Posted on 10/11/2012 9:54:00 PM PDT by PittsburghAfterDark
I have to ask this very seriously, do you know that this site has been completely unusable to perhaps thousands and thousands of others during either the first Presidential or Vice-Presidential debate and for an hour or so after their respective conclusions?
This has never happened in previous election cycles during debates, election night results or during large breaking news events. Slow? Yes. Unusable, no.
I've had multiple tabs opened for the debates this year and the FR one just wheel spin, wheel spin, wheel spin... blank page, no progress bar moving on the address bar. It's just the internet equivalent of dead air for hours.
If you're getting this during a VP debate I fully expect this site to be dead and inaccessible from 6PM-4AM election night.
Update us would you? What's going on?
Sorry, I’m fresh out of ideas. I’m sure John will get it solved, but I don’t know when. I’m hoping there are still enough people donating to keep FR going through this rough spot.
Denial of Service attacks, perhaps?
I've already purposed that I won't even waste my time coming here for the next presidential debate.
Sorry for my little rant...just a bit frustrated. And yes, I will be making my donation.
No, it’s just election year traffic IMHO.
Jim, I would doubt it’s through put. Can you tell if you’re being attacked. The timing is... interesting.
Being an IT professional, I would suggest that he run it in the cloud, that way it scales, is reliable, and it can add servers dynamically....I do this all the time for customers who have much bigger problems.....
Amazon, Azure, etc.
There are always a lot of freepers and lurkers here at any one time. It has been consistent that on things that could hurt Dims, the site is slow.
It doesn’t seem to be a lack of server power as JimRob said on the live thread that they were operating no where near capacity. It must be a network bottleneck of some sort.
I’d say it’s going to take a careful step-by-step approach to pin the problem down. It would be easier to do it when the servers are under heavy load. You could then change things one at a time to find out what’s going wrong. Not sure how to put such a load on the servers unless you were to trouble shoot during a debate, and that would cause lots of grief.
Perhaps a limited DOS attack by a group of freepers in the wee hours could put enough load to help diagnose this?
Network problems are not my strong suit, I work on embedded stuff and it’s far removed from such a topic....just thinking out loud here.
Most conservative posters and lurkers come when big news is happening. Like now. Occam’s razor.
That sounds well-reasoned!
Can you rent cloud capacity by the hour?
No, no, no.. Bandwidth and/or the inability for the FR scripts to handle a flood of posts simultaneously. Too many viewers attempting to post simultaneously!
Jim, with all due respect you need to consider a professional hosting option if you’re still physically hosting this on a set of machines you’re actually reaching out and maintaining.
If you’re getting hit with DNS attacks during these times, which would not surprise me, so would any number of political sites on the right and left. I lurk on maybe 12-15 sites during peak times and this is the only one where uptime is an issue.
Been a registered and paying member since 2000. I love this site. But it’s gotta get some major improvement. Not just performance, but the forums and everything need to be upgraded to newer formats and platforms. Now, I end up on twitter during major events to get my news and commentary. I hope they can fix this, but frankly this site looks and operates like it did when I joined in 2000.
Only downside to the cloud environment is that you’re at the mercy of your host node. Then again, I do favor dedicated hardware so I’m a bit bias in that regard.
If your having trouble getting on FR. Do what quite a few female freepers do....clean house, use the washing machine, take the clothes out of the dryer and fold. If its a real long time, scrub the kitchen floor.....:O)
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