The connection has timed out

[Joaz Banbeck]

Okay, so this might be interesting. At 10pm eastern, I checked the joaz/mw's thread, and as bonobo described, while the diagrams in the first 8 post loaded immediately, the next 8 took 20 seconds, and the last few never finished loading at all. And after trying to access that thread, I wasn't able to load any other page on the site for a few minutes.

Does anyone else see this? Have MW and I created the Thread of Doom?

It is the link in my sig.

[logan]

Okay, so this might be interesting. At 10pm eastern, I checked the joaz/mw's thread, and as bonobo described, while the diagrams in the first 8 post loaded immediately, the next 8 took 20 seconds, and the last few never finished loading at all. And after trying to access that thread, I wasn't able to load any other page on the site for a few minutes.

Does anyone else see this? Have MW and I created the Thread of Doom?

It is the link in my sig.

It's been happening to me when viewing and esp. when trying to reply in a thread with many diagrams. (It's been very difficult to update my journal.)

[ChradH]

Okay, so this might be interesting. At 10pm eastern, I checked the joaz/mw's thread, and as bonobo described, while the diagrams in the first 8 post loaded immediately, the next 8 took 20 seconds, and the last few never finished loading at all. And after trying to access that thread, I wasn't able to load any other page on the site for a few minutes.

Does anyone else see this? Have MW and I created the Thread of Doom?

It is the link in my sig.

Right now the Malkovich thread loads fine. Yesterday the diagrams loaded sluggishly or not at all, and later the connection time out error page appeared. Didn't check other Malkovich games at the time, but threads without diagrams seemed to be not affected. Location is northern Germany.
What about the server log files, did someone take a look at them by now?

[Bonobo]

Okay, so this might be interesting. At 10pm eastern, I checked the joaz/mw's thread, and as bonobo described, while the diagrams in the first 8 post loaded immediately, the next 8 took 20 seconds, and the last few never finished loading at all. And after trying to access that thread, I wasn't able to load any other page on the site for a few minutes.

Does anyone else see this? Have MW and I created the Thread of Doom? [..]

It’s not only that thread. When trying to reply to this comment I had to wait for about 20 minutes until I no more got that old “The server does not respond at all. Try again a bit later.” message Oddly, previewing this my comment goes very fast now.

And it definitely seems to be not just here in Germany—last night I wanted to link an L19 thread in Google+, and after I pasted the URL it never showed that thread’s information. Usually it show’s the info of a linked page pretty fast (before hitting “submit”!).

[CnP]

From UK, I have been unable to access L19 for a couple of days (until just now). Also, the Tapatalk client couldn't access it either. Now everything seems to be okay (I was getting twitchy having no L19 fix)

[Joaz Banbeck]

I edited the post that may have been causing problems. Does anyone still experience it?

[jts]

I edited the post that may have been causing problems. Does anyone still experience it?

I just checked and the thread loaded instantaneously (on the same device as last night). Maybe give malky cat his own thread, and add diagrams until we can recreate the problem?

[Joaz Banbeck]

I edited the post that may have been causing problems. Does anyone still experience it?

I just checked and the thread loaded instantaneously (on the same device as last night).

Now it loads fast for me too, regardless of device, with no after effects. Dang cat.

Maybe give malky cat his own thread, and add diagrams until we can recreate the problem?

Good idea. I'll do it.

[daal]

I can connect again! Thanks!

[Bonobo]

I edited the post that may have been causing problems. Does anyone still experience it?

Not with that thread, but “liking” your comment, the one I’m replying to here, seemed to take an eternety. That other thread you vs. MW loaded fine a few minutes ago.

BTW, can you tell us what exactly you edited? I’d like to try that, too. Might be good to know what we should better avoid.

<edit>


And after submitting this reply, it again took eons to load the “submitted” page and to take me back to this thread

</edit>

[Joaz Banbeck]

...
BTW, can you tell us what exactly you edited? I’d like to try that, too. Might be good to know what we should better avoid...]

WHAT? Are you crazy? You want me to post instructions - where the entire world can see them - about how to create a page that will render an L19 user's account virtually inoperable after he clicks on it?

No way am I going to do that. I'll tell Jordus, but that's it. I'm taking this one to my grave.

[admin]
Although I may resurrect it for particularly troublesome users as a precursor to banning.
Hehehehe..."Please click on this link to see the our new amendments to the TOS"
[/admin]

[Uberdude]

I can connect for the first time in days without a proxy. I find it hard to believe a dodgy thread caused the entire site to be down for people in some parts of the world but not others...

[Bonobo]

...
BTW, can you tell us what exactly you edited? I’d like to try that, too. Might be good to know what we should better avoid...]

WHAT? Are you crazy?

You don’t really expect me to answer this, do you? And if I did, it wouldn’t be a credible answer, would it?

You want me to post instructions - where the entire world can see them - about how to create a page that will render an L19 user's account virtually inoperable after he clicks on it?

Well, I realized what this would mean right after submitting my comment But wait, you wrote “an L19 user’s account” (emphasis by me)—very interesting. I thought it had just to do with that Malkovich page doing something to the server.

No way am I going to do that. I'll tell Jordus, but that's it. I'm taking this one to my grave.

OK, I guess that’s the thing to do.

Anyway, I guess one day I’m a-gonna go and shoot all computers.

[Joaz Banbeck]

I can connect for the first time in days without a proxy. I find it hard to believe a dodgy thread caused the entire site to be down for people in some parts of the world but not others...

Agreed, that is weird. But I have a guess how it could happen. I only saw real slowdowns in the mornings here. That is when a lot of Europeans are on.

We are on a shared server. If our neighbors are using their bandwidth mostly around 6:00-12:00 Greenwich time, and if we have one munged thread that strains the SQL server, then the shortage would only be felt when are neighbors are maxing their usage.

But..seeing that there are no more reports to this thread, I think we can say that the problem is fixed.
If it appears again, I'm going to grab a sledgehammer and join Bonobo.

[xed_over]

I haven't been able to read/replyto this (and other) thread for days.

What I usually notice is that the site will work fine for a some days and weeks, then any thread longer than 20 posts will start to takes minutes to load (if not timeout altogether). After a several days of that, I assume the sql server gets restarted, everything is back to normal, for a time.

I see these cycles every few weeks, and have for months, years. I've reported this a number of times in the past, but no one else seems to notice. To me, it feels related. I think I'm just feeling the strain on the sql server sooner than everyone else because, as an aside, I have my default number of posts per page set much higher than the default.

This recent "outage" was worse than others in the past. I could load short threads, but not longer multi-page (>40 posts) threads.