Very slow page loading

[Yora]

For the past week or so, the forum is terribly slow for me. It often takes half a minute for a new page to show up while Firefox says "Waiting for www.giantitp.com..." and I get lots of Error 500 messages as well. I also see a lot more "This page is having too much traffic, try again later" messages than usual. And this is the only page where I have anything like that.

Is that just me, or do others as well have problems with connecting to the forum?

[Volthawk]

I've been noticing that as well.

[Serpentine]

It's nigh-unusable sometimes. I'm also getting a new type of error message (possibly the same in the other threads). I'll copy-paste it here next time it comes up.

[Howler Dagger]

Im getting the "server is too busy, try again later" messages WAY more than I used to, starting on sunday.

[irenicObserver]

Getting errors of all kinds now.

[Gullintanni]

To be fair, these kinds of errors have been getting incrementally more common owing to server congestion. Perhaps the increase you're all noticing is symptomatic of traffic increasing further to the site?

I've also noticed that posting on the weekends here can be pretty difficult though, so nobody's crazy.

[irenicObserver]

I don't remember anyone saying it wasn't.

[Anarion]

I've been seeing a lot of error 503 "service unavailable" which I assume is also part of the congestion. Mostly in the last 4-5 days.

[Traab]

I have all three issues. I waited almost 30 seconds for this page to load just so I could reply! I get the same extreme amount of server busy and error messages mentioned here. But its honestly the lengthy page load times that are bugging me the most.

[Serpentine]

Annnnnd now every time I try to report a post (nevermind which), the 500 Internal Server Error comes up :smallsigh: Seriously, I've tried about half a dozen times now, and although the rest of the forums are more or less working fine, not once has the report thing come up properly. I have no idea whether it went through, or if I'm spamming the report thread thingy.

[The Bushranger]

Just remember, even now the server is still over 9000% better than it was a few years ago.

[Drolyt]

The current server cannot handle all the traffic it gets, that's why the Giant added the ads. If they are successful maybe we will get a new server (that'd be cool). Also, the server is designed to prioritize the comic, and several new ones have come out recently.

[Mordokai]

Just remember, even now the server is still over 9000% better than it was a few years ago.

"It's better than it was when it was really bad" is hardly a reason for celebrating.

Especially when situation is still(or should say, again?)... bad.

[The Bushranger]

Given that the server goes down for about five minutes or less at a time, as opposed to being shut down for 36 hours sometimes...I'd call that a significant improvement.

[Weezer]

Given that the server goes down for about five minutes or less at a time, as opposed to being shut down for 36 hours sometimes...I'd call that a significant improvement.

It's certainly a major improvement to how things got before the last server upgrade, then the site was nigh-unusable for extended period of time. However, things are starting to get bad again, hopefully the ad revenue kicks in soon.

[The Giant]

We're aware of the problems, and the fact that they've gotten worse over the last week (possibly as a result of security updates by our hosting company (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=12367001&postcount=9)). As has been mentioned, this is the main reason we added the advertisements, so we could afford to switch to a dedicated forum server.

So far the ad income has been erratic, ranging from "not quite enough to cover what we need" to "nowhere near enough to cover what we need." As a result, we're investigating a few lower-cost solutions, but I'm not certain when we'll be able to pull the trigger on any of them...maybe soon, maybe not until January.

Also, there may be significant downtime for the forum when we do so (days offline, in all likelihood), so that's something that everyone should brace themselves for. It should be announced more than a week in advance, though, in any case.

Since the problem is widespread and endemic to the software itself, individual reports of slowness/errors are not as useful as they are in other situations.Therefore, I'm going to lock this to prevent it from spiraling out of control. If Rawhide wants to post through the lock and explain any of this in more detail, he can.