Website is slow sometimes

[Stingy]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

The best thing is that we need to find a better host in december and we have to pay a little more money for that.

I can get behind that idea.

[LazyPooky]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

Dreamhost is a cheap place for websites with visitors from the US, but for international visitors it's a terrible host. The last time (januari 2015) we discussed hosts Dreamhost had just moved our server in november and problems were solved with that move. I never thought it came back again because they said it's a stable server. Obviously they lied and I saw they still use an old MySQL version on their shared virtual servers.

The best thing is that we need to find a better host in december and we have to pay a little more money for that, although I don't think that would be a problem because most of the members here live in the richest countries of the world according to the Global Wealth Report 2015 ;)

It's feasible that there is some kind of negative interaction with the "Random Picture" box and the GetLazy galleries. Did you try to disable that and see what happens?

I did test that, like any other plugin, but it didn't change that much.

[Buzz]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

It's feasible that there is some kind of negative interaction with the "Random Picture" box and the GetLazy galleries. Did you try to disable that and see what happens?

I doubt it...the forum was already slow before the "random picture" box appeared for the first time afaik...pooky...I'm sure you already explained to me why we stick with dreamhost but maybe you can tell me again?...as fare as I can remember it has something to do with the price...on the other hand it is a shame that we (you) pay so much money for a forum with such a messy performance...sometimes I have the feeling it is the slowest place in the internet...I'm a member since 2009 and I'm wondering if it was that slow at the beginning?...and if not I wonder what happened in the meantime that cause so much trouble?

[Stingy]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

It's feasible that there is some kind of negative interaction with the "Random Picture" box and the GetLazy galleries. Did you try to disable that and see what happens?

[LazyPooky]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

Somehow the server has gone cuckoo again after high server loads which means that my former efforts did not help to prevent it :?

Considering that we are largely text based, unless we are using a plugin that is poorly coded and uses up more resources than it should, I can't imagine what else it would be aside from the pictures. There are usually no more than 5 members on at a time, so it's hard for me to believe that that would put too much strain on whatever server they are stored on. Are people who are not logged in allowed to view the galleries?

You're right. Only members are allowed to view the galleries and view the full photos posted in the forums by clicking on the thumbnails.

I have done what I could to optimize the forum. Xizer needs to discuss the situation about server settings with Dreamhost support. My contact with them were only superficial because I don't have much knowledge of servers and how they work.

[Stingy]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

Considering that we are largely text based, unless we are using a plugin that is poorly coded and uses up more resources than it should, I can't imagine what else it would be aside from the pictures. There are usually no more than 5 members on at a time, so it's hard for me to believe that that would put too much strain on whatever server they are stored on. Are people who are not logged in allowed to view the galleries?

[Fox]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

Nice story Fox. I understand the importance of GetLazy for the society

It's a saddening thing to admit, but after throwing all of my former internet habits in the trashcan, GetLazy has taken a very special place in my everyday life.
Good to have it back though, and I see it was necessary to have it offline for a couple of days, to improve the stability here on site.

Now, I'm just throwing it out there, but could it potentially have something to do with the tons of inactive users? I mean, before you get your first 5 posts, you are not showing up anywhere on site, but I would assume the account details are still being stored 'somewhere'. Maybe do a cleanup of old and inactive accounts?

[LazyPooky]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

Sorry for the downtime for the last two days. We were testing the forum how it works without any user and the problems we encountered before didn't happen during this test. I don't exactly know what was causing the problems but it could be a combination of things. So to rule out some causes we made some changes in order to improve the perfomance of the forum.

We tested the performance without plugins and enabled them one by one to see how this affected the site's performance. A few adjustments have been taking place, some obsolete plugins were deleted and a few plugins were updated. The Activity Side Bar was causing some trouble and is now set to a setting which uses lower bandwidth. I activated it just now.

Besides that, the attachments thumbnails are of lower quality and have a smaller size. The images on this server (also on the wiki pages) can't be hotlinked anymore.

There are a lot of pictures in the photo albums, some have a lot uploaded and some have a few uploaded. I thought it was a good plan to have all photos in one place organized. Unfortunately the Photo Gallery as plugin, who shows the public photoalbums on this forum, is not that good for such an amount of photos. We have to find a better solution for it.

The Picture Gallery is a better option because this software is ment to handle pictures and has a mobile friendly layout too, and it doesn't affect this server. The downside is that members of this forum can't upload photos themselves because there is no registration and login on that site.
The other possibility is using a filesharing site like Flickr and use the Group option to share photos. We do have that for a while now but there's not much activity: https://www.flickr.com/groups/lazytown. Some of you have personal accounts on photo/filesharing sites. The risk of using filesharing services is that you don't have control over the quality process of your uploaded photos, and there is a small change that the website shuts down.


I hope the changes will contribute to the site's performance so we can keep posting without delay ;)
Any suggestions are welcome.

I tried to find the settings for the activity stream bar thing, but was unable to find it.

It's in the Forums & Moderators -> Forum Blocks Manager.

It was a long and gruesome time...

Nice story Fox. I understand the importance of GetLazy for the society

[Stingy]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

I just noticed that a New Posts section is dissapeared.. When it will come back?

Yeah some things seem to be messed up for some reason. I tried to find the settings for the activity stream bar thing, but was unable to find it. I guess our Leading Lady is going to have to help us out with this one.

[Buzz]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

I just noticed that a New Posts section is dissapeared.. When it will come back?

I second this question

[SollaMega]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

I just noticed that a New Posts section is dissapeared.. When it will come back?

[Buzz]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

I was watching some adult stuff instead...and gave "down for everyone or just for me" some bonus hits

[Fox]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

It was a long and gruesome time. One second you would be telling yourself it would be okay, the next you would be begging for mercy. Minutes turned into hours, and hours into days.
The morning was at its beak, and you rolled out of bed. It was gonna be another one of those days. Another day that simply had to pass by. There was nothing to wake up to, and there was nothing to fill the empty space in your oh so boring life. You looked at your clock. The dead pixels in your phone indicated it was around 13:30. The fatigue had now really started to put its marks on you, and oversleeping was not even a surprise anymore - it was to be expected.

Crawling along the floor, you neared the basket of dirty laundry. The shirt wasn't too bad today, the socks were another story. A simple glance of an idea passed your mind, but it was quickly thrown away by the hunger for food.
What was on the menu today? Another portion of soggy oatmeal. You had started to get used to the bland taste, and the lumpy milk which was long overdue. Inside your head, you knew that it tasted horribly, but never the less it was food. It was the only fuel that kept you away from just staying in bed, letting the world pass by.

Outside the window you could see a sparrow. It was pecking at some breadcrumbs from the pile of pizza trays. You couldn't be arsed to take them to the dumpster, as you had seen the mountain grow for almost a week now. The tiny little creature was quickly interrupted though, as some teenagers ran by your garden fence. Hand in hand they skipped along, singing some lyrics you could faintly recognize. Inside your mind, you knew where you had heard them before, but your body's natural instinct had tried to reject them for all this time. You had said to yourself you wouldn't be pulled back.

You looked down in your saddening puree of brown goop, and realized you had been scraping the empty plate for a while. You got up and placed the plate in the towering pillar of dirty dishes. Not because you wanted to, but simply because you knew you had to.
You snailed yourself back into your cave, and sat down in front of the blinding plasma rays from your 24" monitor.

The computer had been standing guard from yesterdays bypassing. You got a slight feeling of happiness when pressing the F5 button, but was greeted with the same message as ever. "503 - You don't have permission to access this site."
The anger grew inside of you, but the life long messages you have been taught settled your mind, as you gazed into your imagination. You saw threads, you saw posts, you saw members. "Oh, LazyPooky made a new update for the app? I better check that one out!" "What's that? boredjedi got a new screen for his home theater? I GOT to see the results!" "No way, did Stingy announce another interview? Better start coming with some suggestions fast!"

A buzzing sound suddenly emerged from your otherwise dead cellphone. It was from Facebook. Did you really just snap out of this wonder world, just to interrupted by another meaningless notification? Another one of your so called 'friends' tagging you in some dumb viral video? You nearly threw your phone at the wall in remorse, but decided to see who it was, daring to ruin your perfect waste of time.

When looking at the screen, you suddenly feel strange. It wasn't a notification about a meaningless tag, it was a message. No sender and no topic. Just a simply short sentence saying "(Psst the forums are up)".
Could this be? You get the energy of a thousand Sportacus', and mash that poor F5 to death. And what are you greeted with? The well familiar lightblue background, and the wonderfully looking green grass in the banner.

That's when you realize that this was not yet another bloody Sunday. This was the day that you discovered, how important GetLazy.net really is for you.

[Fox]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

Oh yes..
I'm rather new, but I have noticed the site being very slow. I even got a 503 error when trying to access this topic. How ironic.

[boredjedi]

Re: Website is slow sometimes

I'm getting tired of this host. We had so much trouble last year until november and now it starts all over again.

At least now I know it wasn't due to my isp provider