Cloudfare error opening first page of very long thread

(Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this)

There is a very long thread on the Slackware Linux forum https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ that causes a Cloudfare timeout and failure when I try to open page 1. It's one of the pinned threads at the top.

Opening the most recent page of that thread - currently page 420 is OK.

Link to first page of the thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...-a-4175620463/

Here is most of the text of the page I get from Cloudfare. This is repeatable - I get this every time.

Error 524
Ray ID: 6034f2ecbef0e865 • 2020-12-18 01:02:27 UTC
A timeout occurred

You Browser Working
Newark Cloudflare Working
www.linuxquestions.org Host Error


What happened?
The origin web server timed out responding to this request.

It's a web server timeout, a perfectly normal thing to happen on a much-frequented site.
Somebody is paying good money to show you a boilerplate page "explaining" things, instead of your browser just timing out evtl.
And it does not always happen. I can open the page in question near-instantly right now.

Same here for more than two weeks now.

Definitely not normal.

I'm getting the timeout too, but no error message. Anyway... vBulletin (this forum software) can get stupid with very long threads. Over on City-Data we found that the limit with old versions was about 100 pages per thread (or about 1000 posts), and after that it would start losing posts (some sort of database error), so we made a policy of when they got that big we'd start v2.0 for that thread. A few years ago vBulletin seemed to get over this problem (anyway we now have some threads there with over 700 pages that still work correctly, but C-D has millions of users and is provisioned for that), but every once in a while on other vBulletin sites, I'll see a timeout complaint like this. I'm thinkin' when a thread gets really long, depending on the server capacity it can still time out, maybe something to do with the size of the thread database.

What seems odd to me is that it times out opening the first page of the thread, but has no problem with the last page which opens right away. I tried other pages at random, and it also fails on page 2, but the rest seem OK.

(Yes, I understand why Cloudfare reports the error the way it does.)

Yeah, same here -- page 3 loads, but page 2 times out.

I wonder if there might be a corrupted entry in the message database, that is preventing the first two pages from loading.

Unfortunately I don't see a way to backtrack one message at a time, to test the theory that it's a single corrupted message (or index, not sure how it's structured under there, but I know it takes forever to rebuild if you migrate vBulletin to the latest version .. on another site with traffic similar to here, it took most of a week.)

Still having issues with this. I can't open the first page of that thread on multiple machines on different networks (I couldn't open it last night on my home machine and I can't open it this morning at work on my work computer).

Also, the database will frequently fail if you try to search that thread or search the site for a keyword and limit it to a specific username.

Originally Posted by bassmadrigal ... Also, the database will frequently fail if you try to search that thread or search the site for a keyword and limit it to a specific username.

It ALWAYS fails for me if I try and find a post, or search for a specific word from a specific member here. While it did fail a couple times when I searched a particular thread the other day, that's about the only part of the site's search function that ever works for me.