forums still slow and flaky

The forums still seem really sluggish and I got errors and blank pages rather routinely. Were they going to get switched to forum software like phpbb or punbb instead of the Plone thing? Perhaps getting rid of all the curft in the headers, sidebar and footers would help.

We're fixing this tonite, and the site will be down for a bit.

Marshall

I do still get a lot of blank pages, though...

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.

The long loading time the first time you come in after a site restart is expected, and really is a matter of caching n our end. Once cached, the site works well.

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

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

LOL, one of my more interesting freudian slips lately...

Marshall