Title says it all. This site doesnt work almost every day at some point due to server overload. Do they need new servers ?

Just a lot of pepole using the site. AVS is by far the best site for HT and related talk out their..

So many times during peak hours you may not be able to get in

Guess everyone got really cool stuff for Christmas and came to the premiere website for advice on how to hook it up, program it, use it, etc. <G>

Doc

Is that like "Why is the rum always gone?" :) I experience the same issues, during peak times its tough to get in. Maybe we should start a donation fund for new servers or more bandwidth!

Hi...

Yes, aware of the issue. :)

As it is now, the site runs on 4 web servers, 1 MySQL server, 1 image server and 1 ad sever. (7 servers in all.) We have a NEW Dell Dual Quad Core server (8 processors in all) coming in with 8 gigs of RAM for the MySQL server for faster database access and thus less bottlenecking. Also looking to add in a load balancer for the 4 web servers.

So in a nutshell, we are working on it. (Growing pains when you see 6 million unique visitors a month.) Though December and January are the most busy months.

As far as donations...just become an AVS Club member to help support the site. Not needed, but it is a way if you so choose.

Thanks

Good to hear. That is alot of traffic. LOL I guess DrDon was right about all the people.

Sounds like you are all over it though.

Love the site and keep up the good work.

Hi...

Yes, aware of the issue. :)

As it is now, the site runs on 4 web servers, 1 MySQL server, 1 image server and 1 ad sever. (7 servers in all.) We have a NEW Dell Dual Quad Core server (8 processors in all) coming in with 8 gigs of RAM for the MySQL server for faster database access and thus less bottlenecking. Also looking to add in a load balancer for the 4 web servers.

So in a nutshell, we are working on it. (Growing pains when you see 6 million unique visitors a month.) Though December and January are the most busy months.

As far as donations...just become an AVS Club member to help support the site. Not needed, but it is a way if you so choose.

Thanks

I think a flux capacitor putting out 1.21 gigawatts of power will help the server.

Tried that....it just burned out. :D

We have a NEW Dell Dual Quad Core server (8 processors in all) coming in with 8 gigs of RAM for the MySQL server

*Drools*

Hi...

Yes, aware of the issue. :)

As it is now, the site runs on 4 web servers, 1 MySQL server, 1 image server and 1 ad sever. (7 servers in all.) We have a NEW Dell Dual Quad Core server (8 processors in all) coming in with 8 gigs of RAM for the MySQL server for faster database access and thus less bottlenecking. Also looking to add in a load balancer for the 4 web servers.

So in a nutshell, we are working on it. (Growing pains when you see 6 million unique visitors a month.) Though December and January are the most busy months.

As far as donations...just become an AVS Club member to help support the site. Not needed, but it is a way if you so choose.

Thanks

I came over to this forum area so I could get the "411" on the server busy-ness... especially since I already did my yearly contribution last month. I have to say, I appreciate the details on the upgrade, it's good to see where the money goes and good to know that it's actually getting fixed... keep the good work up!!!

Load balancer will also be ordered but not in time for CES. Just running out of time.

As far as donations...just become an AVS Club member to help support the site. Not needed, but it is a way if you so choose.

Thanks
My surefire way to drum up some extra donation money:

Let the server situation stay the way it is and give Club Members priority access to them.



The only reward I ask for presenting you with this brilliant idea is a free upgrade to Gold Membership status. ;)



.

LOL...You are not the first to ask actually.

BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS....I just order a Barracuda Load Balancer Model 340 and it is being shipped overnight. I hope we will be able to get it running tomorrow and more evenly spread the connections to the different servers.

Right now...One may be running a load of 45 and another may be at 8. Thus if you happen to be hitting the one that is at 45, you will currently get a message that the site is closed for high loads. (40 is the cut off currently and thus you will need to wait for the load to drop.)

I really hope this will help...but what I really want to arrive is the new server!

This site is really going to get hammered next week so that is good news.

Enjoy your trip. :)

Where are the site stats for avsforums.com ?

Seems this is a very popular site for a lot of people...

Just use Alexa.com for traffic info. Other than that, we do not publish our logs outright. BTW...The traffic is tracked by a third party.

Thanks for letting us know about the solutions to the problem. It has been very challenging for the past week. Anyway, for the first time last night (or maybe the night before) I got a message that the site was shut down due to being overpowered by Google or some such thing. What was that all about?

I am so upset with the server busy status that I will have to take it out of you with the free food at the AVS party at CES. :D

Glad to see you are on top of it.

Once again, thanks for this fantastic resource.

The GoogleBot (no relation) was hitting the site quite hard for some reason at about 9:30PM ET. As a result of all the queries to the site being made, it slowed up right down with high server loads.

Google contacted us right away as they had seen the note and we worked on resolving the issue. I personally thank the GoogleBot spider team for their help and look forward to working closely with them.

...but what I really want to arrive is the new server!
Maybe a Butler would help keep those servers in check. :)

FYI...Currently working on setting up the load balancer as of this post. Then we will need to test it and then try it live. (That will be fun)

As of about 6:00PM ET new load balancer now installed and running.

I really hope this works well for I leave in the AM for CES and will be traveling most of the day. So, lets see how this now goes. I wish I could do more testing, but alas, we are off and running at this point and all seems well thus far for 4500 people on-line.

Nent step is the new MySQL server. (Shipping weight 150lbs!) It is on the way and should arrive to the network center Monday. The question though is when we will take the site down to get it up and running. So stay tuned.

Oh...until that is done...we still can have slowdowns based on the MySQL server. But with the load balancer I hope the server high loads with be gone.

Looks like the load balancer is sending me to some bad mirrors when I visit www.avsforum.com/avs-vb (no trailing slash).

I get redirected to 404 pages on http://fractalmirror.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ , http://mirror2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ and http://mirror3.avsforum.com/avs-vb/

www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ resolves correctly to the forum index page.

Pondering...I used your link above without the trailing / and I did not have such an issue. I can I have tried a number of time and it always revolved as it should.

????

This is odd.

I've tried from two different computers with two different browsers and via two networks and I'm still getting the 404s on http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb.


Edit: I'm also being redirected to http://fractal.avsforum.com/avs-vb/ with the same result. With that said, I'm having no problems when I include the forward slash in the URL.

I can not get it to reproduce it returning the server name for the www. Augh...I hate issues like this.

I know-- I hate that, too. I spent a year as an Oblix SSO and load balancer admin and dreaded every call or email when a user got an error that I couldn't reproduce. So, I pretty much hated every day. :D

For what it's worth, I'm definitely not complaining and please don't waste any time on this if I'm the only one with this issue. I'll just make sure to include the /.

Nathan...That is just it...I would not know if others have the issue unless they took the time time to report it. Let me know if it continues or has ended. I can not get it to do it.

I am using the DIRECT SERVER RETURN method for speed. This a loop back is made to from the real IP to the balancer. That has to be where the server name came into play. But no clue why.

I'll pull out my testing tools and let you know what happens from my end, but I'm really rusty at this. :)

No problem here accessing http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb (no trailing slash).
Btw, the lack or presence of a trailing slash seems irrelevent, at least for IE 6 that adds one anyway, so it works OK either way.

Yes, also tried it the same way in both IE and FireFox, I still have not got it to produce an error. We will see.

Nathan...That is just it...I would not know if others have the issue unless they took the time time to report it. Let me know if it continues or has ended. I can not get it to do it.

I see the same behavior that Nathan reported. With Firefox 2.0, it goes to one of the mirror pages instead of the forums. With IE7, it worked once -- but usually generates a 404 error.

Just ran a quick test. Here's what I get when sending a request to the server for /avs-vb:

(Note that it's redirecting directly to http://mirror3.avsforum.com/avs-vb/. This is the problem, as that URL does not work.)


HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2007 17:03:50 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) PHP/4.4.4
Location: http://mirror3.avsforum.com/avs-vb/
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

13c
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>301 Moved Permanently</TITLE>


</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Moved Permanently</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://mirror3.avsforum.com/avs-vb/">here</A>.<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.37 Server at mirror3.avsforum.com Port 80</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>

The web servers probably need to be updated to use "www.avsforum.com" as the hostname when building error messages. This will ensure that the redirects go back to the load balancer.

Hello...some changes were made to Apache, so let see how it goes now.

SPECIAL THANKS TO JOSE AT SPEEDHOST.COM FOR HIS HELP AND SUPPORT no matter if the fix worked or not, he is one heck of a guy and hosting company.

This past week has been the worst ever. I have lurked/posted for several years and have never seen it this bad.

Good luck with the upgrades.

I am an addict and cannot go long without the fix so I hope things get back to normal soon.

Just a quick post before I'm locked out again :(

I can only get in without interruptions during the wee hours of the night.

Hey it's 2:10 AM EST 1-9-7 and this is the FIRST time I've been able to get on the site in days! What ever is going on iis worse than I can remember in all the years I've been coming here. I know it hits at a bad time and I'm not complaining - I know you will get it worked out, just wanted to let you know the problem is a bit widespread.

Yea it's the worst I can remember. Too busy at 10:00PM eastern time with less than 5K on , very strange. Yesterday from 11:30 AM till 4:30 I couldn't get on because it was too busy.

Art

It would be nice if paying members have priority. Then again based on past experience as an admin and a mod from other forums its a slippery slope to elitism.

Going to bed now. We will see if I can log on in the morning :)

Hi...

You should not have issues at this time. The new server came in yesterday thus we took the site down, for it was just too loaded anyway, and added the new MySQL server (Dual quad core system with 8 gigs ram). We then added a 5th web server. So at this time the site should be quite stable.

Yesterday was nuts, Monday is are most busy day anyway and add to that the opening of CES we were crushed. So now with the new MySQL server and the 5th web server, I hope we will be fine.

Thanks all. (And to think I worked with this from CES! Special thanks to Jose from SpeedHost.com for all his support and great hosting/admin services.)

Thanks, you guys are the greatest! I, and I suppose many others get caught up in the day to day dealings in the forums, discussing products and expressing opinions and I - and I'd guess many others - don't give too much thought to those that make it all possible.

That being the case, let me take this opportunity to offer my thanks for a great website and a great group of forums. Well done!

Much better thanks David ! :)
Art

Let the server situation stay the way it is and give Club Members priority access to them.



I was wondering if members get priority access, but evidently not?

The REFRESH BUTTON and I: A Love Story (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=9396425&&#post9396425)

Much better now.

Huge improvement over the last day. The site is quite snappy now, so once the CES traffic thins out, we should be extremely happy members.

Thanks for the upgrade!

Scott

Just wanted to extend a BIG thank you for the improvements!! Site response is MUCH better!

Just wanted to extend a BIG thank you for the improvements!! Site response is MUCH better!

David - major kudos to you! The site has been running extremely well over the past day or so. Ahhhhh. :)

Thanks for all your hard work, David, and for spending your CES time working on the servers.

Just to report from Europe.
The last few days the load time have become nearly impossible.
It took 4 minutes to partially load this thread. After 6 minutes the thread was still only 82% loaded.
I have tested this at many times thru the day/night, Daytime Europe/Daytime USA, and the the problem does not change whatever time I log on.
Does not look like its due to traffic.
Hope this is sorted out as the AVS is the most facinating place on the whole internet.

Hello....

I am sorry to say you need to check with your ISP for the above has nothing to do with us but everything to do with the route you take to get to us.

Try running a TRACE ROUTE from you PC to find the issue point.

At this point, all servers are running with no slowdowns directly realted to us.

Thanks

Thank you for the reply.
You are proboably right.
I made my internet provider check AVS to see if the problem was mine, and they had the same problem.
Without them admitting to anything they must have done something because now everything's running smooth both here and on other US sites that's been slow lately. :)

Hey David... Nice seeing you at the show, a good time was had by all.... .However, now that you are back....

I have been having a TERRIBLE time getting into any of the subforums. I get into the main forum list ok, but when I select a forum from the list, like the "Digital Hi-End Projectors - $3,000 USD MSRP and Up" forum it takes a bit over a minute for the forum contents page to load. It is the same for any of the forums. Once IN the forum individual threads seem to load just fine, but getting into the individual forums is very painful.

Hello...

Wish I could help in this case but I can not see any such issue nor has it been reported at all really. I would try clearing your cache and maybe trying another browser just for kicks and see. (FireFox is a great choice)

Also could be something some firewall or some other protection you may have on your system.

I just tried the forum you mention and here is the result...

Page generated in 0.45684 seconds with 13 queries [Server Loads: 1.40 1.87 : 1.90]

Not that it helps you, but it clearly shows not an issue I an see when going into that forum.

Sorry

Hello...

Wish I could help in this case but I can not see any such issue nor has it been reported at all really. I would try clearing your cache and maybe trying another browser just for kicks and see. (FireFox is a great choice)

Also could be something some firewall or some other protection you may have on your system.

I just tried the forum you mention and here is the result...

Page generated in 0.45684 seconds with 13 queries [Server Loads: 1.40 1.87 : 1.90]

Not that it helps you, but it clearly shows not an issue I an see when going into that forum.

SorryWell, in Firefox it loads immediately. Very fast. I don't understand why ONLY this site would be giving me problems in IE. Interesting.

Server problems? Failure to load or very slow page loads are starting to crop up once again.

It was corrected around CES but lately I've noticed it's starting to happen again and it's not my ISP or browser(IE7) as whenever I have a problems here, the first thing I do is check how the pages are loading from various other sites and I have no problems.

I must say, for a site with an audience of it's size and being well respected for the breadth and depth of it's content, it's quite frustrating to suffer from these failed/long load times due to server problems. It really takes away from the enjoyment of reading and posting here when this happens.

If this was any other site I wouldn't even bother coming here, but it's not, it's AVS and it's got it's hooks deeply embedded in my cerebral cortex and I can't extract them.

Help us out here, David. ;)

well the top pages load quickly: so it must be a glitch with the server

I don't think it is traffic related: weekends are usually light

Hopefully it will be fixed quickly

No today's problems seem to be of a quite different nature. These are connection timeouts. So the requests are not getting to the server. The old problem was that the server was too busy and couldn't process the request.

well the top pages load quickly: so it must be a glitch with the server

I don't think it is traffic related: weekends are usually light

Hopefully it will be fixed quicklyMany times you can click on a link or on a thread button (first, last, last post read, quote, submit, etc.) and nothing happens for a while. Clicking again and again can get the desired action. Also, many times a "The page cannot be displayed" error occurs. For example clicking Quote on your message took a long time to open the reply page and clicking Submit Reply resulted in a "The page cannot be displayed" page so I had to do it again, and again and again. Seems to be a problem with server responsiveness.

P.S. I've noticed one difference between yesterday (great performance) and today (poor performace)...the Samsung Ad at the top left corner of the page. Not sure if that could be causing a problem though.

This is not ad related, but it seems to be with the new load balancer dropping connections vs handing the request to one of the servers.

Being working on.

I can get to top pages quickly as usual:

but try to click on a last post to a thread and the connection times out

edit: seems better now :)

Ok, that should be it. Found the issue we do think.

David, whatever you did seems to have fixed the problem as the forum is really quick again now. Great job!

Yes, more or less one of the 5 servers was not set correctly in the load balancer. (It lost a setting). As such you had a 1 in 5 chance that your next call to the site would end up going nowhere.

All better now.