Avoiding Multiple Posts during board lag

Kelly Antilles · Post by **Kelly Antilles** » 2003-03-17 04:36pm

A simple way to avoid making multiple posts during board lag is to do the following:

If it is taking an inordinate amount of time for it to post, stop the process.
Highlight your text and copy it (ctrl+c).
Go back to the forum via the link, not the back button.
See if your post shows up. (it usually will have)
If not, go back in and reply to the topic, pasting your post (ctrl+v) into the box.

See? Simple.

Trust me, 98% of the time, it's posted.

Kelly Antilles · Post by **Kelly Antilles** » 2003-03-17 04:41pm

btw, it took probably 2 minutes to post this thread.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-03-17 04:46pm

You can also open up a new window and check the alternate address of the board to see if your post has gone through.

Darth Garden Gnome · Post by **Darth Garden Gnome** » 2003-03-17 04:49pm

Whenever I've attempted to do something like this (occasionally my internet hiccups), once I go back (even using the Forum Index button) I only get an error. There's no way around it, so I have to close the box, and then use theotherlink to acsess the site. The link I previously used won't work for several minutes (up to ten, I believe). Either way, my postis always there, but hasn't been brought up to the top of the page or anything like that.

Maybe its just my comp?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-03-17 05:37pm

I have to talk to Lord MJ and see if he has any remedy for this. If it keeps happening regularly, I may have to consider Plan B: hosting it off my own server at home.

If you want to check it out just for fun, there's actually a working board at http://stardestroyer.homelinux.org that I've been running for quite a while as a testbed, and that's my home PC.

In the meantime, I'm going to sticky this thread and ask that anybody experiencing board problems report time and nature of problem. It's hard to get a handle on problems when I don't know how often they're occurring.

Post by **haas mark** » 2003-03-17 05:41pm

Or, stop the process, and right-click the "Preview" button and click "Open in new window." Usually, it will have posted.

Also, I think the lag is probably due to the major use of the board, and the amount of users on it. It's slower now on a cable modem than it is at 2 in the morning on a 56K. The more the merrier, they say, but it seems that the more people on the board, the slower and the more used a server gets.. but that tends to happen, no?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-03-17 05:44pm

verilon wrote:Or, stop the process, and right-click the "Preview" button and click "Open in new window." Usually, it will have posted.

Also, I think the lag is probably due to the major use of the board, and the amount of users on it. It's slower now on a cable modem than it is at 2 in the morning on a 56K. The more the merrier, they say, but it seems that the more people on the board, the slower and the more used a server gets.. but that tends to happen, no?

Yes, but what concerned me was the fact that my home PC can handle the data dump four times faster than this server can; there is some kind of performance bottleneck on the hardware end which is probably due to the fact that it has other users on it besides just me. At home, I have full use of the CPU. The server's only a 600MHz Celeron shitbox, but when 100% of 600MHz is a lot better than 5% of 1GHz. I believe this board can and should be able to run a lot faster, with fewer outages on a proper setup.

Post by **haas mark** » 2003-03-17 05:48pm

Darth Wong wrote:Yes, but what concerned me was the fact that my home PC can handle the data dump four times faster than this server can; there is some kind of performance bottleneck on the hardware end which is probably due to the fact that it has other users on it besides just me. At home, I have full use of the CPU. The server's only a 600MHz Celeron shitbox, but when 100% of 600MHz is a lot better than 5% of 1GHz. I believe this board can and should be able to run a lot faster, with fewer outages on a proper setup.

Ah, well, then.. Different people using the same server would cause less for you.. But then, as I said, it's worse now on a cable modem than it is at home with my 56K (and a shitty processor to boot). But it seems to clear up now and again, so, who knows? Would that mean that some people begin to get off the server that you are using?

Brother-Captain Gaius · Post by **Brother-Captain Gaius** » 2003-03-17 05:51pm

Darth Wong wrote:In the meantime, I'm going to sticky this thread and ask that anybody experiencing board problems report time and nature of problem. It's hard to get a handle on problems when I don't know how often they're occurring.

When I got home from school today (approx. 15:20 GMT-7), I couldn't access the board at all. I couldn't get on until about 15:50.

Kelly Antilles · Post by **Kelly Antilles** » 2003-03-17 06:48pm

verilon wrote:Or, stop the process, and right-click the "Preview" button and click "Open in new window." Usually, it will have posted.

Also, I think the lag is probably due to the major use of the board, and the amount of users on it. It's slower now on a cable modem than it is at 2 in the morning on a 56K. The more the merrier, they say, but it seems that the more people on the board, the slower and the more used a server gets.. but that tends to happen, no?

Actually, there are 47 people accessing the board at the moment and it's working fine. I think it's probably whatever else is on the server is crapping us out. Bandwidth is sucked rather quickly.

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-03-17 07:43pm

I'm been searching for the cause of this performance lag. The network has been undergoing reconfiguration, following a DOS attempt, but I doubt that's causing this much downtime.

The server isn't that heavily used, since it only has a few other sites on it, in addition to this one, and my own. However I temporarily suspended a site with a perl chat, to see if that chat is causing the downtime.

Hopefully this problem will be tracked down. I may in a couple months buy a faster server and migrate everything to the new one, as soon as there is another low set up fee special.

Kelly Antilles · Post by **Kelly Antilles** » 2003-03-17 07:58pm

Lord MJ wrote: The server isn't that heavily used, since it only has a few other sites on it, in addition to this one, and my own. However I temporarily suspended a site with a perl chat, to see if that chat is causing the downtime.

Bingo. I bet that's it. Perl sucks up bandwidth.

Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi · Post by **Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi** » 2003-03-17 09:47pm

I always thought that hte board lag I experiences was the result of a just plain crappy connection. Several times today, I was about to make a post and it took forever to load. I'm sure that's a part of it, though.

irishmick79 · Post by **irishmick79** » 2003-03-17 09:53pm

I've noticed that hitting the "submit" button ONLY ONCE generally helps a ton. As long as you're patient, your one post will more than likely go through.

Mark S · Post by **Mark S** » 2003-03-17 10:16pm

I find it nice that, with all the problems going on, people seem to either just put up or try to find solution. Nobody is getting fed up because of it. Shows what kind of group we have here.

Ted · Post by **Ted** » 2003-03-17 10:45pm

It can get kind of anoying.

Like my latest multi-post.

I clicked submit once, then left my computer for 1.5 hours, and turns out I had a triple post with 6 mins between each post.

Something's odd with that.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-03-17 11:35pm

Advisory

If you suspect the board is malfunctioning when you attempt to post, immediately hit stop. The browser may not receive a response and resubmit your post, leading to double or even triple-posting.

Sriad · Post by **Sriad** » 2003-03-18 02:10am

irishmick79 wrote:I've noticed that hitting the "submit" button ONLY ONCE generally helps a ton. As long as you're patient, your one post will more than likely go through.

I only hit submit once and got a quadruple post on the Ideal Government thread on the Morality board. Now that I've read this thread I won't let it happen again, but you can have multiposts from only one press of the submit button.

Cal Wright · Post by **Cal Wright** » 2003-03-18 02:24am

If you need more help Wong, let us know.

Captain tycho · Post by **Captain tycho** » 2003-03-18 04:38am

Sriad wrote:
irishmick79 wrote:I've noticed that hitting the "submit" button ONLY ONCE generally helps a ton. As long as you're patient, your one post will more than likely go through.
I only hit submit once and got a quadruple post on the Ideal Government thread on the Morality board. Now that I've read this thread I won't let it happen again, but you can have multiposts from only one press of the submit button.

One time I quintiple posted a thread on the OT forum...

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2003-03-18 04:47am

Lord MJ wrote:However I temporarily suspended a site with a perl chat, to see if that chat is causing the downtime.

Doesn't seem to have made much difference.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-03-18 08:00am

I think there must be some kind of CPU or memory use throttling in the Ensim appliance software that's installed on the server. When I was doing the data-dump restore on the database, I noticed that it never let the CPU utilization for the mysqld daemon go above 10% or so, whereas on my home PC it could shoot up to 60%. That's why the current test board at http://testbbs.stardestroyer.net is so fast even though it's running through a feeble 256kbps upload connection (to be upgraded to 640kbps next week).

Lord MJ · Post by **Lord MJ** » 2003-03-18 03:30pm

I have narrowed the list of possible problems, it is almost certainly either apache or mysql that is causing this lag. It might be very well what Mike has suggested. I have finally noticed the lag myself, and have been furiously trying to try to fix the problem.

Although Mike's answer seems plausible, I'm also looking heavily into Apache as well.

I think I can definately rule out processor or memory problems though.

Kelly Antilles · Post by **Kelly Antilles** » 2003-03-19 12:17pm

Something I've noticed, it's lagging a lot around noon eastern. It did it yesterday and now today.

Boba Fett · Post by **Boba Fett** » 2003-03-19 12:28pm

Kelly Antilles wrote:Something I've noticed, it's lagging a lot around noon eastern. It did it yesterday and now today.

Happened to me as well but I realized it only happening when you try to post a reply and somebody else is posting at the same time, in the same thread.