Does anyone else find that if they haven't been to the empegbbs for an hour or two, it seems to take an absolute age to load up? It happens at home, at work and on the phone over 3G. It appears to hang at the DNS resolution stage. But after this initial delay every subsequent request is near instantaneous.

Yes. Happens to me too. Over the weekend I was being taken to placeholder site from GoDaddy.

Stu

Yes.

Yes.. feels like slow DNS to me here.

ISTR it started happening after the site moved hosts in May.

This is my impression as well.

Odd, the DNS where empegbbs.com lives didn't change beyond where the A record points. I have been tracking some slowdown when posts are made but this is the first I've heard of it just being slow to load due to DNS.

I'm at Quakecon currently, but will investigate deeper later. There is a possibility some of it is DB slowness, especially after backups are made around 0:00 Central Time ( -5 GMT currently).

Depends on how you define "absolute age..."

It takes me 2--3 seconds to display the main forum page for the first time. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

tanstaafl.

In this day that is quite long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&fmt=22

Haven't noticed any slowdowns yesterday, and today the site is as snappy as always. No complaints here.

Up to 10 seconds, which to me, is enough normally to indicate a site is down.

Yup. 5-10 seconds to get the first load after rebooting my computer, very snappy on subsequent page views.

That's why it feels like DNS slowness -- exact symptom match.

I really should debug it further. Later today, perhaps.

1.49 seconds after fresh power-off restart.

edit: 0.98 seconds without restart.

tanstaafl.

I've noticed this for maybe 2 months or so, 5-10 seconds for the initial page load of the day, then it's instant access to all empeg related content.

Maybe it's a browser specific bug? Anyone else using the Chrome Dev channel as their default browser? I haven't been paying much attention if it happens on firefox, I've used chrome dev as my primary browser for ages.

It appears that the secondary nameserver isn't responding to requests

Seems fine for me. When it hasn't, there's usually been something more drastic, like not being able to load the page at all.

Using Safari.

Mmm.. quicker this evening. Two tries, both more or less instantaneous.

There are a couple of issues here. The secondary nameserver isn't working for one.

http://intodns.com/empegbbs.com

This thread is really weird to me. I've never noticed any delay at all...

I have been seeing about a 20 second delay on the first load both from home and from work for the last couple months.

I just counted 1 minute 30 seconds to load.

Edit: Firefox

Just as extra info points:

no delay for me (ie sub 2 seconds every time) from home (talktalk using OpenDNS) with FF3.6, FF4b1 or Chrome, or from work via Colt telecoms POP in London

No delays here either, AAISP using my own local DNS caching server. Never seen any delays on my iPhone either, via O2.

Odd. I just opened five tabs from the empegbbs. Three opened immediately and two are wedged.

I've been having problems like andym, today all of a sudden it seems better ???

Cheers

Cris.

It seems highly variable. I've had a couple of days where it's popped up instantly but today it's slow.

I'm surprise Tom hasn't said anything in this thread yet. The fact one of the DNS servers is responding would indicate there is an issue of some sort.

I've just redirected the MIA nameserver (ns2.perilith.com) to 127.0.0.1, and no more delay now.

Still.. I wonder if there's something I can set somewhere to have our local caching DNS do parallel lookups and not wait for the MIA nameserver to respond?

Whether it's quick or slow, on any given hour or day, depends upon _which_ nameserver your system or DNS lookup service happens to choose.

So long as they always pick the first server, it will be quick. Whenever they pick the second server, it will be slow -- things have to time-out before they fall back to the first server.

In my case, my local caching server appears to normally try the second server first, causing a five-second delay before it times out and tries the other server.

Cheers

Mmm.. It looks like the failed ns2.perilith.com was once a static IP at the end of somebody's DSL link:

Code:

[~] host NS2.PERILITH.COM
NS2.PERILITH.COM has address 173.203.115.251
[~] host 173.203.115.251
251.115.203.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 173-203-115-251.static.cloud-ips.com.

The domain is owned by Vitorio Miliano, in Texas. "Vito" for short.
His current static IP is 173.203.115.13, but he's not running a nameserver on it.
And don't try poking a stick at it, cuz it'll blacklist you (as it did me just now).

I wonder if he's an acquaintance of Tom?

Telephone (in Austin, TX, USA): (phone number removed)
Email is listed as: [b(email removed)[/b]

Or quite possibly, "Vito" is a fake name, and the real admin is Josh Odom of San Antonia, TX.

Enough digging.. just blacklisting ns2.perilith.com is enough to "fix" it for me here.

Cheers

The servers are/were owned by Vito and run by Tom.

I will look to get the DNS issue sorted out this weekend to see if it helps.

As an update, I decided to go ahead with my domain transfer off of GoDaddy. I had intended to do this prior to the empegbbs.com domain expiring recently, but didn't get to it in time (hence the domain parking page maczrool and Dignan saw). Currently all of my domains are being transferred, and once that is complete, I'll finish migrating off Perilith services including their DNS.

ns2.perilith.com BTW isn't a DSL line, it's a VPS hosted by Slicehost, and yes, it will ban people trying to poke at the box :-) I need to get something similar setup on my VPS, as it looks like I've had nearly 4,000 attempts to log into the box in the past 5 hours.

One of the problems appears to be that the DNS server hasn't been updated in the root servers. This is the response from a.gtld-servers.net:

This is the response from ns1.perilith.com:

Note that the glue record for ns2.perilith.com has a different IP address at each server. I don't know which is right, because neither IP address seems to be responding to DNS requests; both time out. I guess that means that neither of them is correct.

Just wanted to update with my experience:

I have the Off Topic forum bookmarked as it's the only one I post in anymore. I have not noticed any slowdown at all. None. Not when getting to the forum, not when reading posts, not when posting. It's all as fast as I could ask for.

However, yesterday I wanted to go to the "General" forum to see if anyone had posted about the empeg.com site there. Simply clicking on the "empegbbs.com" top-level navigation link left me waiting for at least a minute before anything happened. During that time I even opened an unread thread in Off Topic (since it was frozen on the screen for an eternity), and THAT took ages to load too.

Now, today, I'm back to only reading the Off Topic section, and everything is fine again. If I try to go anywhere else on the boards, I'm left waiting for at least a minute.

It doesn't seem like this is a case of the Off Topic forum being cached or anything. In fact, I recently cleared my cache. I don't know why the Off Topic forum would be so fast for me only because I go to it exclusively... Does that help at all?

Your bookmark uses www.empegbbs.com whilst the forum uses just empegbbs.com

1 - actually, my bookmark doesn't

2 - when I go directly to www.empegbbs.com, it still takes forever to load (to be more accurate, I just timed it and it took about 1:25)

Still trying to get control of my domains back from GoDaddy, so I can also point to DNS servers I can easily change settings on.

However, I don't think it's a DNS problem, or DNS is not the only issue. I'm still seeing high IO wait times on the current VPS provider at certain times, and am starting to think it may be some issues with my setup as well.

I'm going to try and do some optimization passes on the database this weekend when things are slower. Not sure if it will help, but it can't hurt. The only time I've consistently noticed slow loading is when I'm making a post. The DB may just be putting too much IO load on the VPS in certain situations.

In that case, no idea then. Something odd is going on with your browser or setup.

While I've also seen the slow posting, it's at least reduced significantly, if not gone away completely, since you made a change at some point. The only time I see slowness now is when I bring up the site the first time after I've not for a good while, like overnight. This steers me towards DNS.

I just did an nslookup at home and found that it took quite a while for "empegbbs.com" to load. It felt like less time than the initial browser load delay, but there's still definitely something wrong with the DNS records. I'd say that you need to fix that first before you can definitely say that it's something else. Not that two things can't be happening.

I understand about the registrar problems, though. They can be a pain.

Ugh, I wouldn't want to have to switch registrars again. Getting my domains out of Dreamhost was a nightmare, and I hate that whole unlocking procedure (though I understand why it's necessary to an extent).

I agree with Bitt, though. I used to frequently have slowness problems when trying to submit a post (maybe one post in every 10), and that was the only time it was slow. But I haven't seen that problem in a long while now.

I almost don't want to rock the boat here. Like I said, I spend all my time in the Off Topic forum, and if I stay here, I have no speed problems whatsoever, which explains my first post in this thread where I was so surprised by the complaints of slowness...

ust for the records, I too, from here (Rome) found opening www.empegbbs.com or even just empeg.com visibly slower than it used to. Once in, though, all seems to work ok.

Would this feature of firebug show us where the bottleneck is in that transaction?

DNS has been switched for a week now, anyone still seeing this issue?

I'm looking into optimizing some SQL tables today, it's been a while since I've last done that. May help the other issue I've seen where the site stalls when a new post is made.

Anyone else doing this? Hopefully the SQL optimize run will help here, but I found this is one potential way to run a really expensive SQL query. Basically when you go to the normal front of the boards, it calculates how many unread messages you have in each section based on your last date visited in each. If it's been a really long time since you visited the front page, it's going to do a query that will hit a lot of DB rows that aren't likely to be in memory cache.

If you do only want to visit the off topic section of the boards, please hit "mark all read" at the bottom of the page from time to time. That should help avoid some of the expensive SQL queries. Hopefully version 8 will address that one with a better setup.

Keep in mind that in doing this, you also will miss out on any announcement threads and such. And it's lead to a number of "on topic" threads going to off topic.

I do the same thing Matt does and I've just verified the same issue he mentioned. After a minute of loading, I just cancelled the page load, clicked marked read and was instantly taken to the top level of the forum.

Ah-HA! I don't read the three "Rio" forums. I just went through and "read" them all. Lets see if I see this problem again tomorrow.

It's definitely been quicker on the whole for the past week or so -- taking only maybe 5-seconds too long for the initial load, rather than 10-15 seconds.

So earlier today I took your suggestion of "Mark All Read" on the main page -- including the non-empeg forums. Since then, initial load time is 1-2 seconds, about normal for any BBS-like site I visit.

Cool. Thanks, Tom.

It's quickER, but still not very fast.

First, I clicked on the "General Discussion" level, which lists only the set of boards that Off Topic lives under. That took about 8-10 seconds to load.

Then, I clicked on the top level (empegbbs.com), and it took long enough for me to skim several stories in Google Reader while I waited. That's actually an improvement, though, because I used to be able to clear out a feed waiting for it to load. Also, once it did load I was able to move around easily and quickly through the various forums.

I'll check again tomorrow and see if it's improved. I hadn't noticed an improvement this week, but I hadn't really tried. I had done a couple searches, and those were quite slow...

Keep me posted. I've been doing other work on the box and restarting some processes, so it may take time for memory caches to return to their normal state.

I realized what hid the page load problem for me. Safari has empegbbs.com on my top sites at home and work. So in both places, the background check for new content hid any loading delays. I also tend to keep all forums read anyhow, so that helped hide it too.

Long term, I may pay the provider a little more every month for some extra RAM. I figured 512MB would be enough, but I guess not. The entire empegbbs DB is 397.26 MB for data, and 139.56 MB worth of indexes.

Doing this has significantly improved my loading speed for the BBS. I rarely visit most of the other sections so there were many un-read posts.

me too

Agreed. I've still seen it be slow on occasion, but much faster in general.

The site has continued to be quite snappy since I did this. I still read all of the empeg forums, not just off-topic. So my bookmark points at http://empegbbs.com/ and it is nice and quick now.

Cheers

I just tried the "Mark all read" trick too and I'll see how well it works. It was still a little slow for me to exit the Off Topic forums today, but I'll check again tomorrow.

BTW, I finally went into the announcements section, which I never remember to look at. There I noticed Cris's wonderful post about the empeg wedding! Was that posted there originally or was it moved there? I feel bad for missing it, though even if I had seen it, it doesn't look like mere mortals are allowed to post to the announcements section... Anyway, congrats, Cris!