Most people should now be accessing the forum through the Cloudflare CDN. This provides more local caching of some files as well as other benefits. I didn’t know they had a free plan The analytics are showing some interesting things, e.g. the China traffic is still there and is getting on for double the traffic from the rest of the world. Cloudflare are now blocking it too so my server never sees it.
I’ve run out of things to improve performance now. There is a trick with creating images as CSS sprites but that’s quite a lot of work so I’m steering clear of it.
Have to say things are running a bit slow today, when logging in or trying to show unread posts, but maybe not a problem at your end. I’ll keep an eye on it. . .
Same here, I always remain logged in but after been away from the computer for an hour, getting the first response for “unread” is > 6 seconds.
After that it is as quick as it should be.
And just now prevented from replying to a PM by being suspected of being a robot and having to answer silly questions! The reply I had laboriously typed no longer existed, and I had to log out and back in before I could do anything else. . .
While login seems better the past week, yesterday I saw a delay logging in…footer said over 150 “guests” online. But overall I would say things are better than when this fiasco started
I don’t think that’s new. It’s happened to me a time or two. I don’t know what causes it though but fortunately it seems rare enough that I don’t think it’s a major issue.
I’m still not convinced that the Chinese traffic isn’t causing problems. The firewalls have blocked over 250,000 hits from China in the last 24 hours. Having said that the forum seems pretty responsive to me most of the time. When it’s sluggish I find that other sites are sluggish to which suggests it’s my connection rather than the forum.
That’s the weird thing. The server is doing the same thing every day. I didn’t make any changes in the last 24 hours either. The only thing I can see is that the number of attempts by China to access the forum dropped from 260,000 to 200,000 between the two days. That traffic should be blocked before it hits the server for the last 2-3 days so that shouldn’t be affecting it anyway. Consider me puzzled.
I’ve looked at the Forum Firewall messages before and they’re inserted by the mod but I couldn’t see a way to get rid of them without disabling part of what the mod does.
Although things have considerably improved where I still do see an slight delay of maybe between 5 and 10 seconds is the first access. Once on I have not had any issue with delays either browsing the forum or posting. Also as mentioned earlier I have not been logged out by the forum at all. Anyway for me the current status is perfectly liveable with. Thanks Chris for all your hard work and sorry I stirred this up originally :roll:
I’m still digging as I get a chance. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of sessions (4-5000) in use. These are for logged in users and tend to last around 90 minutes so that’s a lot to be seeing in such a short times. That’s sent me back to look at the logs and I see a lot of BingBot accesses. The IP addresses for BingBot scans are supposed to come from MSN domains but a couple of IP addresses I’ve looked aren’t linked with any domain so I’m now wondering if there’s another ‘attack’ going on from someone pretending to be BingBot. Time for work soon but I’ll try to investigate some more this evening.