• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later.

Because, Mick, when it happens to us here in Western Europe, you and most others in USA are tucked up in beddybyes.....it's called Time Zones. :mixed-smiley-010:
 
Mick said:
some people seem to have this problem regularly, while others of us virtually never see it.

Very curious! How is that even possible? How can some folks be affected so often and others never or hardly ever? That makes no sense at all.
Click to expand...

The server backup is happening each day at the same time. Since it is located in the USA, this backup is set to run during the night there when most users are sleeping. Problem is, this means it happens on the morning for European users (who check this website after getting up and before going to work), and if you look carefully most of the complaints about this problem come from European users.

Simple to understand enough?
 
We should look into having the backup run at around midnight or 1am CST or thereabouts. Less intrusive to both sides of the pond.
 
For me, here in South Africa, GMT+2. no issue at all. I regard it as just one of things, & there is nothing urgent that I need. No problem to wait a few minutes.
 
Roxane-21 said:
The server backup is happening each day at the same time....
Click to expand...

Im not sure about exactly the same time (but it is similar), sometimes it appears at 8, sometimes at 10 Am. For example Today I couldn't open SOH between 9 and 10.30 AM.

Moses03 said:
We should look into having the backup run at around midnight or 1am CST or thereabouts. Less intrusive to both sides of the pond.
Click to expand...

Great idea, Thank You!
 
Any detail on why the server was too busy today around noon Pacific Time?

Just came back from taking my wife to the Cancer Clinic and couldn't get into the forums for 20 minutes (11:56 am to 12:10 pm) which was unusual. I know that server and software updates sometimes cause this, but mid-day seems unusual unless it's some kind of denial-of-service attack. Just wondering.
 
Odd! I was on at that time with no problems noted on the site. Just like now....12:57 PM Pacific time.
 
PRB sent me a text message a couple of days ago that the website was down. We couldn't even access the control panel to see what it was doing. I opened a ticket with the datacenter but before they could look at it the server magically became active. Looking at the logs the system was running, it was just getting hit hard with downloads from the library to the point it could no longer function.

That is not the first time that has happened and it is the reason I had to slow down the download speeds for everyone.

Three times today we have been hit with High Server loads outside the normal maintenance window.

The logs are not conclusive on what caused those ones.

There is a range of IP Addresses I have to block in the firewall every so often because someone is using them to index the site. That in of its self would not be a bad thing if they didn't use over a 1000 IP Addresses to do it. When that happens they bring the server to its knees. I just blocked them again lets see if that helps. Prior to blocking it we were only showing 200+ guests on the forum. Normally if it is them I see 1000s of guests.
 
Dangerousdave26 said:
Looking at the logs the system was running, it was just getting hit hard with downloads from the library to the point it could no longer function.
Click to expand...

That sounds a bit too much like bots to me. I haven't been to the library here in years (literally), but if you don't have it already, I'd suggest implementing a reCAPTCHA filter to keep at least some of them out. If that's possible...
 
For me this morning, either I could not even connect or I got the too busy message from 05:35 to 05:50 EDT. 199 users online at 05:55, 156 of them were guests.
 
Here we go again... :dizzy:

I pop in and out of the forum throughout the day to see what's new, added comments on posts, and possibly new downloads. About fifteen minutes ago, 11:15 am Pacific Time, I could not get into the forums. The first couple of tries just locked up, eventually giving me a message that the connection was dropped?? Eventually I got the "server is too busy" message. It took well over fifteen minutes to finally get in and post this message.

Is there some kind of bot or downloads that's occurring this time? This is occurring all too frequently.
 
WarHorse47 said:
Here we go again... :dizzy:

I pop in and out of the forum throughout the day to see what's new, added comments on posts, and possibly new downloads. About fifteen minutes ago, 11:15 am Pacific Time, I could not get into the forums. The first couple of tries just locked up, eventually giving me a message that the connection was dropped?? Eventually I got the "server is too busy" message. It took well over fifteen minutes to finally get in and post this message.
Is there some kind of bot or downloads that's occurring this time? This is occurring all too frequently.
Click to expand...

See post above from Dangerousdave26.
 
wombat666 said:
See post above from Dangerousdave26.
Click to expand...
I saw it. He mentioned that he was going to block some IP addresses that seem suspicious. I am assuming he may not know if the changes were effective unless we report ongoing problems.

From my perspective there seems to be a possible trend in that I have difficulty accessing the site during the middle of the day. Because I cannot access the site, I cannot tell how my users (and guests) are active.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top