Slow-site update

[Clare Newsome]

Our intrepid website editor, Andy Clough, has been communing with the internet tech team this morning to find out why the site was running so slowly last night and is generally performing below-par.

As I surmised yesterday, it's down to sheer volume of traffic - we're running at double the usual numbers (hello everyone!) and combined with us sharing a server with the equally popular Gramophone site (that archive is pulling in the punters...) the system was crawling to a near-standstill.

We've moved to a new, dedicated server this morning (hence the glitches first thing - apologies for that) and will be adding yet more rack space this afternoon. Apologies in advance if there are any temporary effects due to this machinations - our ops team tell us there may be a slowdown again @2pm but things should ease later as we have lots of extra terabytes to play with....

 

[Andy Clough]

Two brand-new servers are being built and installed as I write this, and we hope (fingers crossed!) to have them online by the end of today.

In the meantime, you may experience a slowdown on the site as we reach peak traffic at 2pm, so please bear with us. The ops team are working flat out to resolve the problem and I'll let everyone know as soon as we've got those new servers installed. Thanks for your patience folks, we realise how frustrating this is but at least it's nice to know how popular the site is!

 

[Tony_R]

For the record (no pun intended)

I also note there is this reference in your web page..

<!-- CRAZY EGG heat map implementation -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cetrk.com/pages/scripts/0008/3039.js"></script>

I noticed that the page was taking a while (10 seconds plus) to finish loading, and noticed a message in my browser status bar stating.
"waiting for cetrk.com..." - suspecting some kind of spyware, I had a look at the source code for your page.
I then tried to access "cetrk.com" and eventually gave up waiting for the page to load...
So maybe their servers too are experienceing heavy loads - but sadly this is making your site look slow too....
By the way - this is visitor tracking software - but there are better ways to do it....

Tony.

 

[Andy Clough]

Yes, Crazy Egg is our heatmapping software but that's been on the site for some time and has been running fine.

FYI, the new servers are now built and will be installed over the next two hours, so hopefully by later tonight things will have improved considerably.

 

[Messiah]

Definitely seems better!!!

 

[RodhasGibson]

Thats because your special, still painfully slow here still at present.

 

[Clare Newsome]

Try clearing your cache - worked for me after a slow start....

 

[Messiah]

RodhasGibson:Thats because your special.

Ah Bless Ya!

 

[RodhasGibson]

Hi Clare, Good point been a week or so since I last did that. although in the last couple of minutes speed has increased a fair bit.May be traffic is easing a shade. Thanks for your input as usual.

 

[PJPro]

Well, the forum has all but died for me. Takes forever to load a page. Consistantly coming back with a Runtime Error. This is generated on your server by IIS, so nothing to do with me.

 

[Andy Clough]

Strange. Working absolutely fine for me on Firefox right now. Have you tried clearing your cache, quitting your browser and restarting?

 

[PJPro]

Unfortunatley, that won't fix a runtime error on your server. But I'll give it a go.

 

[PJPro]

Just got another error. It redirects to this URL

http://whathifi.com/errors/default.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/forums/t/176569.aspx

This is where you should display your custom error message eg

"WHFSV apologise for the loss of service......etc"

Basically, what you have here is an unhandled exception which is being sent to the user by IIS.

Your code monkeys should be slightly embarassed about this cos the unhandled exception is sooooooo easy to fix and prevents the customer having to see xml being displayed from your web.config file which shows you have custom errors turned off.

Turn them on. Provide a url. An Bob's your uncle. Job done. Doesn't fix the error which caused the exception though. And this high level custom error is your braces in a belt and braces approach.

 

[Andrew Everard]

We're really not experiencing the problems you're getting, but I've flagged this up to our Digital Media people for a look in the morning

 

[Tony_R]

The site is painfully slow again, and has been all evening (I didn't use it at all today, until earlier).

What a pity Linux / Apache wasn't chosen, as against IIS / Windows / ASP, because I suspect you wouldn't be having these problems.

In my experience Windows and IIS does not scale well.

Tony.

 

[Dave_]

yep painfully slow here to, not getting any error messages though!

 

[Anonymous]

It's all fine at this end now; update is trŠs vite.

 

[Messiah]

Anyone else finding the site slow tonight??

It is taking bloody ages to load pages. All the other sites I use are fine. Maybe too much traffic again??