is it just me or is this site getting way too flakey?
Pretty constantly experiencing crashes and database errors and directive processing errors.
I know it's run out of the goodness of ChrisW's heart, but maybe it's time some money was put in the pot to pay for some upgrades?
Just a thought.....
Good Idea
it shouldnt be our pocket or the goodness of his heart, this site is easily busy enough to be funded out of advertising and traders. I think he lacks time to optimise it tbh. Something does need doing though because the site is so slow now im thinking of giving up!
i think everyone with over 2000 posts should be made to pay for site maintenance!
i can see mad house would soon dry up if it were the case. and most of the bitching and griping.
i agree about the funding though joel
tom
Maybe its time Chris gave one of the regulars who is good at the website stuff admin status so stuff like advertising could be maintained.
It looks like Chris still visits the site, but he hasnt posted in a few months and is probably very busy.
if it was opened to advertising to kit car manufacturers/ parts manufacturers im sure it could get quite a bit of money- its the site where THE most kit car enthusiasts regularly access- surely they should be asking chris to be able to advertise here???
If you wish to help Chris with the funding of the site, there is a donate button which links to paypal on the home page (scroll down it's bottom
left).
I believe Chris upgrades (new servers which when I last spoke to him were the main culprit) the site when funds allow.
I know some have helped already but newbies may now know
ATB Dan.
[Edited on 11/10/06 by scutter]
Have to say I've not noticed a problem! Seems to run fine for me and I'm on here pretty much all the 'working' day!
Cheers,
James
There are also problems at times with the MySQL server limits being hit too.
I'm willing to help out if any maintenance needs doing. I've been working with PHP & MySQL databases for a good number of years now.
Getting sponsorship from companies would be worth it. My mate who runs zetecinside does quite well, though in his case as its for sprint and hill
climb he mostly gets big discounts on products.
Its all how you market to the companies. I could possibly help in working out an approach.
maybe some of the other traders who gain business from this site ( some are not even registered traders ) would like to contribute towards the cost of
web upgrades / maintainence etc in return for a small logo in the corner as we have, im happy to donate £150 to the cause ( as we do have our own
section ) and if other traders did the same then that should go a long way towards helping
it would be a shame for such a great site to go down hill
just my thoughts
best regards
marc
I only ever use this site during normal working hours and it has been 100% reliable for over 2 years. Clearly, the issues mentioned above must be related to high volumn of demand in the evenings. To me, this would suggest a hardware issue of some sort. Some sort of cash investment would deal with this issue.
Yeah, the idea of the traders donating a set fee each year to host the respective forum would be a nice idea if they don't do it already.
Lets face it £150 is a nomimal sum that can be written off against tax, but in proportion would really help on hosting fees.
One limitation that is there is the 100 simultaeous connections limit on the MySQL daemon which causes pages to balk out. This may be a hosting
service implied limit. I can't rememeber off hand if this is a per database limit or per host service.
On top of that of course is that the server will be hosting loads of web sites.
i find its night time thats the problem !
im willing to donate as its would be a shame to see this site go down ! (not that i think it will)
got a blue sierra to donate lol
ive only found it to be night time it quite often says something like too many connections ???
just made my £150 donation 
best regards
marc
Guys
If there is an issue, please let me know! I don't get on here as much as I'd like any more (although that has changed in the last couple of
weeks - I've even got my email going and cleared all the spam out of my inbox!) but every time I have logged on I've not seen a problem.
Admitttedly this has been during the daytime though. If we do need a hardware upgrade, I'll see what I can find.
For the technically minded amongst you, current load is...
quote:
[root@typhon ~]# uptime
13:46:50 up 212 days, 19:35, 2 users, load average: 0.39, 0.60, 0.55
Mid-evening is the worst time...
some evenings I cant access the site all night, day time is fine.
yeah its in the evenings around 8-10 i reckon, everything slows down and you just get that too many connections thing coming up.
Well done Marc
Don't worry about buying new hardware...but a brain upgrade for ChrisW might be worthwhile
I should point out '_luke' is my business partner and found a few things to tweak on the server for me, and a few things I
'overlooked' that should have been configured again when I rebuilt the server earlier in the year. Hopefully performance will improve -
your feedback is welcome!
Chris
So when it breaks is 8-10pm.... exactly when you lot should be building your cars!
Get out in the garage you slackers!!!
Cheers,
Jim
Says speedy builder James
ATB Dan.
Many thanks for that Chris! (and Luke.... )
Thanks for taking 'time-out' from your schedule for our quick chat earlier, much appreciated .......
Edited to say:- The clocks still an hour out, but...no worries, leave it a couple of weeks and it will be right again!
ATB Fozzie
[Edited on 11/10/06 by Fozzie]
Ok - so I'm told (via MSN) that it was crap again tonight. Anyone care to give their comments? How was the site for you this evening? If you
don't tell me about the problems I can't fix them...
It's now 1am and everything seems fine!
Chris
I was on at 20:30 - occasionally very slow going between pages (20+ seconds).
Yup started slowing around 20:10, started a long reply to a thread, posted it, the site hung for over 2 minutes then returned a blank page, and my
post lost into the big wide ethernet...
So did it again, and it was slow, very slow, but posted OK and didnt time out that time.
I also tried to U2U around 22:00, and again that 'timed out'.
I was also getting an error and indeed the Netrino Logo (top right) was missing.
Went back on around 23:00 and all was fine and dandy......
Fozzie
If people say what they think a reasonable respose time for accessing the forum or any specific area is (ie loading a page) I might be able to setup
some monitoring at work. We could setup an sla and a schedule for the hours to suit and I could generate a report for you to illustrate any slow
responses/downtimes?!
Hmm tis proper broke now 
Have you noticed that if you click on forum (front page) it just brings you back to front page?
Click on 'recent topics' on the front page and some work some don't. On the pages that do work, click on forum (top left) and you get
sent to 'front page' again.......
I have left a message for ChrisW, but is probably tres busy at this time of day...
I only managed to get to this page by clicking on my profile 'find posts' by this user.......
Any one else have the above problems, or, is it just moi?
Fozzie
been getting:
Database connection error!!!
A connection to the Database could not be established.
Please check your username, password, database name and host.
Also make sure config.php is rightly configured!
When connecting, the database returned:
Error 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)
Note that if the site breaks in such a way that the wrong pages are coming up, there's probably someone working away behind the scenes!!
Hopefully we're getting somewhere now
quote:
Originally posted by _luke
Note that if the site breaks in such a way that the wrong pages are coming up, there's probably someone working away behind the scenes!!
Hopefully we're getting somewhere now
how come this is the only(?) area of the forum where you don't get the option to add an attachment to a new post or reply?
if you're still working on it can you try and sort out the permissions error on www.locostbuilders.co.uk/users/ned? there was some data on there
that i don't have copies of anywhere else
ta.
ps i was just playing around with setting up some synthetic scripts to monitor the response times when LB went down earlier:
lb monitoring
[Edited on 12/10/06 by ned]
The downtime was for a database re-index
I can't sort those files out I'm afraid. You know who that's down to.....
are there any old backups that could be restored? I have a feeling the files never came back after the last rebuild when the site was hacked or
upgraded (I forget which it was)
the url did open for a while with a forbidden html error on it though..
Ned.
As this site is currently being tweaked, is it possible to have the members and guests online reinstated on the bottom of the page? I used to find it
extremely useful.
Phil
quote:
Originally posted by Hellfire
As this site is currently being tweaked, is it possible to have the members and guests online reinstated on the bottom of the page? I used to find it extremely useful.
Phil
Hi Chris. Thanks for your efforts.
Did you see this thread the other day? A reply ended up timed before the thread was started, was very odd.
http://www.locostbuilders.co.uk/viewthread.php?tid=53158
This is similar to a few of the rarer database problems, ie posts not appearing or appearing twice.
[Edited on 12/10/06 by JoelP]
Well, it's just gone 8:00pm, and the site's zipping along!
Maybe I'm just lucky, but it does seem faster.
David
Yup zipping along here too!
Fozzie
aye, much better!
*touch wood*
First time in a while that I've not had any data base error messages. Site's generally speedy too. Which is nice.
few niggles but we're getting them ironed out! It's looking much better tonight
quote:
Originally posted by _luke
few niggles but we're getting them ironed out! It's looking much better tonight
Looking at the graphs of server load for this evening, it does appear to have been a lot better. Luke optimised all the database tables for me today,
and recreated all the indexes, which should mean queries are a lot faster with less load on the machine. Although there is still a peak around 8pm,
it was far less today than previous days!
Take a look at the graph below and you'll see the difference. Note the peak at about 10am this morning was Luke rebuilding the database!
Server load average
Chris
[Edited on 10/13/2006 by ChrisW]
[Edited on 10/13/2006 by ChrisW]
Many thanks Chris and _luke.....
I had no 'time outs' or database errors last night at all, in fact, not even a 'slowing down' whilst pages were loading.
Very well done chaps....
Fozzie
p.s. Look in ChrisW's photo archive if you want to see a pic of the graph mentioned above
I had one "significant pause" at about 21:00, but as it was a one-off I'm prepared to put that down to a network hiccup.
Apart from that - it's a whole load better!
Well done chaps...
David
[Edited on 13/10/06 by David Jenkins]
looks like _Luke hit the trick!
Cheers luke
Tks
p.d. chrisw what was/is the reason for not putting back those user info in the corner??
needless to say that if we builders / donateers vote for it to come back you can only bend and put it back...
[Edited on 17/11/06 by tks]