The Stovebolt Site Forums The Back Office IT Short Bus Is anybody else having forum issues?

For the past couple of days, my computer has been extremely slow changing pages, but only on this forum. It's taking a minute or more to post a comment, or even to log on from another web page. Anybody else having trouble? Other websites I frequent are running normally.
Jerry

Yes, the slowness has been noticed by several people.

We have asked Paul to weigh in. It may have something to do with all the "guests" we've had the last few days.

Well, things certainly got back in gear! (No word from Paul but he may be behind all this good news!)

Looking at awstats, it looks like we're getting a ton of requests from Frontier networks. It appears to be bot-like. Since I don't think we want to block Frontier entirely, I've opened a ticket requesting that our hosting company add the mod_evasive module to apache which will allow legitimate requests while suppressing bot activity worldwide.

Whatever happened seems to have fixed the slowness for me.

It got very slow again when the guests were over 500. I see it's okay now (guests 265).

Slow again- - - - -8:30 PM Central Time- - - - -
Jerry

Yup, slow here.......6:48 pm PST

Awwwww.....Back to its good speed. Thanks all

Oops, spoke maybe too soon. Sudden slowdown and now with 608 guests??

When I signed on late this morning (about 11:15am CST) there were over 660+ guests and things were pretty durn slow. About 25 minutes later the guest count dropped suddenly to about 378 and things speed back up.

The vast majorty of guest IP's show locations in the far East, like Honk Kong, Vietnam, Singapore etc. (Alibaba and Huawei data centers and the like) that probably have very little to do with our passion. Guess we must be having way too much fun and they need to see what we are about???

This is beginning to look like a DOS attack. Does somebody have a grudge against old Chevy trucks?

Maybe there are searching for parts sources? They are only guests and not logged in. If you click on some of the threads they are lookng at, some are very very old.

925 "Guests"?
It does seem like a Denial of Service attack.
What would anyone get out of inconveniencing old truck fans?

Jeleous Ferd guys, no doubt.

Dennis

Currently showing over 900 Guests. Screenshot below shows 180 "Guests" location activity as "Logging in". Vast majority of the IP's shown as "Logging in" are identified as IP originating in Vietnam. Slowing things down again - ARGH!

Well, it's 471 guests right now and it's not slow at all. Earlier 300 was the magic number.

I just know when it's slow I stay off for a while. It's more frustrating to me waiting for the screens to change. Overall, the site has been pretty good. Not many slow days. Thanks to those that manage the site.

Took 3 minutes to get to the 1st screen on the site at 0710 CDT today, and another 2 minutes to switch from one catagory to another. 4 members, 228 guests and 0 robots.

Extremely slow loading pages today. In most cases when they do load any attachments/pictures are not available without opening them which is another slow step.

I tried getting on this morning at about 7:30 EST and it was frustratingly slow so I logged out until this evening. Going great now!

Yesterday when posting, I'd get an error, but the post was there when I looked. Not sure why I got an error. Next time I'll write the information down.

Couldn’t get on this morning at about 7:00 am. It timed out. Tried again five minutes later and it did the same.

Forums are exceedingly slow right now (7 PM Alaska time). It took over a minute to respond when going from viewing a post to the forum listing. I couldn't see any specific issues other than being slow, but I also am getting the error message when posting. I'll try and add that message if I get it when I post this.

yep, got the error.

Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: in_array(): Argument #2 ($haystack) must be of type array, false given in /var/www/html/ubbthreads/libs/user.inc.php:608 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/ubbthreads/libs/user.inc.php(608): in_array() #1 /var/www/html/ubbthreads/scripts/addpost.inc.php(668): user->check_group_join() #2 /var/www/html/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php(286): page_addpost_run() #3 {main} thrown in /var/www/html/ubbthreads/libs/user.inc.php on line 608

Again extremely slow right now. I’m able to do stuff but it’s painstakingly slow! No error though.

I was on last night between 9 and 10 pm CST. It was annoyingly slow, taking sometimes more than a minute to switch from one page to another. I never got an error message, but did cleanup several duplicate/triplicate posts in several forums.

So far this morning 6-7am has been better, but starting to see delay/slow down signs now after 7am - GRRRRR!!!

I just did a quick review (as quick as I can anyway right now) and of the over 400 "Guests" listed as being on-line, there were 30 different "META of Ireland" IPs listed with the activity of "Logging in". Also 50 different guest IPs with the source being Alibaba Cloud Data Center from Hong Kong. Those were not showing as logging in, but reading posts in various forums, but many of the IPs were shown as reading the same posts.

I'm sure this doesn't account for all the slow down, but maybe playing some part. I've taken some screen shots of the data gathered and going to forward to HQ later in case it may be useful.

Very slow right now 7:30 PM CT.

Was slow about 15 minutes ago, but normal just now 8:06 Central.

So sloooooooooooooooow!

Click Forum - 1:39
Click Login - 1:11
Enter PSWD - 3:18
Click IT Bus - 1:28

So frustrating. 😒

Gee - Now it seems normal again. Oh well.

It is truly annoying. Even waiting to preview a post. I wanted to post my frustration this morning but it took too long to jump from the menu down to here.

Dan had same angst. He said some took 2 minutes to go from one place to another.

I sure hope Paul can get some answers from our hosting company or whoever.

And then I get an error message when I hit post. It may be the same one Kevin H got. I get this frequently but I thought it might be my computer.

I also get error messages when I post a reply and it also duplicates my reply. Eye yie yie!!

"It's BAAAAACCCCKKKK!" Slow page changes and lost posts. "System timed out".
Jerry

Whew!
I thought it was just me!

Again, I couldn’t get on this morning 7:30am. Just timed out! OK at 8:30.

Edit: posting this took almost 30 seconds!

This was info from my yesterday early morning activity trying to get into and going through the site:

SB was super slow from 5:30-7:00am this morning (Saturday 6/8). I timed different actions, from initial loading the main forum page (not signed in), to logging in, switch forums and attempting to post.

On average each task took from 1 minute 45 seconds to 2 minutes for each activity. Even just clicking the back button to return to a forum from reading a post. Didn't get better until just after 7am, when all of a sudden things sped up to normal page load times of a second or 2.

Member count when first signing in was "2" and guest count just over 300. Up until 7am members on line was rarely more than 6-7, but guest counts often close to 500.

After 7, members at one point was 12 with guest counts still above 300.

Really can get frustrating and wonder if that has to do with fewer members being less active?

This morning it has been better, but still fluctuates at times from regular quick transitions to several second delays. One added thing for yesterday. When I first tried to bring up the SB Main Forum Page, it would not load at all, even after 5 minutes. I clicked on the Stovebolt.com home page and that took more than 2 minutes, then another 2 plus minutes to get to the main forums page. This was even after clearing all my cookies and deleting web history too. I also tried to use both Firefox (my default browser) and Google Chrome with no difference in either browser.

One other note, not knowing if it has any bearing on the problem or not. During the page loading delays yesterday, in every instance the picture in the "News Corner" was always the last thing to load/display with each page change. It seemed to take forever to finish.

PS - I've seen a few older threads with weird characters cropping up again while searching for previous threads.

I ran across and flagged the weird character issue yesterday in the DITY forum. I cleared out my cookies yesterday.

I just got the error when I posted this!

Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: in_array(): Argument #2 ($haystack) must be of type array, false given in /var/www/html/ubbthreads/libs/user.inc.php:608 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/html/ubbthreads/libs/user.inc.php(608): in_array() #1 /var/www/html/ubbthreads/scripts/addpost.inc.php(668): user->check_group_join() #2 /var/www/html/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php(286): page_addpost_run() #3 {main} thrown in /var/www/html/ubbthreads/libs/user.inc.php on line 608