Outstanding server / web site issues

[whole diary]

[grahame]

New and improved diary back and running at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/diary.html

Can I ask members as they post up date specific stuff to add a link to the Coffee Shop Calendar too please.

[grahame]

The web site has been running very slowly today due to being very heavily loaded.   It's already started to improve and will do so even more during the night

I'm the one to "blame" - I added the 2023/24 passenger flow database to the five previous years which we already had, and I made their analysis https (secure), obvious and crawlable.  Ouch!

There are (only) so many possible pages, so I have our receptionist server caching them each time it passes back a new response in case it's called up again - it's so much more efficient to say "I know that one' rather than "I will ask for you".    At 3 O'clock this afternoon, all enquires were new and being passed through at great loads on the worker.  By 10 p.m., 11,000 requests had been made and already around 50% are being answered "trivially" from cache by the receptionist.   There IS some capacity on the worker (and plenty if we need it on the receptionist) so the issues of the last few hours are (as planned  ) on their way to being resolved.

We have another similar issue in due course in a couple of weeks time when I add in all the bus stops!

[Chris from Nailsea]

Have you never heard the expression, 'shooting yourself in the foot', grahame ?   

[grahame]

Have you never heard the expression, 'shooting yourself in the foot', grahame ?   

I have ... but this came as no surprise - in fact I'm glad I didn't have to start throttling it back.   

[grahame]

Have you never heard the expression, 'shooting yourself in the foot', grahame ?   

I have ... but this came as no surprise - in fact I'm glad I didn't have to start throttling it back.   

It's coping much better this morning - and 2 out of every 3 requests are being answered from the receptionist's cache.    Overall Coffee Shop requests yesterday (until 03:30 this morning):
307,599 requests to receptionist
231,213 of those forwarded by receptionist to worker
a further 20,396 direct to worker

There is other traffic on both machines - total web requests including other sites:
recpeptionist - 468,360
worker - 303,582
and as you might expect in any working relationship, there is other common reference to the same shared data sets out of the public (web) view.

Overall news for our users - steady as she goes.  Main stuff looking good for the future.

Please forgive me logging far more than is really useful to most of our members - it helps keep me sane(r) and be explaining what I am doing and why, it warns me if I'm doing something pretty darned crazy and helps me then make better choices.

[GBM]

Currently still not receiving email notifications.
Just tried a bounce test for my internal mail, and that's working OK.

As matt1j says, I press LIKE. This takes me to a new page with 'like wot he said earlier', so have to press the back button to return to the current topic.

Still no email notifications, and the same issue with the LIKE button.

If it helps, can use my gmail address instead of the BTinternet one.

[grahame]

I am aware of a slowing of some page delivery recently - caused partly by a build up of logs from the work done over the new year and tracking how the sight is performing.  Also caused by my working some things out from scratch at each page call with less caching of results than before, and far higher robot traffic than we used to have now that we are https.   I have made some adjustment already and will be making more.  As I know what to look for, I'm seeing a difference; if you hadn't noticed the issue, you won't see any change - for you, we're fixing the issues before it breaks - preventative maintenance.

This - remains - really irritating - but remains for another few weeks to allow me to test ...

This is a test of GDPR / Cookie Acceptance [about our cookies]
Really irritating test - cookie expires in 24 hour!  Accept  Reject

[grahame]

If you get this page anything other than VERY rarely, please let me know



Last year's code that quietly turned away aggressive robots needed tuning which I did this morning ... load has gone down (good) but I need to know if the occasional one I divert away is a real user