View Full Version : repeated long-term forum downtimes
Lt. Killer M
30-07-2004, 10:23
lately, this place has repeatedly been down for me for prolonged periods of time. sometimes 10 minutes, but once a full day.
in between, I get email notes of people posting along with info from stapel via MSM that for him the place is up.
this is starting to seriously hamper my interest in ISDG, as I ncna hardly ever follow the turn thread properly, much less post.
others with the same experience?
Yeah, I've experiencing it too.. Sometimes @ work, sometimes @ home (not sure exactly). It's annoying but it doesn't undermine my interest in the ISDG ;)
digger760
30-07-2004, 11:01
i sometimes experience timeouts..but normally i check 5-10 mins later and it is back up.
Lt. Killer M
30-07-2004, 11:31
Plux: if I read pages fo threads, then can't post or re-check on progres for a full day that DOES reduce my interest. I can't even DL saves then, after all.
Well, most of the times it's 5-10 minutes so it's not that bad. Helps to keep my head with my work, unfortunately ;)
Lt. Killer M
30-07-2004, 11:59
most of the time it is down for hours on end for me :( and I get so upset I can't work ;)
Weird. Very occasionally I get downtime that lasts for a while, and others can get there and post. [???]
Socrates
30-07-2004, 17:18
Same for me, and it has always been the case since I came here. But it is almost never down for a whole day though. Sometimes (many times actually !!) it works, but badly : heavy topics don't show properly, and I have to reload them several times. The trick is to click "reply" so as to read what is missing (because the rest shows up then). ;) Weirdly, I have never experienced anything like this when I was working on a network machine with Netscape... [crazyeye]
I have never had serious problems. Neither with Mozilla nor with IE.
Just a couple of 5 minute glitches over here in the last couple of days. Nothing annoying.
I had that problem a few months ago, but it passed. Performance has been very good at my end the last 4 months or so
A bit slow at times but always up for me also.
Exactly what Killer described.
I can't access CDZ while I'm actually getting thread-reply-notifications at the same time (for the record, I tried to connect w/o succes in the last hour or so). It seems it's not a general downtime problem, maybe it's limited to certain ISPs (IPs resp)? [confused]
Sometimes I can get to the forum main page and then I just sit there (can't enter forums). The number of registerd users and visitors showed at the bottom could be very low - so I guess it's not overload or something.
FWIW, I also tried both IE and mozilla.
And submitting this reply was a nighmare...
Lt. Killer M
05-08-2004, 11:52
same here: it was gone for 2 hours almost, now it is back, but 'edgy'
'edgy'confirmed. But I only tried the last 30 minutes.
Shabbaman
05-08-2004, 13:13
It's the same for me as for killer. I haven't had a full day downtime though, and since I don't use email notification I couldn't say if others post in those downtimes. But I'm experiencing quite some downtime, sometimes only for half a minute, but up to several hours.
yesterday evening it was all very dodgy for me but a lot of sites were so I suspected my ISP to be the wrongdoer.
Reporting CDZ is finally up. It has been down for me for the best part of the last 2 days. (Fri and Sat).
Same here..
Got the message that the website exceeded the maximum amount of traffic.. or something like that.
Shabbaman
29-08-2004, 08:52
CDZ was down for me the whole afternoon.
Shabbaman
29-08-2004, 14:58
WOOHOO! DOUBLE POST!!!!1!11
Just to up this thread: the forum was down for me since about I previously posted (see the post before this), this time I got the "maximum traffic exceeded" message.
And it went down AGAIN just after I posted until now :(
the extremely bad performance has been noted. I emailed anarres on friday and asked him to contact our ISP or provide contact info to me so I can contact our webhoster.
I'll keep you all posted in this thread and hope to solve this soon.
Kingreno
29-08-2004, 20:38
Yeah! And when I bet Beam yesterdayevening the Site would not stay up for 20 minutes during one of the windows it was open, it stayed on for 30, resulting in one Beer for Beam. It is an OUTRAGE[aargh]
So that's why Beam offered me a bottle of whisky to keep the site running for 30 mins ;)
Kingreno
29-08-2004, 20:56
Beam offers you a BOTTLE of whiskey just to get a Beer from me. This site's downtime is getting at everyone these days.
I wasn't around myself, but that sounds pretty terrible. [sad]
When our ISP lease comes up we can move to another. Our current ISP is pretty bad at doing anything about downtimes...
Shabbaman
30-08-2004, 09:11
It was down for me this morning until now, and seeing that since anarres posted at 2:13 and nobody after him, the site was probably down since then. Or at least since normal people were out of their beds ;)
You know, downtime sucks, but the "traffic exceeded" message is worse: our ISP accuses us of something, or at least is implying something to our visitors... I say we hang 'em.
digger760
30-08-2004, 11:27
It was down for me until at least 11am UK time...now i know how killer feels..it seems to be getting worse for me
I think that we all have had the same issues in last couple off days. So it must be a general thing, as opposed to what Killer had. There was a 15 minutes window (or so it appears) when Shabba posted. I could read his post but 10 minutes later I had the 'traffic exceed' again.
Forum accessability is indeed horrible at the moment and, as Killer already stated in his first post in this topic, I'd like to voice my concerns here again about the impact that these downtimes may have on being able to succesfully run a demogame at this site.
If the forum's current performance will continue for a prolonged period of time, I can imagine that plenty of people will not want to be part of the discussions etc anymore, since with these downtimes it is very difficult to get some posting there done, let alone to start debates and discussions.
Kemal, we can always ask for an extension in the demogame if there is a site downtime. I know it's not ideal, but until our current agreement runs out I am not sure what we can do.
I understand we'll just have to cope with the current performance for now, and my post wasn't meant as personal criticism on anyone, but it's juts that I hope people won't start to (perhaps permanently?) drift away from the game because of lack of interest, since atm it can be difficult to follow on a per turn basis.
Another thing I noticed in the last couple of weeks:
While page load could appear to be very well oiled, upload took ages or just didn't work at all. Dunno if it's just me, but it seemed like the ISP limited stream or even blocked port?
FYI: And again bad performance today :(
Kingreno
01-09-2004, 15:35
Indeed. This morning the well known message appeared again, limit exceeded...
It is getting increasingly more difficult to keep up to date on subjects as active topics are hard to spot.
digger760
01-09-2004, 16:37
i had no problems this morning..but could not access it from about noon till now
smalltalk
02-09-2004, 19:53
As this runs on a windows machine, maybe an occasional reboot would help?
Probs for me yesterday while PP had no probs accessing CDZ. Not the first time some ppl have access while others haven't. Could it have something to do with user verification?
Same problem here a few days ago. Kemal had no access to CDZ while I had on the exact same moment
I'm having a lot of intermittent problems too.
I've been in touch with our ISP recently to try and resolve some of these long term problems.
Last week I rang them when I was unable to log in, and after investigation they said one of the servers was down. After some time they eventually got it back up and running, however I should never have been unable to get on the site.
We use load balancing, which means our site is held on 3 machines and we get directed to the machine with the least load on it. This should ensure that when one machine goes down we automatically get sent to another one, but this obviously isn't happening properly. This also explains why some people can get on when others can't...
We need everyone to start noting te times CDZ is unavailable so we can take this informaiton to our ISP. If we can show that the load balancing isn't working we can maybe get them to find out why and then solve it.
One final thing: Can everyone please bookmark this static html page, and when you can't get in to the site could you also try this page:
http://www.civ3duelzone.com/CombatCalc2.html
Logs of downtime should look something like this:
Sat 9am to midday: no response from forum, no html page
Mon 10.30am to 1.30pm: error page '500.13' from forum, html page accessable
P.S. Please post, even if someone else has reported the downtime.
it has been terrible for me lately. I'll start logging.
Shabbaman
13-09-2004, 16:35
Wow, suddenly the site is back up! But it has been down for me since yesterday evening... but I see people have posted in the mean time.
Kingreno
13-09-2004, 18:56
Could get online till late afternoon, though the occasional refresh was needed. Between 4 PM and 7 PM it was off again.[cry]
quote:Originally posted by Kingreno
Between 4 PM and 7 PM it was off again.[cry]
Same here :(
couldn't get to the forum last night, i.e. Sep 18 between 22:00 and 00:00 cet
no error message this time
html page accessable
Pastorius
19-09-2004, 23:12
I got mail from cdz about a pm the other day, but could not access till today. Dont remember when it first occurred to me, but part of it could be my isp not updating dns after your website came back up...
Lt. Killer M
21-09-2004, 09:50
Mo, 20.09.2005: 15:15 CEST to at least 21:25 CEST - no response from forum, but post notification emails
CDZ was down for me from lunchbreak till now.. approximately one and a half hour.
Lt. Killer M
21-09-2004, 13:26
CDZ was down for me most of this morning:
Tue, 21.09.2004, 10:30 CEST to 14:00 CEST no reply.
Shabbaman
21-09-2004, 14:18
For me a bit later, but a bit longer as well. Until some minutes ago.
I've been on the phone again to the ISP and they are useless. It appears that one of the websites we share the servers with is constantly taking down the machine. This means we will get continued downtime, until this asshole is found and removed from the server.
The "Load Balancing" we pay an extra £50/year for but it appears that this is pure BS from the ISP. Their "Load Balancing" consists of sending you to one of the servers, but this appears to be based not on which server has the least load, but a lottery based on your originating IP address. I complained bitterly about this farce of an option and they have agreed to remove it and refund it if we want. This in itself isn't great news - it means they are not capable of providing a service we require for no downtime.
It seems like the only solution is to change ISP and to pay for a dedicated machine. :( On the bright side a dedicated machine would provide us everything we need and more, it will just cost the earth.
I've had a quick look and the cheapest we can get a machine for is £30/month is we buy 3 years or £40/month if we buy a years worth. This would give us guarenteed 99.95% uptime and max bandwidth before extra charges is 3 times what we use. Also we should be able to put SQL Sever on the box so that the DB is more robust. Many dedicated machines cost £100+/month, so you have to have a good look to find the cheap ones.
Anyway - this is all food for thought, but unless donations suddenly reach the £40/month area I can't see this happening soon. Any suggestions on how to raise this money is welcome. [ponder]
P.S. If we go this route we can probably host as much as we want (up to a total of 40Gb space and 20Gb/month transfer) to make up the money, but IIRC not many people were interested when I asked at the last reunion.
Lt. Killer M
21-09-2004, 14:47
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
thanx for looking into all this.
Shabbaman
21-09-2004, 21:55
quote:Originally posted by anarres
Anyway - this is all food for thought, but unless donations suddenly reach the £40/month area I can't see this happening soon. Any suggestions on how to raise this money is welcome. [ponder]
Hm, that reminds me that it's time for a new donation.
Hmm, not sure if my mind tricks me, but IIRC overall performance seemed better before this load balancing service. In case it's possible, maybe just cancel it and see if it works out ok?
(btw, forum was not accessable 2 hours or so ago, this time 500.13 error page showed up)
I was wondering what people would think of a move to a *nix system. You can get a virtual linux machine with 300MB of space, unlimited bandwidth and claimed 99.9% uptime for 6 pounds a month [1], though this company has caused problems [2]. There is a thread discussing options for this sort of thing here [3].
I have access to a *nix machine on the web for the next 9 months or so, so could put up a site for the moment probably, just as a test for a start. I have made a start at putting phpbb2 on it, but I have got a bit stuck allready, see http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/~hmorgan2/personal/forum/phpBB2/install/install.php I guess I had better not spend too much work time on it ;)
I belive there are some issues with changing from micro$hit to a grown up system, but I am sure we could work something out.
Just a thought.
--
Linux, because eventually, you grow up enough to be trusted with a fork()
[1] http://www.amenworld.com/static/index.php?pid=580
[2] http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=ce546i%24mil%241%40pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk
[3] http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=61ce6e0a.0408280717.2bc56ae4%40posting.goo gle.com&rnum=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dvirtual%2Blinux%2Bmachine%26hl%3Den%2 6lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26group%3Dcam.misc%26selm%3D61ce6e0a.0408280717. 2bc56ae4%2540posting.google.com%26rnum%3D2
Kingreno
25-09-2004, 13:44
Forum down again between 11am and 1 pm on saturday 25th of september
no reply between 15:00 and 17:00 cet, 25th Sep
Lt. Killer M
29-09-2004, 14:23
it ain't getting better, e.g. today: Wed, 29.09. around 13:15 IIRC to now, 15:25 no rreply whatsoever
Kingreno
02-10-2004, 18:06
Me and kemal had some short CDZ-blackouts on the 2nd of October, between 2 and 5 pm.
quote:Originally posted by Kingreno
Me and kemal had some short CDZ-blackouts on the 2nd of October, between 2 and 5 pm.
Same symptoms, same timeframe.
Same here.
(Static html page worked).
At some point I got this one:
Microsoft JET Database Engine error '80040e14'
Unknown
/forum/inc_header.asp, line 186
Kingreno
02-10-2004, 21:05
Oh shit! Was that errormessage site-related?? I smashed my Monitor for that one![mischief]
But seriously, I got that too, was there for 5 minutes then went to the "too much trafic screen" again...
Pastorius
03-10-2004, 00:14
Erm. Got a connection refused message from Mozilla earlier tonight at about 22-23ish
I am a bit under the weather from a nasty cold that snuck up on me, so it was a bid disappoinding do nod be able do view dhe forum.
inserted "d" for "t" to show you how my nose makes me talk
Shabbaman
03-10-2004, 10:52
I couldn't access the site for two days.
Lt. Killer M
04-10-2004, 18:36
down all day toady! no contact at all!
this sucks sucks sucks!
Kingreno
04-10-2004, 20:10
Down all day for me as well ...[sad]
Socrates
04-10-2004, 20:25
Don't want to post too much in this thread, but for the 1st time IIRC, it was down all day for me as well. I've just succeeded in connecting again. I see some people didn't share the same problems. ;) We need to do something.
For the first time from work today I've got Database Engine Error and then 500 error. From home, it was sometimes stalled but from work it was OK, just reload after 5 minutes or so. Now it was down apparently all day (about 9 hours). The calculator page loads fine btw. May be actually from cache.
The problem has been never experienced even with some remote servers in Central/Northern Russia which are a couple of hundred km away from the nearest city in the tundra/forest. The connection there is slow and unstable but never refused in such a rude manner. :)
Ginger_Ale
05-10-2004, 00:20
I have a question anarres - what causes this site to be down (in many cases, about 1 hour a day for me...)?
I finally am able to connect after a long day without contact [sad]
Pastorius
05-10-2004, 09:05
Got the traffic message (500 error iirc) all day yesterday, only replaced by "document contains no data" message on one occation where I used mozilla to try to login to the site.
Shabbaman
05-10-2004, 10:13
quote:Originally posted by Ginger_Ale
I have a question anarres - what causes this site to be down (in many cases, about 1 hour a day for me...)?
See post number 14. Site was down for me all afternoon and evening yesterday. For a change.
Socrates
11-10-2004, 16:56
CDZ was down all day until now. BTW, where is anarres ? [???]
Kingreno
13-10-2004, 00:04
had some problems all day, off for half an hour, then on, then off. ect. that is Tuesday 12th.
quote:Originally posted by anarres
Anyway - this is all food for thought, but unless donations suddenly reach the £40/month area I can't see this happening soon. Any suggestions on how to raise this money is welcome.
Though 700 euros a year, is more than I thought it would be, I also think we should be able to pay it.
I have been discussing this with several others, and I think we should seriously discuss it in Breda.
It's all relative. I pay 250 euros a year for my hockeyclub, but I do play CIV more often than hockey.
Not that I would like to pay 250 euros a year for CDZ, but still.
I think we have a platform here that is quite valuable. We should realise it doesn't come for free!
Darkness
13-10-2004, 14:03
Could't reach the site for the last three hours... (12:00-15:00 CET)
Kingreno
14-10-2004, 13:11
12.00-14.00 CET 14th of October, site was unreachable.
Stapel, I've been thinking the same thing myself, lets definitly discuss it in Breda. :)
Hmm, of course it will have to be in the first 6 hours of drinking or we may not be capable. [ack]
Stapel, perfectly explaining the basics of economics :)
quote:Originally posted by Stapel ... Though 700 euros a year, is more than I thought it would be, I also think we should be able to pay it. ...
Sure, enjoying the banner-free environment can stimulate people. It certainly stimulates me. :)
Could you tell me what services/bandwidth/volume etc. this site needs? I *may* be able to get a good price for it, though I can't promise.
Kingreno
16-10-2004, 22:18
Site was dwon most of the saturday...
Socrates
16-10-2004, 23:11
quote:Originally posted by Kingreno
Site was dwon most of the saturday...
Same here (end of afternoon and evening). We should start to think of what we'll do to anarres in Breda if the forum hasn't improved by then. [estwing] [groucho]
I'm exploring some options to get decent hosting at a reasonable price and without bannering. I hope te be able to tell some more about it in Breda, but not sure yet.
However we're working on this and seriously looking at possible solutions. So please bear with is for a little while more, we'll work out something.
@grs, thanks for the offer! I'll send you some statistics about site traffic. The more options the better.
Hadn't seen this one before.
http://www.civ3duelzone.com/forum/uploaded/Beam/20041017134537_1710200412h45.jpg
58.25KB
grs, atm we use about 1 to 1.5Gb of space, and up to 10Gb data/month. If cost came in to it we could "rationalise" the space as 99% of it is uploads... :)
Ginger_Ale
17-10-2004, 16:13
Yeah, Beam, I got that a couple hours ago too.
Looked at the server reports and it seems our traffic is growing quiet rapidly
jan 2004 : 185mb
sep 2004 : 7,58 GB
Hadn't really thought about it, but that looks like an awfull lot of traffic for a small site such as ours.
Shabbaman
17-10-2004, 17:10
That's a lot of traffic. Is there some hidden mp3 subforum here or something?
quote:Originally posted by Shabbaman
That's a lot of traffic. Is there some hidden mp3 subforum here or something?
It's Miffy's shrubbery workshop subforum.[:o]
Lots of stuff in it, frequently hit and a lazy mod...[shabba]
j/k
But I guess traffic seriously went up with it. If inceased traffic is indeed the main problem, maybe it helps to edit/remove the img tags of 'older' posts/pics in there?
quote:Originally posted by ProPain
... sep 2004 : 7,58 GB
Hadn't really thought about it, but that looks like an awfull lot of traffic for a small site such as ours.
It cannot be that much, there is something wrong here. May be isp wants to cover up for something else? You can probably run a large shipping sales company with that kind of traffic. [confused]
There are lots of various promo webhostings in US but how can one tell it is good?
Or you want a Euporean-based site absolutely?
What also can be the problem is the down time itself. That usually encourages people to hit refresh a couple of times, upping the requests for a page. Although we dont really get the page we apparently do reach the ISP who then reverts us to the down-server. Could count as traffic though.
When I still used to work for dutch telecom we had similar phenoma when a switch got overloaded/went down. People start hitting the call button like crazy while trying to get a connection. Overloading the switch even more.
Pastorius
18-10-2004, 08:57
I think that could be it - or at least I refresh whenever I see the down-page. Sometimes I get the forum to reload right, sometimes I dont, so I have been quite happy with just hitting refresh. I ll wait a bit before I try again next time I see it, just in case. (of course I dont think it is my refreshing the page that increases traffic that much, but I am glad to help reduce it if I can)
A friend on mine who is actually in Russia uses ez:
http://ez-web-hosting.com/shared.htm
The serivce has been very friendly and so far no problems. The company is actually located somewhere in Texas. But he signed up very recently like 4 months ago. And it is a rather small personal site.
I'll be meeting with another friend of mine who actually owns a large search engine (searchbug.com) and will ask him what he is using and what does he think in general.
@paalikles: atm we dont pay for traffic, so hit that button as much as pleases you.
In fact overloading might encourage FastHosts (I know, the name is not quite what we're experiencing) to address the problem. Happy Hitting!
7.58Gb seems like the monthly bandwidth - this is not very much!
PP - In jan we moved domains didn't we? That would mean 158mb is only part of the month...
it is the monthly bandwith yes. And yes we moved. Still bandwidth is increasing quite rapidly also if you compare the last months
I've looked at netcraft.com but they don't monitor CDZ. Although other "FastHosts"-hosted sites (I've looked up ony a dozen) experience major difficulties starting from September. They also switched many domains to Winserver 2003 in July when all this trouble apparently started.
Also, there are 2 people already who highly recommend www.superb.net (HopOne) as ISP. It is in US (Virginia). They are somewhat pricy but quality has been indeed superb. For 1Gb disk and 100Gb traffic it will be about $100/month overall.
Also, netcraft shows (http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/Hosters) that FastHosts has unprecedented amount of failures among the big ISPs including outages and failed reqs.
Another promo offer: http://www.superbservers.net/services/promo_sds.php
Darkness
08-11-2004, 16:07
Couldn't reach the site for about ninety minutes immediately before this post. i got this message:
quote:
Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0241'
CreateObject Exception
/forum/active.asp
The CreateObject of '(null)' caused exception C0000005.
Server object error 'ASP 0177 : c0000005'
Server.CreateObject Failed
/forum/inc_header.asp, line 113
c0000005
That's weird, we've all been posting. [hmm]
Please keep on updating here - the deadtime has been less frequent recently, but we need to monitor it accurately to guage if the service is really improving.
Pastorius
08-11-2004, 17:59
I had serious trouble uploading anything for about an hour, then it worked, but it was terribly sloooooow. This was yesterday around 22-24 GMT+1
The site runs very smooth for me for about 2 weeks now.
Uploading has been very slow recently even with small images. And the reference to the image does not appear in the post in about 50% of the cases. So, it is needed to dig that image out of the previously uploaded pile. Inserting image then to the post workis fine except that the url is at danwilliamson.net but editing it to civ3duelzone seems to do the job.
What Paali said. Page load was slow for me now and then over the past few days, like 20-80 seconds (worst cases).
However, it's much better than nada access.:)
digger760
09-11-2004, 09:34
Access has been 100% for me in the last few weeks. I have always had problems with image upload..it seems to get to 99% then stalls for 30-60 seconds.
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