Status report - restructuring

The site seems to be behaving itself tonight, cross fingers and touch wood ( jemima's head will do. ).

 

That not very nice @Mistress B

 

Is dead slow just now.............

 

The speed seems to vary depending on when you log in. I sometimes imagine that the Mansion's host server is steam driven and that the little men who look after it are idling about instead of stoking the furnaces with coal. It either needs changing to an electric driven one or getting the whip out and encouraging the men to start shovelling coal.

 

Very true, that is. And having less money to buy stuff is a bad thing.

 

There are a lot of people on.

A few moments ago there were 160 total. Note that most of them are guests. And, a lot of robots.

 

The ratio of members to guests is interesting. And more robots than members!

 

the certificate is expired? Connection is Not Secure. as of Friday June 16, 2017 4:22 eastern says certificate expired yesterday?

 

Such imagery! choose the whip! @Mistress B Tell us more!!!

 

lol @beck We now have a warning about dire consequences if we continue to proceed to the Mansion. Something about a certificate.

At least it works faster now hardly anyone logs in. Perhaps my threat of the whip has caused this.

 

Thank you carrie. Does this now mean that we are all certified............

 

Just a few thoughts ...

Why are there "guests" at the mansion ... meaning there is no cost to join the mansion and the point of any Forum is to welcome new members to be part of a community ...

I would guess that the "robots" are causing the issues to the site loading slow ... Google is an upstanding robot that does not beat up a site and respects what ever limits you place on it ... but I have had to completely block robots from web sites because they where beating it to death spidering through it ... it appears it is time to block some of the bad robots from the mansion.

 

It really is a drudge sometimes getting the pages to load on the site lately for whatever reason something must be done soon as there must be lots of folk who give up and look elsewhere.

 

Dreadfully slow. In chat there are times I must type my comment 2 or 2 times before it will post. I keep getting --server time out. Arrrghhhh!

 

yawn.

yeah free site and all... but really, really, really slow

 

Have not had to deal with admin of a website in a few years so I'm out of touch with the current trouble makers, but they are easy to spot when you look at the traffic stats ... they will have multiple pages open at once etc.

 

Pardon my ignorance who what where whatfor why where and when are who's robots looking at CM?
To what end I can not even imagine but then again I have a smartphone that since my neice chose it and registered theownership for me it has never been online since.
My does google send robots in here?

I do not always log in especially if I know I wont be posting or dont find something to respond to is not logging in now an issue?
Multiple pages open at once... if multiple is more than one I'm guilty is that an issue?
Really I do not know the answer to these questions or I would not ask.
Are we saying there are things we can do to not contribute to the sometimes slow response times on this site? If so let us know.

If any kindly offered response to this post requires me to look up any computer/internet savvy technician/geek terms then my apologies but you wasted your time if it was your genuine intention to enlighten me.

One does not need to know how something works beyond the rudimentary to enjoy its use.
ie: I sometimes watch TV. How everything that can take place on my TV screens is brought about is not only a mystery to me but to be honest its also something about which I care not to spend time worrying about. Not everyone undertands how a fridge works.. or cares.

 

Robots (also called spiders) are the search engines like Google / Bing / etc. ... There are many off brand search engines also.

So the "robots" scan through websites (every page they are allowed to go) and index the content so when you search for something it tells you where to go.

Many of the off brands of robots will ignore a websites rules and try going and indexing even pages it is not supposed to ... but more importantly some will open multiple pages at a rate that can bog down a site (think one every 5 seconds for 4 hours straight and always have 2 - 5 open pulling the data from them) then if you have 2 robots doing that at once it slows the site down because of all the calls being made to the database that contains all the information.

The above mentioned database has limits set on it as to how many calls it will process and the website as a whole has a limit on the total data it can send at any given second.

So think of it as trying to get on the highway ... During off hours it is easy to drive down the entrance ramp and merge into the little traffic that is there ... but during rush hour (when you have bad robots) it become difficult to get on the highway and even once you are on it is difficult to change lanes etc.

So by allowing guests to access all the Web pages you also allow robots to access all the Web pages ... limit the area guest are allowed can also limit the robots. So logging in is not an issue, only as related to bad bots.

Personally I would just block the troublesome bots, and only allow the ones that behave, and leave the guest settings the way they are. But like everything there are many ways to achieve the same goal.

And ... no there is nothing you are doing (most likely ) to slow the site ... you would have to be pinging it every few seconds all day to have any effect.

 

oooh that's a thing innit cos i don't know what the robots did as well and now i do and i will tell my Mistress cos She never knowed as well. It does take ages and ages to get on the motorway by us if its the wrong time and its a lot better at about 10am and sometimes my Mistress don't go in to work till then and She say its better then.

 

Well now I know what a robot does on the internet... thank you for clearing that up.
I now know enough to know that I could not possibly offer any kind of solution to this unless blocking all robots or all searches by non-members is an option.

 

Since no one has stepped up yet to offer assistance... I will. If the administration wants to send me a message I will exchange contact details so we can move forward sorting this out.

I am software architect (read: developer) and this is in my area of expertise. MySql, mssql, apache, iis, online blogging software, forum software, etc etc.

No need to exchange passwords for your hosting environment. We can schedule a time and use WebEx, GoToMeeting, Zoom, etc. They provide call-in numbers internationally or you can use built-in mic & speakers for audio. I'm located in the southeast US (EST) and you could call directly if preferred.

The page load time is abysmal and it cannot be that hard to fix...

Regarding everyone guessing at the problem and talking about crawlers / prioritizing searches: that won't fix the problem. database queries are taking an absurdly long time. Every page you load creates a database call -- listing all threads, viewing all replies, loading settings from the database etc. The problem is with the database server.

With shared hosting it is in the hosting provider's best interest to overprovision services compared to hardware performance. They are 'squeezing' extra revenue out of the same hardware at the expense of performance. That's just business...