Anyone having trouble with initial access to the forum?

Over the past days I find that I can access the forum but only after an extended wait initially, probably several seconds. This does not happen with most other forums I access, or websites come to that. Does any one else also see this effect. Once I’m in it seems fine, so I suspect DNS might be an issue but why only this site?

Stuart

Had trouble with it running slow for a few days - and not just initial access - from about 13 August, but seems to have settled down here now.

I decided to run DNSBench and update my DNS entries yesterday but still no improvement on the first connection to the site, takes what seems like an age but once connected it reacts as expected.

Stuart

noticed it today on 1st access to forum, took over a minute to complete the login sequence of validating my credentials.

Hi All,

No issue this morning here in Hawaii. Everything came up as usual. I just clicked and everything that I went into popped right up.

Regards,

–Stan Y.
Maui, Hawaii

Takes a good 30 secs to get initial page up . In UK.

An on-again, off-again problem here for the past few days.

Slow initial access just occurred here for the first time. Interesting problem.

Has been normal for me until today.

I have noticed the slowdown here several times also, 15-20 seconds to bring up the page.

I had been thinking this could be something to do with user authentication so I just logged out which took quite a long time and then logged back in which took even longer. So I suspect this is an issue with Chris’ server and hopefully he will notice this thread and investigate when he has time.

Stuart

I think the problem may be related to HTTPS SSL certificate.
Check your saved bookmarks links. Make sure you are going to HTTPS and not HTTP as it is that redirect that hangs.

Coincidentally, I did this yesterday and it was very slow. . . but no problems this morning.

And I think most of us will have had https bookmarked for a couple of years now!

Could still be related to the SSL certificate, though?

I have the forum bookmarked as https and it was still slow and logging in was slow however, it seems to be much better today.

l make him aware of it. Curiouisly I have not experienced this particular issue :dontknow:

Rather than people complaining
I just want to say a big thanks to Chris,
the forum admin for keeping it working well 99% of the time :slight_smile:

Nobody’s complaining, Brian.

I didn’t perceive it as complaining.
Just making it known and seeing if it is widespread.
And maybe offering a solution.

I think most all of us appreciate Chris’ efforts.

This is certainly not complaining, we do appreciate Chris’ effort in providing this. The reason I raised this was to see if the problem was something only I had or if it was more widespread which it seems to be although not everyone has the issue. It could well be related to either an end user issue or the internet generally but from the end user perspective it is not easy to judge and we need Chris’ help.

Just to confirm my bookmark is indeed https.

Stuart

Sorry I had a busy weekend and I’m only just getting back to this. I’ve looked at the server and there’s nothing obviously wrong with it from a performance perspective. However, I think this might relate to a large increase in the number of users at certain times. Typical days have a few hundred users accessing the forum. During August there have been days with 2000-4000 users accessing the system. I need to do some digging through the logs to find out what all these extra users are doing and maybe work out why there’s been such a big increase some days. Maybe it’s some form of DOS attack, although I don’t know why anyone would do that, or it could be a search engine spider process gone crazy. Whichever it is, the forum is bound to be slower with 10 times the normal number of users accessing it.