Intermittent hang from forum

neptronix

neptronix

Administrator
Staff member
Joined
Jun 15, 2010
Messages
17,993
Location
Utah, USA
So here's the deal.

Ever since we changed the PHP version and upgraded Xenforo, the site started randomly taking >10 seconds to return a response... even though it's not overloaded at all.

It seems like the issue comes and goes. I can be browsing ES for hours, and never encounter it. Then the next day, te site appears to freeze, then goes back to normal.

Sorry for the annoying bug, we are aware of it and will tackle it next week when holiday break is over.
 
I don't see this myself, as a hang, exactly. But I do see an intermittent problem only when uploading images via copy/paste of an image into the text box, where it will start the upload, then it will show the progress bar increasing *then decreasing*, over and over, gradually getting higher, but often never completing.

Sometimes it will reach some point at which a copy of the image is actually uploaded, but it then continues to do the same thing with another copy of the image, sometimes repeating this more than once.

It happens whether I use the context-menu paste, or Ctrl-V, so it's not a stuck key / key repeat issue.

I have yet to find any specific condition it happens under, as even the image size / resolution has varied.
 
Interesting, this is the first i've heard of it. I have noticed that image uploads aren't as fast as i expect. And sometimes clicking on the full screen version of an image hangs for a few secs, then shows the image.. which is weird.

Thanks for the report!
 
I thought I'd posted about it before, but a quick search of my posts for various keywords doesn't find it. It's been going on for a few months I think. I can't tell if it happens outside my ancient Firefox or not, because it's very intermittent, not very often, and completely unrepeatable, so I haven't seen it happen when testing in Chrome (as I only use that when something doesnt' work in FF).


Sometimes image uploads take a really long time relative to usual, for files I haven't reduced that I took with the phone camera (which is most of them these days). Is fairly random for when this happens, and not very often, but when ti does happen it's for a little while, so I expect it is a bandwidth issue somewhere between me and the server (rather htan a specific server or XF issue).


This other thing is different, though I thought it was related for a while, until I saw the duped image the first time.

When it happens sometimes I can press ESC on the keyboard and it will stop trying to upload, but most of the time it won't. When it won't, I cannot access that tab at all. The rest of the browser usually stil works normally, and if I open that tab's URL in another tab, it comes up with all the content I'd typed in, and sometimes with any of the already-uploaded images in a post I haven't submitted yet. Then I just close the "stuck" tab and retry attaching, and it works.


I don't think I have seen it happen when using hte Attach button, only if using the direct paste option (which I use most often). (I very rarely use drag'n'drop so it might happen with that and I just haven't encountered it yet).
 
For you, has this problem started since a few weeks ago.. or has it always been present?
 
I'v had occasional 'hangs'... not to often, but occasionally, and usually late at night - click on a forum link and it just sits there for upwards of several seconds 15-20 maybe. Does your sys backups occur late nights?
 
Thanks for chiming in.

Backup happens at night but the hang doesn't correlate with high load ever.

If it was only so easy.. 😅
 
neptronix said:
For you, has this problem started since a few weeks ago.. or has it always been present?
Click to expand...
It wasn't always present, AFAIK, but has been more than a few weeks siince the first time I had it happen. It's not very common, so I don't remember the first time, other than that it was frustrating; the second time it was ...."oh this is a bug in something" and my troulbeshooting brain started "taking notes" in it's wierd little way that I don't really have control over or access to in a direct way.
 
FWIW,
At first, I just assumed my occasional 'hangs' were glitches somewhere along the complex path between the forum and I. But lately, when it happens, I would quickly jump to an email refresh (which is open in another tab),... and the remote email server instantly responds.
 
I actualy experienced both of these hangs today.

Once trying to an image upload via copy/paste from one thread to another (but other tabs did still respond if very very slowly), and then a little while later (few minutes ago) just in general, where no forum operation or tab would respond.
 
I'm not 100% sure this is just ES....been noticing it on other sites also lately, namely thingyverse. I had thought it might be my plethora of Firefox plugins stripping away trackers etc. but it could also be a CDN issue affecting multiple sites/domains.

May be worth switching to an alternate DNS provider to see if that improves anything.

Cheers
 
It's just ES in this case, we don't use any external technologies except for google analytics, which can fail but not affect forum functionality.
 
Last edited:
Currently operating on the server configuration to fix this. Expect some turbulence!
 
No links were working a while ago.. try again :)

Surgery done!

In theory, we cured the weird intermittent hang, but we won't know for sure for 48 hours of observing the patient. 😅

There's absolutely no way to reproduce it on the development machine.
So this is the mode we're in right now:

1704389548823.png

I get an email whenever it happens so we have a track on the issue.
Fingers crossed we got it on the first try :bolt::es:
 
Howdy pardners!
No sign of the hanging issue since the operation yesterday. Not getting any more random alarm bells going off at command central either (y)

eee291​

brought up an issue that was a remnant of the 10-15 minutes of downtime we had earlier yesterday, around 9AM-11AM PST. Some pages displayed PHP code while we were rewiring how PHP connects to the webserver. On at least mobile phones, this page can get cached, so if you visit it again, you may also encounter robot spew.

In this case, a clearing of the browser cache should solve the problem. Xenforo makes a lot of use of browser caches to lower our bandwidth bill, but it also causes complications like these.
 
Last edited:
It's wierd that it caches stuff that probably shouldn't be, and then doesn't cache stuff that probably should be. (sorry I don't have a list; just "impressions" I've had during assorted frustrations).
 
Yes, i don't like that behavior because it can force you to refresh a page to see the changes.

Likely monstrously difficult to change the behavior.. we'll investigate it some day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Reid Welch
"Extreme MY1018" archival, closed out
Replies
11
Views
15,897
GIGATT
G
Back
Top