google pad screws up posting and PC forum freezes PC at work

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 23 Apr 2007, 16:48

first:
unable to get on with posting a reply or making a post due to that google syndication ad wich won't budge.

I had it occur on me several times now, regardless of location (work, home, else), OS (W2K, XP etc) or browser (IE6, FF2.0 etc)....

when making a post the "in between screen" hangs on the "loading google syndicate ad" and then nothing ever happens again.
the next page just won't come up, not after 3 minutes, not after 5 or 10.

when I refresh the page to "unfreeze" it (using either the ENTER key or F5) my reply is there several times and I have to delete all save one.

bug?

second: the PC forum freezes the PC at work
another typical PlanetCatfish-forum sign (it hasn't happened on any other site with any other phpBB forum) is the total freeze of the computer.
now this is particulary weird, cause it only happens at work where we run the show on windows XP with the latest service packs and the browser is IE also updated.

using the forum freezes the entire PC solid! every switch in links or making posts freezes it.....and then not evenm CTRL ALT DEL can unfreeze that computer, except just waiting and closing off IE altogether.
every switch from page or from topic to topic starts this freeze wich can last from 5 seconds (rarely) to 15 or even 30 (happens more often). even the rightclick dropdown screen from the mousebutton is gone, and no keyboardcontrol in the screen is possible.

browsing the PC forum at work when I have some time on my hands isn't funny anymore cause of this.

only by aiming the mousebutton to the 'close' button up right seems to work, after the 'freeze' time is over of course.

memory flood? bug?

MatsP · Post by **MatsP** » 23 Apr 2007, 17:30

I'm using Firefox on WinXP and although sometimes things are a bit slow, they aren't at all like what you describe.

Multiple posts can happen (I've done it a few times) when you click multiple on the submit button (or refresh with F5 during the "submit" phase), and I see this as a side-effect of the site being slow, rather than a bug in itself.

3, 5 or 10 minute waits seem far too long to wait. I usually give up waiting after a couple of minutes, and my company's proxy server isn't much more patient... And yes, the proxy server sometimes gives up on PC - this is possibly the same problem that you're seeing. But it's not happening very frequently to me.

The second problem, I can't say I've seen at all. You're saying that it's completely stuck and not even CTRL-ALT-DEL works, right? That's very strange on a Win2K/XP/Vista-based OS, because [going technical] these OS's have multi-threaded and re-entrant kernel. Generally when something like this happens, it's becasue some process is holding a global lock that is necessary for the other process (e.g. the "change the screen to the CTRL-ALT-DEL one"). It may be that the system is so low on memory that some very critical process has been swapped out, but even that should right itself long before 5 or 10s, in my experience. Sounds strange. What are the specs on this machine (memory size is probably the most interesting detail, but processor speeed and hard-disk info would be good too).

--
Mats

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 24 Apr 2007, 08:34

I'lll ask the System guy; he's the one with all the stats.

it's something at work; here i got a dual core 4200 something CPU and over 2 GIG on ram. very few things flood my computer since I did that upgrade.

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 24 Apr 2007, 14:52

The top google ad or the bottom google ad?

Jools

Post by **Janne** » 24 Apr 2007, 21:08

I have the same problem like sidguppy except that I always can use ctrl-alt-del, I dont know why but this happen only on this site. This answer took around 3-4 minutes to upload.

Janne

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 25 Apr 2007, 08:08

Jools, a very good question , since often the whole page doesn't load when this happens and I see nothing.

but i strongly suspect it's the top one, cause once in a while it really doesn't load properly, "eats up the drop-down-menu-bar" or makes half of it it disappear.

it's very random. looks like today it's working fine BUT I'm also typing this at home. where I got a significant larger and faster computer.

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 25 Apr 2007, 09:12

We've been through this before.

(a) It has nothing to do with the adverts. If the drop down menu doesn't display, it means the page hasn't loaded. Despite its position on screen, the drop down menus are about the last thing to load onto a page.

So, the menu doesn't display because the page hasn't completely loaded because the database hasn't returned data to fill out the page. IF it was a problem with the adverts, wouldn't the cat-elog or cotm or shane's world pages also exhibit the same problem. There's been no report of that...

(b) It has little to do with your computer. Typically home users will have modem connections which, very generally, have much more tolerant connections than work proxy servers. The time out quicker in essence. That's only true however when database load is equivalent, as you've noted, sometimes it is OK and that can also be because the forum is quiet (not a lot of people on). That usage includes "guests" who are users that are viewing the forum but not logged on.

(c) Looking at database load, it seems to me that the is a lot more database traffic on forum topics where lots of the users involved in posting have "my cats" lists set up.

I think it's more down to database load and probably my bad programming (or at least the fact that the catelog (including "my cats") database is on a different database to the forum.

Jools

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 25 Apr 2007, 10:40

okidoki.

I thought it was the ad that caused it, cause when it happens, it's the google ad or google syndicate that gets mentioned in the grey bar above the start-toolbar.

as you say, it isn't on every part of planetcatfish (just checked), and those google ads are there on the other pages as well (CotM, CateLog etc).

it's only the forum that sometimes 'hangs' this way.

you mention a different database for the forum as compared to the rest of Planetcatfish. also, different server? maybe it's something there, but I'll be the first to admit I don't know jack about programming servers.

MatsP · Post by **MatsP** » 27 Apr 2007, 13:09

Sid, et.al.

Part of the problem may be that there is two different servers involved, but a major part of it is that if you query two different databases, there's no way for the database-engine(s) involved to optimise the result - all the relvant data from one or another table has to be used.

Jools, do you think it would make sense to turn off the "My Cats" from the forum pages until you've figured out the best way to make it a bit "better"?

--
Mats

apistomaster · Post by **apistomaster** » 27 Apr 2007, 13:30

Hi Guys,
FWIW I have difficulty using IE6 with planetcatfish. It works rarely. I can view everything but when I try to post I always get the "invalid session" message.

However, I downloaded the Netscape bowser, most recent version, and it works really well with planetcatfish.
Posting is no problem.

Loading pages is sometimes on the slow side but I've just ascribed that to perhaps periods of peak volumes.

You may wish to try the same as it has allowed me to continue to enjoy the site with much less frustration.

It may be worth the experiment.
I have a Dell E1505 Notebook with the latest Windows XP, 80GB plus 250GB periferal drive. 1.66 MHertz.
Intel Core Duo processor. Can't remember what the RAM spec is.

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 27 Apr 2007, 19:30

apistomaster wrote:FWIW I have difficulty using IE6 with planetcatfish. It works rarely. I can view everything but when I try to post I always get the "invalid session" message.

Pretty sure this was identified down to a IE/security/AOL issue.

Jools

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 27 Apr 2007, 19:33

I have noticed slow (forum) database performance this week too (it is intermittent). I've had a word with the hosts aboiut this. They came back with this...

> Hello,
>
> We're going to move your account to a server with more powerful processing
> cores, and we want to ensure that the transition is a smooth as possible for
> you. By doing so, we aim to improve the performance of your account, and the
> performance of the server that it is currently hosted on.
>

So, expect a few hours downtime. I do think Mats is pretty much right about this, there's a database connection opened for occurrence of the stats under the posters stats. Why that slows the forum (as opposed to the database the stats are on), I don't know and it doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe it is time to move it all back into one place again.

Jools

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 27 Apr 2007, 20:28

Good luck with that one, Jools

sounds like a major operation to me, hope they don't screw up. I'll take it you have a back up somewhere in case they do?

anyway tnx for looking into this, good to know I wasn't just imagining stuff

SG

YouTube · Post by **Jools** » 28 Apr 2007, 08:58

http://www.planetcatfish.com/forum/view ... 571#111571

Jools

Post by **Janne** » 29 Apr 2007, 21:08

What a different...now everything works perfect

Janne

MatsP · Post by **MatsP** » 30 Apr 2007, 12:12

Jools wrote:I have noticed slow (forum) database performance this week too (it is intermittent). I've had a word with the hosts aboiut this. They came back with this...

> Hello,
>
> We're going to move your account to a server with more powerful processing
> cores, and we want to ensure that the transition is a smooth as possible for
> you. By doing so, we aim to improve the performance of your account, and the
> performance of the server that it is currently hosted on.
>

So, expect a few hours downtime. I do think Mats is pretty much right about this, there's a database connection opened for occurrence of the stats under the posters stats. Why that slows the forum (as opposed to the database the stats are on), I don't know and it doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe it is time to move it all back into one place again.

Jools

Agree with Janne about the improvement... Hopefully it stays good too!

I think the problem when combining data from one database to another is a combination of things: One is that "all the data" from one database has to be comhined with another "at the end", rather than being combined "early", which means that (potentially) more data has to be transferred from one DB to another. The other being the latency (delay) in communication between different database servers - which doesn't help matters. The bigger database (forum users) is always going to be worse hit than the one with the smaller database (which in this case is the "keepers list"), simply because there's more data in the bigger database...

One possible solution would be to replicate [a subset] of the users-database in the other data-base. Since I suppose we don't need all the data from the forum-database [probably just name and ID, really], it shouldn't be too difficult to keep it in sync - and only members that are registered keepers need to be replicated. Database replication isn't a completely unknown concept, and I'm pretty sure it could be done here.

But hopefully there is enough extra capacity to cope with a larger number of registered keepers.

--
Mats

sidguppy · Post by **sidguppy** » 30 Apr 2007, 18:05

it's different indeed; a lot more smooth.

great job, Jools

can't test it yet at work, since I got a week off for holiday of some kind, but it sure works faster in the posting area and doesn't hang on the google-adds at home with my ol' W2K operating system and firefox browser.

apistomaster · Post by **apistomaster** » 30 Apr 2007, 18:32

It seems to me that the site is more responsive than it has been at other times in the past. Nice.