C.B. is SLOWWWW...

Submitted by Phosphor on Thu, 2006-03-30 19:01.

Member's Forum

Not complaining so much as worried/curious.

OK. Maybe I am complaining. It's often so slow I want to click off somewhere else.

Can't be my 6 Mbps cable connection.

I wonder if it's slow because it's being "sifted" because it's coming from the Middle East? [EDIT: I did some research and I see that the Dreamhost server is in Los Angeles, California]

Is it slow because of the type of connection the hosting server(s) has to the Intarweb backbone?

Or is it slow because of the DRUPAL script?

Probably our lovely friends DH

Submitted by Jammo on Thu, 2006-03-30 19:10.

Not sure why this is happening...but its probably DreamHost

.. also, Phosphor, I noticed the CAPS, what are you using for a cms? Im currently working with Joomla and apart from lack of plugins im pretty happy.

__
jammindesigns.co.uk

"CAPS"? What are you

Submitted by Phosphor on Thu, 2006-03-30 20:06.

"CAPS"? What are you referring to? (umm...yes, I'm YELLING about this forum load time as being SLOWWWW!!! Other than that, I'm clueless about what you mean).

"cms"? Do you mean content management system?

I'm not sure what you're asking me about.

You do know I have no actual connection with the running of CreativeBits, right?

:)

Submitted by Jammo on Fri, 2006-03-31 17:44.

On the last line Phosphor, you had " DRUPAL " .. I just wondered if you were shouting it because you didnt like drupal or something, so I was asking if you used something else?

Cms - yes I used the buzzword for Content Management System,

Yes I know very well, Phosphor, thanks :)

__
jammindesigns.co.uk

HEH!

Submitted by Phosphor on Mon, 2006-04-03 16:54.

HEH!

I think I used all capitals for Drupal because it sounds like a military acronym to me. And I think it's the first time I've ever typed it.

Nothing more sinister than that.

Oh Lol

Submitted by Jammo on Tue, 2006-04-04 18:48.

I understand now, haha.

Or, as it says in the dictionary, " D'oh "

__
jammindesigns.co.uk

Sorry, I don't know what's

Submitted by Ivan on Fri, 2006-03-31 10:47.

Sorry, I don't know what's causing it. I'll try to investigate with Dreamhost. It can't be the engine, becuase nothing has been changed on it recently and it was running fine up intil a few days ago.

It has been very slow all

Submitted by arvana on Fri, 2006-03-31 17:39.

It has been very slow all along for me, since the move to Drupal (min 5 seconds wait before each page load). I wonder if you have a database error or misconfiguration? That's what usually slows cms's down in my experience -- I don't think you have enough modules enabled to explain the slowdown.

I keep coming back despite it being slow though, so it's not all bad. :-)

Arvana
arvanadesign.com

Hopefully when we upgrade to

Submitted by Ivan on Sat, 2006-04-01 13:35.

Hopefully when we upgrade to Drupal 4.7 it will run much faster. I have heard reports of sites speeding up quite a bit.

OK....just before I posted

Submitted by Phosphor on Tue, 2006-04-04 19:01.

OK....just before I posted this, I visited C.B. for the first time today. As I've been experiencing quite a lot over the past several months I arrive at the home page to discover that I'm not logged in (WHY does that happen? I'm not forbidding cookies). I NEVER log-out on purpose. It's easy for me to notice because I have my C.B. prefs set to use the light (Cement?) CSS, and I was confronted with the dark default CSS. My first visit today brought up the home page very quickly...just 2 or 3 seconds.

So, I decided to do some informal testing of load times, and the speed seems to hinge on whether I'm logged in. But, even that sometimes seems to make little difference. On the whole, though, page loads are generally MUCH faster when I'm NOT logged in. What follows are reasonably acccurate load times:

Intial "Log In"---->15 seconds.
Click on "Forums"---->18 seconds.
Click "Back Button" on my mouse---->12 seconds.
Log Out---->11 seconds.
Click "Forums"---->8 seconds.
Click "Back" button on my mouse---->2 seconds
Click "Forward" in Firefox window UI---->1.5 seconds.
Click "Log In"---->53 seconds.
Click link for this thread---->11 seconds.
Click "Log Out"---->2.5 seconds.
Click "Forums"---->11 seconds.
Click "CreativeBits" logo at top of page---->1.5 seconds.
Click "Log In"---->20 seconds.
Click "Forums"---->12 seconds.
Click "Log Out"---->3 seconds.
Click "Forums"---->2 seconds.
Click "Back Button" on my mouse---->Instant
Click "Log In"---->30 seconds.
Click "Forums"---->15 seconds.
Click "Back Button" on my mouse---->15 seconds.
Click "Forums"---->19 seconds.
Click link for this thread---->23 seconds.
Click "Reply"---->17 seconds.

Compose this message. I was also testing while I was composing, and got similar times, including 67 seconds for this "reply" page to come up.

Who knows how long it'll take to "Submit" this message. I'm going to guess 33 seconds, just for shits and giggles. PLACE YOUR BETS! [EDIT: It took 14 seconds to "Preview" and 26 seconds to "Submit")

Can you understand why I find these laod times totally objectionable?

I'm experiencing very slow

Submitted by Ivan on Tue, 2006-04-04 19:24.

I'm experiencing very slow response time as well, especially at peek hours when both Europe and US are up. I think it's because of the very high traffic on aotw, which is hosted on the same dedicated server. I'll be moving the two sites on separate servers to make sure speed increases.

Oh, and you are only logged

Submitted by Ivan on Tue, 2006-04-04 19:26.

Oh, and you are only logged in for 24 hours.

Why? This is the only site I

Submitted by Phosphor on Wed, 2006-04-05 00:55.

Why?

This is the only site I visit that logs me out after so short a period of time.

I don't really know why. All

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-05 03:53.

I don't really know why. All Drupal sites are like this. It's for your security. I'll try to do a hack, so you can change the time manually to more than 24h.

"It's for your

Submitted by Phosphor on Wed, 2006-04-05 15:45.

"It's for your security."

DUDE! I'm on a Mac! And I'm the only person who uses it!!! Next, you'll suggest I move my whole operation to an underground bomb shelter!!!

I give that to you. I meant

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-05 18:51.

I give that to you. I meant to say it's for security in general.

Interesting fact..

Submitted by Tigerstorm on Wed, 2006-04-05 00:25.

I guess we all are fed up with the slow speed of CB..
This is Ivan's department but I can telly you all that Drupal 4.7 is kicking 4.6 in speed :)

This is what the sys admins

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-05 03:58.

This is what the sys admins said at dreamhost:

Looks like the webservers ran the system out of memory and it was eating heavily into swap.. The site is running quickly again.

I was able to grab a process snapshot, and it looks like it was mostly your basic-argon webserver. I did not get a chance to see which site it was, though I imagine it will happen again.

I'm not certain why the memory usage for your apache server is ticking upward, it points sorta at a memory leak in some code running on your site, but I'm not sure.

So, we'll have to check the logs to see if there is any errors indicating memory leak, but I think the issue is much simpler. aotw has been receiving 50k+ page loads a day, so it's simply too much for the server at peak times. I'll move aotw to another server to be safe.

By looking at the logs, the

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-05 04:14.

By looking at the logs, the other issue is that there were hundreds of tries to post spam comments by some poker site. It looks like a script is hammering the cb server. I think I can try solving it with .htaccess is I'm lucky and the spam is coming from one IP.

Ya must have done something

Submitted by pompo on Sun, 2006-04-02 18:18.

Ya must have done something to it Ivan :)

It's pretty dang fast now with Cox cable!

_P_o_m_p_o _M_u_l_t_i_m_e_d_i_a
http://www.pompo.com
=============================================
You will know fear...Then you will know pain.
Then you will use a Mac.

We identified it's

Submitted by Ivan on Sat, 2006-04-08 15:19.

We identified it's defiinitely not a memory issue. It's a CPU overload issue which only happens at peak times. We found a bunch of spam robots trying to post to cb, which take up a lot of cpu cycles probably. Their IPs have been banned and will be banned continously. Hope this won't cause any issues for normal operation.

We figured that the slowdown

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-12 04:39.

We figured that the slowdown is caused by the huge videos on aotw. So, they have been moved to another server. Let's see if this improves the situation. If not it's probably something else. Pls let me know!

Just like to say, it's

Submitted by Abdul on Thu, 2006-04-13 15:43.

Just like to say, it's getting better now. Although there's a little delay in page loading, but it's good alright.

More info

Submitted by kbahey on Tue, 2006-04-18 19:17.

By now, everyone must have read the front page post on disabling feeds temporarily, where I explained a bit what was happening.

This seems to have sped things up a bit. Please comment here or there on whether you think it is better, how much better, ...etc.

--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

Dunno but I still experience slowness?

Submitted by Tigerstorm on Tue, 2006-04-18 19:32.

Dunno but I can't say I've notice much difference between shutting the RSS feeds down.. I'm still having a bit of a problem with CB being slow..

When I visit CB or Browsing the site I always get that the site is loading and this could take 1min or more, after a while the site display.. Kinda frustrating..

I know many people who uses the feed to keep in touch with the new articles at Creativebits so removing them would mean certain people won't keep in touch with the site..

Dunno if I'm wrong here but wouldn't a sort of balance load server help CB on the RSS feed and Database? Or perhaps that's really expensive or an crazy idea?

Zend optimizer is installed

Submitted by Ivan on Wed, 2006-04-19 15:31.

Zend optimizer is installed for faster PHP.

Bottleneck removed

Submitted by kbahey on Sat, 2006-04-22 12:50.

Earlier today, we were able to know the cause of the slow down, and implement coding and database changes that address the issue.

I think the site should be much faster now for everyone. We also reenabled the RSS feeds after that fix, so things should be fully functional for everyone.

--
Drupal development and customization: 2bits.com
Personal: Baheyeldin.com

Sooo much nicer

Submitted by Jammo on Sat, 2006-04-22 14:48.

Thank you soooo much for fixing this guys, its great to have CB running at normal speeds once again.

I've tested it from my home computer, and the computers at work and its working fast.

Thanks again guys.

__
jammindesigns.co.uk

I'm curious what the

Submitted by arvana on Sat, 2006-04-22 18:24.

I'm curious what the bottleneck was, since I have a few Drupal sites myself, though none with load-time problems so far. Have you upgraded to 4.7?

By the way, we're practically neighbours -- I live in Guelph!

Arvana
arvanadesign.com

The problem appears only

Submitted by Ivan on Sat, 2006-04-22 18:27.

The problem appears only when you have several thousand nodes. And it's a bug in 4.6 that was fixed in 4.7. We are still running 4.6, but the fix was backported to 4.6. We will not run 4.7 until it comes out. It is still in RC stage.