Why are the WBF servers so slow? PLEASE READ FOR FINAL UPDATED ANNOUNCEMENT

[Steve Williams]

Ive submitted a ticket with our carrier to see if they can find any reason why it is slow at your end . South Africa has a similar issue for reasons we have no idea'

our web host has verified there are no server issues and they stated this,......"The problem appears to be related to geolocation-based connectivity."

 

[Holmz]

Im in Western Australia Ron. The site has always been slow compared to others, ever since I joined, but it's getting slower and slower. I dont use VPNs etc but I have tried with a VPN on in the event this actually speeds it up, but alas, no.
I was even copying/pasting an image from one thread to another earlier on today and it came back saying "image too big" - but its already on the forum!
Would be good to see things improve as I WANT to be more involved!

I normally come in from WA as well @Hydrology , but it has been slow in the UK too.
I said a short prayer at the status for JC Maxwell but it has not helped.

 

[Kingsrule]

Maybe time to look for a new web host and designer?

 

[Steve Williams]

Maybe time to look for a new web host and designer?

It has nothing to do with eitherAFAIK

 

[Kingsrule]

OK but I'm in USA and there are always slow days....so the Geo-location seems suspect
I'm on FIOS fiber, 1G plan and the only site I regularly visit with issues is WBF...

 

[dminches]

OK but I'm in USA and there are always slow days....so the Geo-location seems suspect
I'm on FIOS fiber, 1G plan and the only site I regularly visit with issues is WBF...

Sane for me.

 

[ctydwn]

very strange. never have had an issue. based in US but travel a lot. currently in Asia, as quick as ever

 

[Steve Williams]

I have had zero issues “lately”

 

[treitz3]

No issues at all for the past couple of days.....smooth a silk on my end.

Prior to that I had about 2 days of "weird" things going on but they have since resolved themself after the server reset.

Tom

 

[PeterA]

Very slow off and on at my end for a few days now.

 

[Holmz]

For “what’s best” it seems ironic that it’s so piss poor. This morning it’s really bad, but it’s later evening US time.

 

[PeterA]

For “what’s best” it seems ironic that it’s so piss poor. This morning it’s really bad, but it’s later evening US time.

This thread was started almost exactly two years ago.

 

[Holmz]

This thread was started almost exactly two years ago.

Crickey! One would think that they’d have fixed it by now.

 

[Solartiger]

I took a look at what's going on. Cloudflare is not used anymore. The traffic for me goes South Africa -> Marseille -> LA -> hosting provider. There is a problem loading these small jpps that are used for the animations. While these are small (like f.e. 300 kB) they take 20 seconds or so EACH to load. They should load blazingly fast. I can see that there is an Apache endpoint. If every image is loaded via a database request (to control the banners that are shown) and Apache is not configured correctly, we would see exactly the current behaviour. If you run multiple servers, a DNS problem between Apache and f.e. a FileServer with the images or wrongly configured caching would also have similar symptoms.

Take a Mac, open Safari.
Go to Safari -> Settings -> Advanced: at the bottom of the screen is a "show features for Web developers" checkbox, enable.
Go to File -> New Private Window
Go to Develop -> Show Web Inspector
Now load www.whatsbestforum.com. You can click on timeline or network, then REFRESH the page and see how it loads. This way you can inspect every single components load time. The same goes for any other aspect of the forum if you want to see why it is slow.

 

[orange55]

Out of the UK without a VPN it is often very slow. The images above is a good example.

 

[dminches]

The images are definitely the issue.

 

[admin1959]

The images are definitely the issue.

Not true. If you go to noon advert forum pages, it is still slow, when the main pages are sold as well. Those adverts are less than 1 meg ing total for the whole page.

We suspect bot attacks. Many Russian and China attacks coming via other countries. They have thousands of software guys attacking websites full time. It is a damage limitation it seems. We have banned Mexico and Singapore recently after a lot of bots coming fro0m that location. Then 3 day later we opened it back up.

We can ban specific bots, are now banning all bots except Google and Bing, and will see if this gets the speed back.

I'll report back shortly.

 

[admin1959]

On Cloudflare, it was inconclusive. It didn't remove bot attacks, or speed up the server, so we disabled it.

 

[dminches]

Not true. If you go to noon advert forum pages, it is still slow, when the main pages are sold as well. Those adverts are less than 1 meg ing total for the whole page.

We suspect bot attacks. Many Russian and China attacks coming via other countries. They have thousands of software guys attacking websites full time. It is a damage limitation it seems. We have banned Mexico and Singapore recently after a lot of bots coming fro0m that location. Then 3 day later we opened it back up.

We can ban specific bots, are now banning all bots except Google and Bing, and will see if this gets the speed back.

I'll report back shortly.

In my browser I can see how long they take to load. On my iPhone they load immediately and I get not delay in page loads.

That doesn’t point to the images?

 

[admin1959]

In my browser I can see how long they take to load. On my iPhone they load immediately and I get not delay in page loads.

That doesn’t point to the images?

No, the phone version is lighter and uses a different code base for smaller screen sizes.

Today I have rebuilt all the software cashes. It takes a few hours as is HUGE. It seems to have helped.

I also increased VARS and Memory allocation in htaccess. This also seems to have helped.

I am currently getting our hosting provider to enable a different server-side cashing. It should be ready by the weekend.

I am thinking of trying Cloudflare again, but lets get the above performance bits done first.

Thank you for you patience.