Site slowdown cause

[Steve St.Laurent]

I have spent the entire night researching the cause of the intermittent slow server performance over the last several days. Earlier today we were getting slammed by two different search engines and I thought that was the cause at that time. Later I discovered that we were experiencing slow downs even when they were no longer slamming us. What I discovered tonight is that one of our users has a web server that has been slamming the site since January 1st although the worst of it has been the last 3 days. The log files that I had to sort through to trace the problem were 35 Megabytes in size which is why it took all night.



I have emailed the user to let him know of the situation and also contacted our co-location facility to have his IP address blocked until he gets it under control. His IP address has now been blocked at the router at our co-location facility so that should take care of the problem.



To give you an idea of how much traffic this one machine generated, in all of last month I transferred 679Mb of data from the server in browsing the site. In the last 3 days this users PC has transferred 2. 5Gb of data! His PC has transferred 6% of the data of the entire site for the month. It was requesting the "show us your best smoke pics!!!!!!!" thread over and over and over. That thread contains a bunch of pictures from the photo gallery which generates additional queries. All of that was hitting the forums generating tons of queries and bringing the server to it's knees. I apologize for any inconvenience these slowdowns may have caused. I now know one more thing to look for in a slowdown situation and should be able to find the cause quicker the next time.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[willyslover]

Steve. . can you say that in one finger operator english LOL



just wanted to say thanks for ALL your hard work !!!

 

[nixter]

Is that the reason there are 70K+ views on the smoke pic thread?



Nixter



PS. with dial-up, the site always seems slow so I'm used to it. Thanks for the hard work anyways Steve.

 

[csevers]

Good Work Steve!! WOW!! It amazes me that one persons computer could F up this site. Maybe he is a Ford owner?? trying to crash the system??... lol



Craig

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Well, the good news is that all it did was slow things down. In the distant past before the TDR purchased it's own servers it would have crashed for sure. To give you an idea of the load that one system was able to put on the system (he's obviously on a very high speed connection, my guess is better than cable - like t1) it was slamming the site for 7 1/2 hours yesterday (noon to 7:30). It put the equivalent of 125 of our most active user last month on the site browsing continuously for 7 1/2 hours on top of the existing traffic which was hitting record numbers yesterday. That maxed out the cache which then caused continued problems past that time until I reset mysql.



Yes nixter that is why there's 70,000+ views on that thread. 67,116 was from the last 5 days from his PC !! I'm resetting the post count to reflect the real numbers.

 

[HoleshotHolset]

Steve: I came realy close to emailing you about the slowness. I knew the issue wasn't on my end... and my TCP/IP ping response to the URL was pretty reasonable. Sometimes it seemed like it was without rhyme or reason... other times was around 'peak usage' times.



Glad you licked the issue... and thanks for your hard work!



Matt

 

[Theconcreteguy]

and all this time i though i had a good fourm



THE CONCRETE GUY:{ :{ :{ :{ :{ :{ :{ :{ :{

 

[ssanders60]

Hey, I was blaming the slowness on all of the

guys who are snowed in and perhaps during this

winter storm were keeping busy on the internet.

For some reason unknown to me, my password keeps

dropping out and I have to get a new one. I

can live with it but it's agravating.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

That's a cookie issue ssanders. Assuming you are using IE do this:



1. pull down your tools menu to internet options

2. click on the security tab

3. click on the trusted sites green check mark

4. click on the sites button

5. in the add window type in https://www.turbodieselregister.com

6. uncheck the box that says "require server verification (https for all sites in this zone"

7. click on the add button (you should now see www.turbodieselregister.com listed in the main box)

8. recheck the require server verification box

9. click on ok a couple of times



Then log into the site and you shouldn't lose your password any more.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

BTW, even through the slow downs yesterday we hit our highest post count in a day ever - 1054 posts! Oo.

 

[Doubleclutch]

Steve- was this an intentional affront, or just a computer switch chattering? (I know about chattering relays, but this computer stuff is beyond me).

Greg

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It was done intentionaly but the user wasn't aware of the ramafications it would cause. He was trying to play a joke on someone else on the site. It's been handled.

 

[Hohn]

Thanks, Steve for keeping this such a great site. I think none of us can possibly understand just how much work it is to keep it running smoothly.



justin

 

[lil red cummins]

i also noticed it was a little slow yesterday. thought it was because the sight is becoming more popular.



glad you are on top of it.



by the way, how are you feeling Steve?



jim

 

[1sand0s]

Originally posted by Hohn

Thanks, Steve for keeping this such a great site. I think none of us can possibly understand just how much work it is to keep it running smoothly.



justin

AHEM... . Some of us can.



Some of us even type with more than one finger... (Though on this site it seems to be the exception. )