FTR connectivity problems?

[ChezJ]

Lately I have been getting a ton of connection errors when reading or posting to FTR. Is this a local problem specific to my network or are other people experiencing the same?

ChezJ

[BoondockSaint]

most are experiencing it - ive heard multiple people complaining and I have gotten plenty of errors though im usually at school - afternoon seems to be the worst

[JJDylan]

ive been getting the same problems, at least im not the only one...

[UG]

most are experiencing it - ive heard multiple people complaining and I have gotten plenty of errors though im usually at school - afternoon seems to be the worst

Same here.

Yep me too, it's a nightmare.

[Corey]

Yep me too, it's a nightmare.

NO LIFER

[a500lbgorilla]

I've had no problems.

But that's just cuz I live here.

-'rilla

[astrodon]

Tonite is the first time I have had problems when a screen came saying in big letters "This account is closed"

Thought maybe you hadn't paid your light bill or something

[Eric]

Many of you may have noticed the site was down today. We have moved to a dedicated server to accomodate the growth we have experienced.

[gabe]

moved for good? does this mean the random connection problems alot of us seem to experience will decrease permanently?

[TylerK]

PUT THE IRC SERVER ON THE DEDICATED SERVER!

[Eric]

moved for good? does this mean the random connection problems alot of us seem to experience will decrease permanently?

I think we'll stay with dedicated from here on out. This should help with the connection problems. It is too early to tell if the connection problems will decrease permanently but we'll keep our fingers crossed.

[ttanaka]

Yeah, we've moved for good. We're still with TotalChoice Hosting, but we're on their dedicated plan. I'm still fuckin pissed about how they just shut down our site because we have a popular forum. We get a lot of action in the forum, we end up using a lot of MySQL bandwidth, and the next thing you know, they just turn off our website.

No phone call. No email. Nothing. And I was paying over $70/month on a FULLY-MANAGED semi-dedicated hosting plan, and they just shut us off. What the fuck.

So, I just paid $100 for them to switch us to a fully dedicated plan, and I'm paying $220/month to hope and pray that they don't randomnly shut off our site... (which is the second time they've done that to us)

Anyway, I should shop for a new hosting center, but the thought of moving everything just makes me even more pissed.

Deep breath... cocktail... remember I'm going to Vegas tomorrow morning to meet the one and only Fnord, Ripptyde, SCGolfer, Radashack, and some other cool cats...

[ampersandman]

Good luck man and great site.

With regard to people's random connection problems, if the number of simultanous connections exceeds the maximum set by apache - which is set by the way to prevent apache sucking up all your server's RAM, then I'm sure you don't need to know but make sure that Apache has enough spare simultaneous connections, there's a directive for it (the default setting may be too low). Possibly at the traffic levels your getting there's the need for a little bit of tweaking with both apache/PHP and mysql (connection pool sizes, indexing, caching, etc). Some of this you might be able to do through your hosting control panel.

Almost certainly your hosting provider is not keeping an eye on your servers with this attention to detail. It's not always just about Bandwidth, RAM, CPU cycles, etc. The software sometimes needs some fine tuning.

Of course, just getting a bigger, gruntier box might do the trick - for a while. Certainly, it's cheaper to get the bigger box than to get an admin to tweak stuff.

Almost certainly changing hosts will improve your customer service problems. PHPBB is not that complex - should be a simple (but painful) migration.

The price of success?

Now I remember why I dream of being a semi-profressional poker player. Ah, the simple life!

[UG]

My day is going to be super-duper boring here at work, so you don't understand how great it is to have the site up and running. Good job on getting things back on track.

So....Who actually pays for FTR? I'm sure it comes out of somebody's pocket, probably one of the guys on here that makes a shit-ton of money playing poker? You should set up a PayPal deal at the top of the site and have people make donations....I know I'd throw a couple bones at you guys.

Just an idea.

[Corey]

They get money through the sign ups through there links at the different poker sites.

[UG]

I should have known that.


IDIOT IS ME.

Many of you may have noticed the site was down today. We have moved to a dedicated server to accomodate the growth we have experienced.

PRAISE BE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :P

[ampersandman]

Perhaps I am going on a bit and being too technical. This will be my final BB worth, I promise.

I got a "Zero Sized Reply'' error message this morning from my ISP's proxy while trying to connect to FTR.

This happens when Squid makes a TCP connection to an origin server, but for some reason, the connection is closed before Squid reads any data.

Possible causes:

1. An overloaded origin server.
2. TCP implementation/interoperability bugs. See the System-Dependent Weirdnesses section for details.
3. Race conditions with HTTP persistent connections.
4. Buggy or misconfigured NAT boxes, firewalls, and load-balancers.
5. Denial of service attacks.
6. Utilizing TCP blackholing on FreeBSD.

Without knowing about yours sites traffic, I think that sooner or later you are going to have to bite the bullet and start managing your apache/php/mysql setup yourself. You need to start monitoring process conditions, memory allocation, perhaps even recompiling apache. And if you continue to grow, eventually you are going to have to either load balance multiple servers or look at co-location and BIG hardware. The more research I do the more I see your problem being multi-factorial - hardware, RAM, software, caching, connections, load balancing issues. It even occurred to me that you may have pissed someone off and be suffering a low grade Denial of Service attack. Check them logs!

This Orielly article discusses fine tuning setups as site traffic increases: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2...mp_tuning.html

[TylerK]

Given the PhpBB exploits lately, I can only assume the site is getting DOS-ed by scripts looking for unpatched boards.