The Forestry Forum

Hi All , For a  month or so  now the forestry forum has been  loading very slow from my home pc. I only go to the sawmill section to see what's new. All other internet sites that I go to load fine. I have lots of net Speed with Starlink . Anyone else having this problem ? VPN on or off is the same . Btw I have tried multiple browsers with cache and cookies deleted and no change.
Thanks for any info.

I gues I should have read doc Henderson's post right before mine LOL. 
Guess I have my answer.

It has been slow for me about all day......still is.

May be a stability problem as well, click on new posts, it shows up, then jumps to home again, after several tries it will hold.

Still super slow. Does not matter what time of day. Oh well , I guess it will right itself eventually .  

Same here. I've been offline for a while due to some health issues and just now being able to catch up. Happy to be back though!

This morning it timed out, now just really slow

Seems semi normal today so far. 
Fingers crossed.

Lightening fast this morning!!! :thumbsup:

So a couple days ago, a member accidentally erased one of their picture albums from the gallery. If you are seeing posts with missing pictures, this would be the reason why. I've been working to restore this album from one of the backups, but it has been proving slow going because I was running into a speed problem trying to download the 40gb backup file with it dropping to 5kb/sec shortly after starting the download. I Finally threw up the white flag after checking all the culprits I thought it could possibly be and getting nowhere.

I decided to ask for help from the server hosting company. The IT gentleman got back to me a few minutes ago, and I believe he has killed 2 birds with 1 stone so to speak. I'll just paste his msg here, but this most definitely fixed the download speed for getting the backup file local so i can retrieve the album, and also seems to have fixed the speed issue with the forum bogging down.

Hello Jeremy,
I believe the network on the server might have been getting rate limited. When
the server was set up originally, it was set up for a 10Mb (10,000kbit)
connection, with 100Mb (100,000 kb) burst. Your server is typically using
~1250KBs which is 10,000kbit (or 10Mb). I'm thinking that the download would
start fast, and then shortly after our server would see the average bandwidth
was going above 10Mb (the commit rate) and would force everything to slow back
down. When you would reboot the server, it would stop the traffic just long
enough for the average bandwidth to drop down below the 10Mb commit rate.
I've gone ahead and changed the connection on your server to a 100Mb line with
1Gb (1000Mb) burst. I believe that this should fix your issue.



I am hoping to get the missing pictures up and restored by late this evening *fingers crossed*. Also, if anyone would let me know if you have noticed any changes in speed for the better since early afternoon today.


Have a great evening everyone!


Jeremy

Seems faster to me now.

Quote from: TroyC on August 21, 2024, 06:51:52 PMSeems faster to me now.

Same here holy smokes it's way faster as of today this past couple months has been very slow for me 

Much better now!!!
Thank you!!!  ffcool

I am seeing much faster throughput.

 

Like when we first got 10/100 Ethernet and some devices had trouble auto negotiating and folks would be stuck at 10  smiley_thumbsdown were you paying for 100 this whole time? I smell a big credit on the bill coming...

Booming!!!!    ffcool

Ya know, its totally aggravating when ya struggle and struggle, worry and work for hours and days and long nights looking for a solution to a problem and you find out that someone, and this is the same someone that just dumped our files on the server and charging us $$700 on the changeover, doesn't do the job you were counting on them to do.  One little tick on a selection not made.

:snowball:    smiley_thumbsdown

Off and on slow today.

Is anyone having trouble posting this evening? Dad says he is having all kinds of problems at the cabin trying, but ive no issues. wanna know if anyone else is running into the same issues that he is, currently?

Not having any problem. Sorry to hear the boss is though.

Things working OK this side of the World. I had one timeout earlier today, but otherwise it's worked fine. 

I can see how being cut to 10mb would be painful  smiley_thumbsdown  Site being scraped by Google etc would use all your bandwidth, probably all the time. 

Obviously bandwidth costs money, but you should be getting what you paid for. We pay a bit more for a 950 / 500 gb connection here, which is frankly overkill for a home account. If I'm downloading large files, like disk images or games, the bottleneck seems to be the slow hard disks I have, not the Internet. So basically I can't saturate the fiber link, even from fast servers like Steam, because the PC can't write to disk fast enough. 

The FF is working well up here in Manitoba.
Posting, loading and ads are all behaving as per normal.

Can't help the speed of the boss's internet service when quotes of large images are included in our forum messages, such as nativewolf sent this morning. We can help the forum out with prudent use of the forum, seems to me. No disrespect intended here to anyone. 

Everything has worked fine here for the last few days.

Some days are slow most days are fast. But, I'm slow some days too. ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy

For me, the Forestry Forum has been very slow all day. Thought it was time to pass that info up the line. Other sites on my system are not slow at all. 
bt

It has been we are trying to deduce the curre t issues. @Nobody 

Thanks for toiling endlessly with no compensation, @Jeff !

I hope it gets better soon tried different browsers on the I phone. That didn't make any difference.   ffsmiley

Is it any better this morning?

Slow original loading, faster once on site.

Thanks for finding the apparent problem. Good speed now.  ffcool ffcool

Im not convinced its right.  I have very littleconnection here to try anf figure things out and my current help is incommunicado. 

It's very slow for me. Some of the ads are chunking in after a big delay. 

I was visiting before your post at 8am and it was slow and now at 212p still slow. 

Thanks for working on it Jeff and @nohbody !

Back to slow again. Hope this info helps.

V  E  R   Y      S     L     O     W  for me today.  I think ultra long radio waves to submarines is about the appropriate analogy.

All my other sites on other platforms are running fine so I don't think it's a local issue.

Yes, very slow.

Seems zippy for me at the moment. I was out of action for a couple days, the ISP was doing some kind of work on the network and it went down for our area. Got it back around noon today.

Booming now!!!!!!
Was so slow at was being timed out.

The internet is only as fast as the slowest device between you and the source.  And in many cases, there is a huge number of devices an internet request travels.  Also adding to the fun is the need to look up the addresses of things, reroute when devices are taken out of service for maintenance and reconfiguration, lines are cut or go down due to various reasons.

ISPs have complicated setups with load balancing switches and routers, firewalls and multiple servers.  All of them have configuration settings and any one of these devices can bring things to a crawl.  Throw in a mix of satellite, fiber, dsl, cable and there will always be chaos.

There is a computer command called traceroute that folks use to display the path to the source and the amount of time it takes to transverse each device.  In my experience, more problems are caused by load balancers than the actual servers.  I have also noted my internet being really crappy one day and then an announcement that the Feds took a bunch of websites down for criminal activity.

So there will always be people with slow, medium, fast or blocked connections. It is the nature of the beast.  Thanks for the work, Jeff and admins.  I know exactly what you are dealing with.

Its pretty zippy here in the land of little signal on da Nordern Border

Working MUCH better this afternoon ! It's been snailish for more than a week.

I had something I wanted to announce, but with the Hurricanes and the slow forum made it a really bad time. It might always be a bad time, It'll definitely  make at least a few people happy, but I'll wait for a couple days, and see if we really are back on the main road with a full tank. It'll be in the members eyes only board when I do.

popcorn_smiley popcorn_smiley

Still battling the beasts. Middleeast bot dos.

Quote from: Jeff on October 19, 2024, 02:23:56 PMIts pretty zippy here in the land of little signal on da Nordern Border

Still slow to the point of unusability here.
Has been more often than not for the past several days.

All other websites loading normally

Quote from: John Mc on October 19, 2024, 07:36:08 PM

Quote from: Jeff on October 19, 2024, 02:23:56 PMIts pretty zippy here in the land of little signal on da Nordern Border

Still slow to the point of unusability here.
Has been more often than not for the past several days.

... and now 25 minutes later, it's zipping right along

Booming!!!

It's tail dragging slow for me.  It has timed out a couple of times for me this afternoon and evening.

It will be slow and then lickety split fast.

We are trying. It seems we are making headway., but my connection is probably about as bad as it gets and still say I have one, and at times I dont.  I think there are a lot of outside forces at work.

Jeff. I appreciate everything you are doing. This is the first forum I check each day, and usually the last one at night. I understand your frustration, even though I know nothing about website operations.

Just know that we do truly value the community you have built for us.

And I did not intend to sound like I was complaining.....information only.  :thumbsup:

my 2 cents from Montana

C:\>tracert forestryforum.com

Tracing route to forestryforum.com [64.182.125.189] over a maximum of 30 hops:

1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  Linksys28849 [192.168.1.1] 
2    *        *        *    Request timed out. 
3    9 ms    9 ms    8 ms  lag-63.klslmt9402h.netops.charter.com [69.144.26.252] 
4    11 ms    11 ms    11 ms  lag-29.crr02msslmt.netops.charter.com [69.145.105.36] 
5    11 ms    10 ms    10 ms  lag-23.msslmt33zp0.netops.charter.com [69.146.123.12] 
6    28 ms    28 ms    28 ms  lag-702-10.bbr02sttlwa.netops.charter.com [69.144.130.200] 
7    21 ms    22 ms    24 ms  lag-804.prr04sttlwa.netops.charter.com [96.34.3.161] 
8    *      22 ms    23 ms  lag-17.ear4.sea1.sp.lumen.tech [4.68.74.209] 
9    *        *        *    Request timed out.
10    66 ms    65 ms    64 ms  CORESPACE-I.ear1.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.16.235.26]
11    64 ms  100 ms    63 ms  e-10-4.core1.dal.corespace.com [64.182.161.87]
12    65 ms    65 ms    64 ms  forestryforum4.dal.corespace.com [64.182.125.189]
Trace complete.
C:\>

Quote from: Jeff on October 20, 2024, 09:25:58 PMWe are trying. It seems we are making headway.

After a few weeks of being w0nky, whatever you did this weekend seemed to fix it for me. Saturday performance was back, continued good performance Sunday and today.

I think we may have made some headway. Please, can I get a shotgun report on how things are running now?

Quote from: Jeff on October 21, 2024, 07:13:28 PMI think we may have made some headway. Please, can I get a shotgun report on how things are running now?

Loading the site hangs for a moment the first time I visit, then everything flows smoothly and quickly.

Another thing that might be causing a hangup is the ads.  If they load dynamically from another server elsewhere, it can really slow things down.

When you notice it is slow, look at the lower left corner of the browser and see if it displays a URL that it(the browser) is waiting on.  That might be the source of all the issues.  I remember a famous incident from the ad company double-click that munged the net for 1/2 the country.

Mine is moving along and loading nicely now.

We found that the guy that misconfigured the server also misconfigured the ssl cert that was moved over from the old server.  It was renewed about a month ago, and it looks like this was part of the issue. 

Much better for me tonight.  I had quit trying to use the site because it was so slow but better tonight.  You're making progress.

Please dont give up on me. ffsmiley

Moving with great speed for me this evening. Refreshing good news. Thanks to you and your team. 

This morning it was crawling along.
This evening, it's moving along just fine.
Thanks for the improvement!

Seems to be working a lot better here, thanks.

Hello Jeff,
We've fixed the SSL issue it seems, but now the main problem seems to be in relation to the number of available Apache workers in comparison to the number of visitors to the site. I am trying to both balance the number of workers and blocking abusive IPs.
--
Thank you,
Frank H.
NOC Tech.


Whatever that meant, but at least we seem to be moving back toward normalcy.  ffsmiley

Was a bit slow this morning, but humming along nicely now (6 pm NZ time). 

The "Workers" are the processes (in task manager etc) that are communicating with the external connections, actually sending out the web page. Each worker can handle "x" number of clients before it gets bogged down, and then starts ignoring or delaying new requests. With a powerful enough server, (lots of CPU cores and RAM etc) then you can run more "workers", and so serve more web pages. That has to be balanced with the actual Forum Software and the back end database tasks. But that can be tuned so all are working as best they can. If ALL the resources are allocated to the web server workers, then the back end database will struggle, and you get poor performance, but for a different reason. But looking at the CPU usage, you can judge what tasks are working at max, and which are only cruising, and adjust the system to run better.

That seems like what Frank is trying to achieve anyway. And blocking some addresses that are just sending crap requests, and wasting the "workers" time.

With a larger web site, the workload may be spread over multiple servers, with load balancing / mirrored servers etc. But that's over my pay grade, and the Forum budget  :wacky:

Working fine here Jeff. I did experience some slowdown yesterday at one point when trying to access the notifications, it took a bit to 'kick in' when clicking the notifications.

Yes, all is good now this morning in Chesterville ME. 
We even have broad band now!!!
The server we did have worked good, but the wife wanted something to load here videos quicker.
Went from 10-12 hours on here phone down to less then a 1/2 hour now.

Ads are a bit slow to pop in but the rest seems much faster, thanks Jeff and Co.!

it's working good this morning.
There were a few days the ads seemed to hang things up.

Thanks for your efforts, I wouldn't know where to start with the web stuff.

Mine is moving quite nicely this morning.  So well in fact, that I had not even thought about loading speed.

ffcool

Quote from: Jeff on October 21, 2024, 07:43:04 PMWe found that the guy that misconfigured the server also misconfigured the ssl cert that was moved over from the old server.  It was renewed about a month ago, and it looks like this was part of the issue.

About a year ago the site became very slow loading for my setup, then at that time I upgraded my laptop and was finally connected to our new Gig speed system hoping the slow load would disappear but no such luck. Then about a month ago the page started loading instantly. Guess that was it.

The workers/load balancing issue is what causes the timeouts on the traceroute test.  

Apache is a long time web server(its name actually came from "a patchy web server") that is stable. 

SSL is Secure Socket Layer protocol and has to do with server verification certificates and encryption of the communication between user and server to safeguard your internet usage.

As you can see, most people have no idea of the huge amount of work the computers do for each request made by a user.

I remember Apache as some folks ran small web servers on 16 bit home equipment close to 30 years ago now. I remember when web browsing was on Mosaic (specifically I used Amosaic) , which could be done over ftp or http. There is still a web page for AMosaic.

My down load speed is 200, this site sloooow tonight.

Is that download speed a measure of your internet speed? 200 what? bits per second?

That be separate from the forum speed then?

I thought it had been pretty good today I was on the road for 6 hours of it, but each time I checked it seemed fine.

Booming!!!

Been decent on this end.

Pretty quick this morning, ads still very slow to load.

Quote from: beenthere on October 22, 2024, 11:26:17 PMIs that download speed a measure of your internet speed? 200 what? bits per second?

That be separate from the forum speed then?

200 Kbps on fiber optics.

It will never be fast for everyone all the time, but hopefully now its at least normal.

Is the consensus other than the ads loading, are the pages loading near normal now?

I would consider my speed as normal.

I would consider my speed as normally slow.
But the Forestry Forum website is booming this morning.
Super quick.
.
The ads can do what they want, at whatever the heck speed they want . . .

back to normal, one of those your mileage will vary type thing I guess
.

Quote from: Texas Ranger on October 23, 2024, 08:34:58 AM

Quote from: beenthere on October 22, 2024, 11:26:17 PMIs that download speed a measure of your internet speed? 200 what? bits per second?

That be separate from the forum speed then?

200 Kbps on fiber optics.

If that is download speed, it is very, very slow. Fiber optics usually 1,000 Mbps or 1 Gbps.  

My Starlink speed just checked now is 200 Mbps download and 15 Mbps upload. My old copper phone line was around 10 Mbps download on a very good day. 

Quote from: Jeff on October 23, 2024, 08:49:13 AMIt will never be fast for everyone all the time, but hopefully now its at least normal.

Is the consensus other than the ads loading, are the pages loading near normal now?

Yes, and it is great to have the speed back to "fast". Thank you Jeff and Jeremy and the rest of those helping. 

Booming.

A bit of a slow up all the sudden. Was fine 5 minutes ago.

Quote from: beenthere on October 23, 2024, 01:58:32 PMIf that is download speed, it is very, very slow. Fiber optics usually 1,000 Mbps or 1 Gbps.  

Easy enough to get the terms mixed up. 1,000 Mbps is regular domestic "uncapped" fiber, but ISPs will restrict the speed to offer a cheaper plan. 200 Mb is plenty good for a domestic connection. (same as Starlink, and even if the speed dips a bit, you don't notice. Throw a few more dollars at them and they will uncap your speed, but will the average user notice? The fiber itself can support even higher speeds, but that increases the cost of the hardware, at both ends, and the regular network cards / home network switches can only handle 1,000 Mb speed anyway.  Less if you are using wifi to connect. So going over 1,000 Mb is pointless currently, unless you are a large business / university / data center etc.   Multiple users, large and expensive routers and switches etc. 

BTW, speed seems snappy enough here this afternoon.  :thumbsup:

Our fiber is advertised as 950 / 500, and currently I'm testing at 916 down, and 544 up. Close enough. It will be 1 Gb link, but the ISP "de-rate" it slightly because you can never get 100% throughput, Truth in Advertising laws and all that. So they say UP TO 950, and actually achieve that at quiet times. Peak times like now, well 916 is "close enough", and they never promised 950 ALL the time. 
 

Yes, it has broke loose this morning again.  ffsmiley

Fast

Fast

Here too. Thank You Jeff and internet gurus
:thumbsup:

The forum has been working great..............until this am

I am having to click on the new button several times before it works.
each time the bottom left corner says  waiting for primus.live.tech.....


If I hit the X to stop loading the page it works sometimes.

I am willing to get the premium no ads subscription if it will stop this behaviour and help Jeff out more than the ads

I am using Firefox for a browser and popups are not blocked.

I dont think that has anything to do with the forum. Sounds like something else in your browser to me. Thats like a link to a band.

"My name is Mud... My name is Mud... M-m-m-m Mud" 

Not slow here. Quite fast and back to normal speed. 

everything seems good today

I wonder if it's something to do with my antivirus software, there are times it gets very intrusive.

its almost time for a computer change

Booming!!!!

For me, for the past coupla days when I refresh the "Updated topic" button it goes slow, then speeds up right after. It's like the breeze now! 

All good here. :thumbsup:

On again, off again for me today.  Sometime slow, sometime very slow, and then very fast.

Sorry to say the site is back to slow again. Don't mean to complain. Just FYI if that helps.

I know, and It seems like the same problem. Jeremy is in route to a computer,

Screaming fast for me this morning. I blame it on a favorable election... I'd like to see the stock market do the same.

Quote from: aigheadish on November 06, 2024, 06:50:45 AMScreaming fast for me this morning. I blame it on a favorable election... I'd like to see the stock market do the same.

Your wish has been granted. Market this morning took off, don't know if profit takers will bring it down later but still a very good omen!!

I don't like to sell stocks, but last Trump season made enough in the game to purchase a backhoe, pay off the car a few years early, and fill my shop with decent woodworking tools. This was with some inheritance money. I wish I was smart enough to invest and save when I was young.

This Trump season it'd be nice to buy the supplies to fix the pond up and rent an excavator to dig it out and make it nice... I want to make Jeff proud of the pond I've been crabbing about in my yard (and stop being so jealous of his!).

Back on topic- site is screamy this morning!

Odd, I can pull the sire up pretty fast, no problem, to read posts, but when I select "reply" it goes into a 20 second or so lockup, then gets me to the reply screen.  

Mine has been spotty all morning. Some clicks are quick and then some are slow. I made a post and it took a bit to get the picture to load. Don't know what any of this means, just passing on info.

Quote from: aigheadish on November 07, 2024, 06:49:46 AMI don't like to sell stocks, but last Trump season made enough in the game to purchase a backhoe, pay off the car a few years early, and fill my shop with decent woodworking tools. This was with some inheritance money. I wish I was smart enough to invest and save when I was young.

This Trump season it'd be nice to buy the supplies to fix the pond up and rent an excavator to dig it out and make it nice... I want to make Jeff proud of the pond I've been crabbing about in my yard (and stop being so jealous of his!).

Back on topic- site is screamy this morning!

I'd just like to be able to pay my bills and not worry about how. Better yet, I wish I had no bills. I'd just like to be able to live out what might be left of my life where I am happy and not full of stress

Today's problem turned out to be 500+ amazon bots scraping the gallery. They have been blocked. Argh!!

smiley_smash go_away spam_ taz-smiley taz-smiley

As if I needed it, I now have another reason to hate Amazon.

Our current issue seems to be a dos attack on our galley. Disabling the gallery for now seems to have brought the forum up. You may need to use the embed function. The gallery has always been a performance issue, and a target.

Lets try this. I have banned all guest access to the gallery and turned it back on. Lets see if this keeps them out.

netflix is having trouble too.  :wacky:

Much speedier getting in and around the gallery.

And around the forum as well. Thanks for the detective work to help us. 

Seems zippier.  ffsmiley

Flying for me this morning! 

Fast or slow is ok with me.  ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy ffcheesy :thumbsup: ffwave

FF forum has shifted into "slow" again. Just an FYI  (and maybe just for a short time)
@Jeff
@Nobohdy 

Weve been on it. More bots. 

Hopefully we are back up.  It has been mostly down here since about noon.

Jeff, I appreciate what you and your "team" does to keep er kickin'.   :thumbsup:   

If its been mostly down for you since noon, part of your issue must be local. 

It went down here in the early evening and pages wouldn't load. Other sites were loading fine.

AI bots no doubt. They seem to be targeting all the popular sites at the moment, slowing them down to a crawl.

Thats what we are finding and they are hard to block. Chatgbt and amazon were the culprits yesterday, plus a bunch of french bots.  Its like playing whack a mole with a blindfold on.

The bots have been unrelenting today. We are looking to try and find some sort of bot mitigation service. This is nuts.

Your hosting service should be handling mitigating DOS attacks.  I have not been all that impressed with what I have heard about their service.  rayrock

Im not exactly sure these are best defined as dos attacks. They do deny service, but the goal is to scrape data. Seeing more and more ai type stuff.  My definition of bots is non human web traffic.  The bots are probably at this point not even human instigated. AI. 

Please excuse my internet/ computer ignorance but would one of those "I am not a robot" pages to enter the FF help? 

Nope.  When I say bots, I am saying non human web traffic.  Computer programs set up to relentlessly scrape a site for any kind of data and not carring that it maxes out the available connections the server has to handle normal web traffic.  We could have several thousand real people on the forum at one time and it would never cause an issue.

Often times, Hilltop, the goal is to gather that data so Google or some joint like that can show results on their site when people search for stuff. Now, with "AI" sites get scraped to feed into all of that nonsense, so pictures here (or posts or whatever) can be "learned" so Jimmy can "write" an essay on forestry by using ChatGTP or some junk like that.

Quote from: Jeff on December 11, 2024, 08:29:58 AMNope.  When I say bots, I am saying non human web traffic.

Ok, That is what I thought the "I am not a robot" page was suppose to prevent but like I said I am not very knowledgeable on the subject. 

Just some observations: First the site seems consistently very fast for over a month now. Second I notice a lot less 'guests' logged on. Today is the first time in over a week when I saw it get over 1,000 guests.
Third, and most important, I am noticing a LOT more posting than we have had lately. For a long time I could read through all the overnight posts in less than 15 minutes each morning. Now we are back to it taking me between 45 and 90 minutes to catch up each morning.

I believe we are moving in the correct direction!

We are trying.  We are constantly under non human, bot attacks, as well as what I call meat bots. Foreign actors trying to find a way.  Now we have who knows how many AI bots trying to scrape the forum for what ever thay can. They use our information as their own and erase our traffic, as they stole our info.

After what happened over Christmas, that is probably best left unshared, forum income was reduced by an unexpected action out of my control, though I tried to protest, wiped out every bit of our gain in the attempt at subscriptions so far.

Some how today's sponsors and their marketers need to know we are far more than a digital marketing opportunity. They aint listening to me.

I hope things are better this year. The forum problems really suck for our membership, and for me, the stress most days more than sucks.

I was thinking the same thing when I got on this morning. It's been a while since I've seen any slowdown! Great job @Jeff and @Nobohdy !

I wish it would get to the point where  I no longer expect things to be wrong when I login.  In my head it is never what am I going to read, who is on, or what will make me laugh anymore. It's what is going to be wrong, and how am I going to fix it.  I wish for the new year that at least that goes away.

I'm somewhat of a boss at work and I feel just the same way every time my phone dings. Not nearly as much now as when I ran the warehouse, but still... That feeling sucks. 

Yup, its a constant state of when will the next shoe fall