forums still slow and flaky
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The site still takes a long time to load the first time. However, it seems faster once I 'get in' going from page to page.
Though you are right about the blank pages. I use Firefox, mostly, on a Mac, and I get them too often. A refresh fixes it, but it's a pain. We think it's related to the problem peopl eare having registering, i.e., when someone tries to register, it talkes all system resources to accompliah that task, and then none or left for others.
I am working on the registration problem. Hopefully we'll have a solution soon that will solve all problems.
Marshall
What sort of hardware and software are you running on? (I develop software for a living, so I have more than a passing interest.... )
The symptoms suggest that the system might have entered thrashing mode, where it's spending so much time trying to negotiate the constant barrage of new requests that it never has any time left to do real work.
The thrashing threshold varies somewhat depending on the system design, but it can be as low as ten requests per second (or even lower, if servicing a request takes more than a second or so). The bad news is that (a) once you've reached the threshold, about the only thing you can do to solve the problem is add hardware resources (CPU thread capacity is typically the bottleneck), and (b) every system eventually reaches the threshold, sooner or later.
-Steve
I think you might be right on the trashing theory. There are 54 browsers on the site right now, and we normally have quite a few more than 10 request per second. The problem seems to manifest itself most when a registration process is in progress. And that's what I am currently focusing my efforts on (some people can't register, not many but enough). Once I have that solved, I home it solves other problems (this one), but have it on my list to upgrade the server (RAM then CPU).
Marshall
That's thrashing, not trashing. Trashing is what we do when we discuss the performance of this web site amongst ourselves.
-Steve





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