the page until all images have been delivered since it does not know what the image dimensions are and how much space to reserve for them in the rendered document. In the case of #2, my best guess is an SQL timeout may have occurred since I assume your BBS is storing most of its content in an SQL database (presumably MySQL).
The third case seems to generally correlate with DNS resolution issues for ncwoodworker.net. When the cached RR (resource records) expire in my DNS servers sometimes the DNS servers for NCWW will fail to answer when queried. During this period, sometimes even NS1 and NS2.ncwoodworker.net seem to not resolve, which could be indicative of top level DNS issues (i.e. an issue with either NetSol or your domain registrar) since these two IPs should be resolved by top level servers, not the NCWW DNS servers.
I'm not sure if any of this will prove helpful, but it is all that the info available to me at this time.
PS - Over the last day or so I've also noticed a number of posts with previously working embedded images seem to now have broken image placeholders in place of those same images. I'm not sure why embedded images would be disappearing.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
Further info... Usually one of two behaviors will be exhibited: 1) A portion of the page header is delivered but hangs around the ads OR 2) the page header and ads are delivered but the thread content fails to load. Occassionally a third result presents itself and that tends to be a page with little to no content delivered and a timed out connection (with no related connectivity issues with respect to my internet connection).
In the case of #1, hangs with regard to images (esp. remotely served ads) can often be remedied by hard coding the image dimensions in the HTML img element, allowing the browser to render the remainder of the page while reserving space for the as yet undelivered image. Without hard coded dimensions the browser can not properly render the page until all images have been delivered since it does not know what the image dimensions are and how much space to reserve for them in the rendered document. In the case of #2, my best guess is an SQL timeout may have occurred since I assume your BBS is storing most of its content in an SQL database (presumably MySQL).
The third case seems to generally correlate with DNS resolution issues for ncwoodworker.net. When the cached RR (resource records) expire in my DNS servers sometimes the DNS servers for NCWW will fail to answer when queried. During this period, sometimes even NS1 and NS2.ncwoodworker.net seem to not resolve, which could be indicative of top level DNS issues (i.e. an issue with either NetSol or your domain registrar) since these two IPs should be resolved by top level servers, not the NCWW DNS servers.
I'm not sure if any of this will prove helpful, but it is all that the info available to me at this time.
PS - Over the last day or so I've also noticed a number of posts with previously working embedded images seem to now have broken image placeholders in place of those same images. I'm not sure why embedded images would be disappearing.
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
Ethan, just some extra info on the things you've mentioned as they relate to NCWW
<img ....> Other than the Google based ads, most img params are generated by PHP code supplied by either Jelsoft or Photopost or ... The staff would have to start modifying the PHP code and that can be an issue for a variety of reasons.
DNS - Ethan, I think you know part of this, but just to be consistent: each User's DNS is first served by the DNS cache on their own machine and then recursively through other DNS servers in the ISP's DNS structure and then to our name servers ns1.ncwoodworker.net & ns2.ncwoodworker.net and then if necessary to our hoster's backup DNS. Generally, when there have been issues, the seem to to focus on 2 areas. Your ISPs DNS servering system or ncww's name servers.
Be aware that against all normal guidelines and common sense, ns1 and ns2 are not separate machines, they are in fact on the same machine as NCWW but with different ip addresses. So site slow or down? so it name serving.
mysql timeouts? Again the db server is on the same machine as the website. Both good and bad.
For issues where DNS is suspected, change your default servers from your ISP to something else. There are several services which will let you use their dns servers for free. They are generally much more reliable and faster than most broadband ISPs. Then there is the ever popular 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4 (google's) Switch to one of these and see if some things get better. Give it at least a day to evaluate.
Another thing is to but the system in to "debug Mode", which will put a lot of things in a long table displayed at the end of each page. This page provides a lot of internal timing information(not ip related) which can be interpreted by the admins.
That should confuse the non it types :rotflm:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1
<img ....> Other than the Google based ads, most img params are generated by PHP code supplied by either Jelsoft or Photopost or ... The staff would have to start modifying the PHP code and that can be an issue for a variety of reasons.
DNS - Ethan, I think you know part of this, but just to be consistent: each User's DNS is first served by the DNS cache on their own machine and then recursively through other DNS servers in the ISP's DNS structure and then to our name servers ns1.ncwoodworker.net & ns2.ncwoodworker.net and then if necessary to our hoster's backup DNS. Generally, when there have been issues, the seem to to focus on 2 areas. Your ISPs DNS servering system or ncww's name servers.
Be aware that against all normal guidelines and common sense, ns1 and ns2 are not separate machines, they are in fact on the same machine as NCWW but with different ip addresses. So site slow or down? so it name serving.
mysql timeouts? Again the db server is on the same machine as the website. Both good and bad.
For issues where DNS is suspected, change your default servers from your ISP to something else. There are several services which will let you use their dns servers for free. They are generally much more reliable and faster than most broadband ISPs. Then there is the ever popular 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4 (google's) Switch to one of these and see if some things get better. Give it at least a day to evaluate.
Another thing is to but the system in to "debug Mode", which will put a lot of things in a long table displayed at the end of each page. This page provides a lot of internal timing information(not ip related) which can be interpreted by the admins.
That should confuse the non it types :rotflm:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_1) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.112 Safari/535.1
A few comments to followup.
My DNS servers are not ISP supplied. I'm not a typical Internet user, I run my own servers over a high speed business internet connection -- complete with several hours of UPS power and generator to boot. As such, my DNS servers are my own and their performance parameters quite well known to me. They are continuously monitored for performance and any critical delays in serving authoratative records generates automated alarms (there is no point for generating an alarm for non-authoratative/recursive queries since these are served by third-party servers and beyond my control). In my experience, the best way to debug DNS issues is via the linux 'host' command coupled with tcpdump and/or ethereal packet capture and review -- you can follow a lookup from start to finish.
I've suspected that your NS1 and NS2 were the same physical machine though I hadn't positively confirmed that -- they both seem to suffer identical performance issues at the same time -- a poor setup on the providers part as they should have moved atleast one of them to a slave server (setting up a caching slave is pretty trivial on their part and one server should handle many thousands of customers). Nonetheless, the resolution of NS1 and NS2 should *not* depend exclusively on NS1 and NS2 since the IP addresses for these two unique records should be provided by a top-level (registrar) DNS server at the same time the initial domain lookup for "ncwoodworker.net" is performed. In other words, while I need a functioning NS1 and NS2 to perform lookups *within* ncwoodworker.net I should never be unable to resolve the nameservers for ncwoodworker.net since this response is *not* provided by NS1 & NS2 but rather by a registrar's top-level DNS server whose job it is to resolve a query requesting the authoratative servers for the ncwoodworker.net zone. This behavior is critical to proper DNS functionality because the DNS servers NS1 & NS2 can not provide authoratative answers to a querying DNS server until the IPs for NS1 and NS2 become known to the querying DNS server, for this reason they are included in the answer to the initial top-level NS-record lookup for ncwoodworker.net.
Running the SQL and web (and whatever other server processes) on the same machine greatly increases the risks of timeouts occurring. Whenever server activity peaks and either CPU or Disk IO resources (or worse, Memory) become starved (due to most any event) timeouts become inevitable. I made that mistake many years (~12) ago myself, mea culpa. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, once I had moved my web server to a less powerful server, overall performance improved by orders of magnitude. Nowadays, I am very careful about what services I allow to share a physical server as a result of that lesson -- especially services that can starve Disk I/O or CPU resources since they will tend to fight one another quite viciously in cases of interdependency (e.g. one service depending upon another in use). SquirrelMail is a good example for my purposes -- it places deceptively little strain on my web-server but a considerable strain on my mail server's Disk I/O. If the web-server were placed on the same machine as the mail server the mail-server's momentary Disk I/O starvation will cripple SquirrelMail (web) even though SquirrelMail places very little demand on the web server because the web server still needs some Disk I/O bandwidth to fulfill its duties -- resulting in annoying timeouts and erratic behavior that is avoided by running these two tasks on different physical servers.
I was not aware of the site's Debug mode, I'm assuming this is an admin item since one generally does not want users tinkering with debug output. Otherwise, I am still pretty new to vBulletin and have never had need to administer such a sight, so I'm not familiar with all its capabilities.
As for the img elements aspect, I'm really disappointed that the developers for vBulletin would not have exploited *any* opportunity to specify image dimensions -- especially for static images and fixed-size ads -- since doing so *greatly* improves site rendering speed by allowing the browser to assign place holders until such time as the image download completes. As a former developer, I always considered this SOP because the performance improvement is literally night-and-day with respect to end user experience. Modifying PHP code is not terribly difficult (license issues aside), but it would be an awful hack for something the system ought to be doing for itself. Thank you for elaborating on this issue.
Steve, I really appreciate your comments and taking the time to respond to my post. I share the above comments in the hope that they will ultimately prove useful to the NCWW admins. If not, I apologize for the additional commentary.
Best wishes to all!
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
My DNS servers are not ISP supplied. I'm not a typical Internet user, I run my own servers over a high speed business internet connection -- complete with several hours of UPS power and generator to boot. As such, my DNS servers are my own and their performance parameters quite well known to me. They are continuously monitored for performance and any critical delays in serving authoratative records generates automated alarms (there is no point for generating an alarm for non-authoratative/recursive queries since these are served by third-party servers and beyond my control). In my experience, the best way to debug DNS issues is via the linux 'host' command coupled with tcpdump and/or ethereal packet capture and review -- you can follow a lookup from start to finish.
I've suspected that your NS1 and NS2 were the same physical machine though I hadn't positively confirmed that -- they both seem to suffer identical performance issues at the same time -- a poor setup on the providers part as they should have moved atleast one of them to a slave server (setting up a caching slave is pretty trivial on their part and one server should handle many thousands of customers). Nonetheless, the resolution of NS1 and NS2 should *not* depend exclusively on NS1 and NS2 since the IP addresses for these two unique records should be provided by a top-level (registrar) DNS server at the same time the initial domain lookup for "ncwoodworker.net" is performed. In other words, while I need a functioning NS1 and NS2 to perform lookups *within* ncwoodworker.net I should never be unable to resolve the nameservers for ncwoodworker.net since this response is *not* provided by NS1 & NS2 but rather by a registrar's top-level DNS server whose job it is to resolve a query requesting the authoratative servers for the ncwoodworker.net zone. This behavior is critical to proper DNS functionality because the DNS servers NS1 & NS2 can not provide authoratative answers to a querying DNS server until the IPs for NS1 and NS2 become known to the querying DNS server, for this reason they are included in the answer to the initial top-level NS-record lookup for ncwoodworker.net.
Running the SQL and web (and whatever other server processes) on the same machine greatly increases the risks of timeouts occurring. Whenever server activity peaks and either CPU or Disk IO resources (or worse, Memory) become starved (due to most any event) timeouts become inevitable. I made that mistake many years (~12) ago myself, mea culpa. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, once I had moved my web server to a less powerful server, overall performance improved by orders of magnitude. Nowadays, I am very careful about what services I allow to share a physical server as a result of that lesson -- especially services that can starve Disk I/O or CPU resources since they will tend to fight one another quite viciously in cases of interdependency (e.g. one service depending upon another in use). SquirrelMail is a good example for my purposes -- it places deceptively little strain on my web-server but a considerable strain on my mail server's Disk I/O. If the web-server were placed on the same machine as the mail server the mail-server's momentary Disk I/O starvation will cripple SquirrelMail (web) even though SquirrelMail places very little demand on the web server because the web server still needs some Disk I/O bandwidth to fulfill its duties -- resulting in annoying timeouts and erratic behavior that is avoided by running these two tasks on different physical servers.
I was not aware of the site's Debug mode, I'm assuming this is an admin item since one generally does not want users tinkering with debug output. Otherwise, I am still pretty new to vBulletin and have never had need to administer such a sight, so I'm not familiar with all its capabilities.
As for the img elements aspect, I'm really disappointed that the developers for vBulletin would not have exploited *any* opportunity to specify image dimensions -- especially for static images and fixed-size ads -- since doing so *greatly* improves site rendering speed by allowing the browser to assign place holders until such time as the image download completes. As a former developer, I always considered this SOP because the performance improvement is literally night-and-day with respect to end user experience. Modifying PHP code is not terribly difficult (license issues aside), but it would be an awful hack for something the system ought to be doing for itself. Thank you for elaborating on this issue.
Steve, I really appreciate your comments and taking the time to respond to my post. I share the above comments in the hope that they will ultimately prove useful to the NCWW admins. If not, I apologize for the additional commentary.
Best wishes to all!
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
I'm three and a half feet out the door.
Tracy is spearheading a hardware migration. To say we are teaching hippopotamusesses to do jumping jacks on a barely frozen pond while juggling bowling balls is an understatement.
For now, most performance issues have been mostly tied to our oft failing hardware.
Looking forward to reading this exchange when I get back!
Jim
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Tracy is spearheading a hardware migration. To say we are teaching hippopotamusesses to do jumping jacks on a barely frozen pond while juggling bowling balls is an understatement.
For now, most performance issues have been mostly tied to our oft failing hardware.
Looking forward to reading this exchange when I get back!
Jim
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:5.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/5.0
Ethan, I think we have both gotten way beyond woodworking:swoon::gar-La; If you and/or admins want to continue this discussion, we should do it off line. I suspect most everyone else is bored.:XXcompute
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5
naw... I am completely fascinated. [totally confused but]....... nope no smileys yet! :-D Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0
I left a message for our hosting company today. I fully expect an answer tomorrow. They are working to correct the site issues. We should not panic, but we should have faith that we will be up and running this week. I am on top of the site issues and guarantee that we will be the top notch site that we were a few months ago. We are being moved to a dedicated, upgraded, server as I type this response. I would ask all members to be patient as our hosts work diligently to correct any site related problems. Thank You!
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0
I suspect most would agree, but NCWW is already a top notch community and a darn good site to boot, occassional glitches aside.
We all appreciate the hardwork you all have invested in maintaining this site and the extraordinary gift bestowed to our community by Steve's early blood, sweat and tears.
I'm perfectly content to let Steve's and my own comments stand as they are and if there is any info you all can glean from them then all the better. If anyone wishes to continue the discussion further I am happy to do so either in private or as a continuation of this thread at the admins discretion. If I can offer any advice or assistance on the above, or any other topic, feel free to ask. My body may betray me, but I still (mostly) have my mind. :wink_smil
To Froglips -- Please, I beg of you, don't forget to attach a photo of the dancing, juggling, ice-quaking Hippo. I'm really looking forward to it! :rotflm:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0)
Whatever y'all did it fixed my problem!!!:banana: :banana: :banana: :banana: :banana:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.1
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