I am using Opera, and AFAICS the images are not cached for Linuxquestions.org. I am not using any proxy.

jlinkels

I'm posting here because I did a quick read of the "Feedback" forum first.

This has been annoying me for several weeks/months now:

It is a sporadic fault:

I Click on a LQ link in Firefox 2.0.0.19 and it immediately says "Connecting to LQ" then "Waiting for LQ" for a couple of minutes.... .... .... ....

Meanwhile, in a terminal, I can ping www.linuxquestions.org just fine, but the page doesn't load into FF. So I don't think it is a DNS problem.

So (of course) I open up another few links from LQ in new FF widows.

Nothing happens for a couple of minutes until suddenly all (2-3) windows open with maybe a 2-3 second delay between them. Then Bang! Bang! Back in business!

Is your server "going to sleep" now and again?

This behaviour happens now and again. When it is happening, it lasts for 10-20 minutes. Then normal connectivity is restored and all is OK for maybe a day, or two days. Then it starts again.

When LQ "goes to sleep" using konqueror to follow the link doesn't help - the same delay before LQ answers my browsers. When LQ "wakes up", all (different) browsers load the page just fine. At (almost) the same time.

It happens when I try to connect to LQ from different (geographically separated accounts and WAN IP's (bt.internet.com) [As a family we all use this ISP, but have different accounts, are separated by location, DSL exchange, WAN IP numbers]

It happens sometimes when I connect to LQ from work (no idea who their ISP is) - but I have always put this down to LAN congestion.

IPV6 is disabled everywhere (One of these days I look forward to enabling it).

I am puzzled as I do not meet this behaviour anywhere on the net, except from sites that are truly "down", and LQ, which eventually responds, although sometimes it "times out".

I am not really complaining (LQ is good, thank you), but there is a problem somewhere.

Hope this helps find the (intermittent) problem. Maybe you can make some sense of this.

My issue... with this website is my ISP's DNS. Not had problems with this site.. but some others.


Just changed my DNS servers from my ISP's

Thanks, but DNS can't the problem, because ping www.linuxquestions.org resolves and answers immediately, meanwhile the http:///www.linuxquestions.org/xxx will not load. There is something else going on.

I thought the same... I tested my bandwidth .... and pings seemed normal. Though I had a hard time resolving pages. So I changed to some free DNS servers and everything is resolving quickly without issue... My issue might be different. But it fixed my issues with this site.

When a LQ page is displayed, not just LQ.org is contacted. There are others like googlesyndicate, ad.doubleclick.net and others which I forgot. Look carefully in your status bar which those sites are and see if there are problems with DNS resolution.

jlinkels

I've added http.cdnlayer.com back into my adblock filters (the googles and ad.'s were already blocked). Things have improved considerably.
Used to be that this messed up the LQ pages something awful - in place of the gif you got the tag (you are subscribed ...) that destroyed the pages. Looks fine now.
I'm leaving it like this.

When I added http.cdnlayer.com to the list of the blocked sites in my ABP I haven't been able to reply in any thread with "Post Reply" button because there's no "Post Reply" button,but for a little time that http.cdnlayer.com was blocked,there were no problems (delays).
But if you go here then you can see what I had in mind in the thread that I started here.

This is "outside USA" problem.

yes,I've seen some of those stats before - something is serious broken with the LQ usage of cdn.
I'm just going to use "quick replies" for a while.

I'm looking into other CDN providers now. CDNLayer (which is an Internap product) has been quite good from the US and Western Europe, but it's clear that in some parts of Asia and Australia it's not performing well. I've made quite a few performance changes recently and the average response time is now the lowest it's ever been. I have identified one issue that is causing sporadic hangups of 30-90 seconds. I hope to have that fixed by tomorrow.

--jeremy

Just a quick update. The main SQL server will be coming down to install an Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD drive. After that's done, we'll move the DB's to the SSD one by one. In addition to a RAM increase and the issue I identified in the post above, this should significantly improve performance. I'll post further updates after both items are completed.

--jeremy

RAM in the main SQL server has now been increased and both the LQ Wiki and LQ ISO DB's are running off the SSD. After some additional testing I will move the main LQ database.

--jeremy

I didn't browse through LQ Wiki lately,but I did before and from what I remember compared to present browsing expirience through LQ Wiki > things are moving faster.

I had a period of complete unavailability (not just slow; I know I have in the past defined 36 hours to open a reply window as 'a bit slow', but that was supposed to be a joke) from about 10:00 GMT to ~15:00 GMT (maybe a bit earlier or a bit later). I'm guessing that this was down to the move rather than anything else.

Ping, dig all worked fine, but opening the www didn't.

I'm sure that I used to have other things to do, but now this seems to bother me...probably just addictive behaviour

10:00 GMT was indeed when the maintenance window for the stated upgrades started. Since the last post I've moved LQ Radio and the remaining LQ network sites (besides the main site) onto the SSD and so far things look good. Moving the main DB will cause about a 5 minute downtime, so will be done off hours.

--jeremy