Forum Problems

[Nite Owl]

Anyone else notice a considerable slowdown when accessing the forums over the past several days. Been also getting the occasional 503 error, down for maintenance or overcrowded. Checked the Interweb traffic sites and there are no apparent outages that can account for this. Does anyone have contact with the host server to see if they are having a problem. It is a strange one as sometimes things are fine and at other times it takes a good few minutes for a page to load. Perhaps a backup of the forums is in order just in case we run into a similar situation as we did with the Main Page.

[hiran]

My perception is the exact same.

Any thoughts of possible reasons is subject to wild guessing. All I know is the forum is poorly maintained (e.g. it has no https, it has a warning in the top row since ages). With that the slowdown may be caused by whatsoever technical debt has piled up, and we should anticipate the worst.

Buckle up, make your backups, then waive a woolen wildboar to the western nightsky while whistling your favorite tune!

[timer]

I missed this thread

Yes, the fact of the matter is that these are not access/network problems, but a server problem - problems at the server software level, i.e. we saw responses from the server, but they were errors... this is bad.

@hiran is right - probably the technical condition of the server(OS instance - not hardware) is not good.

Regarding backup, we now don’t even have admins with full rights to the forum, not to mention any access to the server or its software.
All I can do is periodically copy all new messages to myself (the data is saved to the database). To do this, I wrote a number of modules and scripts that parse our forum. After CF increased the limit on the size of the free database, I even thought about placing a read-only version of the forum in one of the sections of the site.

Because of all this, I have an obsessive desire to send out secret keys to everyone. This will let you know who is who if the forum does break down, and possibly prevent chaos.

[timer]

Friends, I hope you won’t be offended if I test sending a PM script to you )

But I don't know what to write in messages...
something like:
"Please save this private key to restore access to the new forum if problems arise with the current forum."

Can you please correct this message to make it more clear?

[Nite Owl]

That message is clear. Once the test is complete details can be added on how to use the Key. A reminder to save the information outside of the Forum's Private Messaging System would also be a good idea. Forum goes boom one cannot access their Private Messages.

[hiran]

Friends, I hope you won’t be offended if I test sending a PM script to you )

But I don't know what to write in messages...
something like:
"Please save this private key to restore access to the new forum if problems arise with the current forum."

Can you please correct this message to make it more clear?

Interested to hear what 'the new forum' is about...

[timer]

Friends, I hope you won’t be offended if I test sending a PM script to you )

But I don't know what to write in messages...
something like:
"Please save this private key to restore access to the new forum if problems arise with the current forum."

Can you please correct this message to make it more clear?

Interested to hear what 'the new forum' is about...

IF this forum disappears, we will create something new, right? I didn't mean anything else.

UPD maybe this forum will outlive us all.

[timer]

[cbr]

'timely' rescued from an early 'retirement' chasing behemoths...

unfortunately cannot post to screenshots...

[Nite Owl]

Confirmed - the Screenshot Thread is borked with the following.

Code: Select all

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Table 'phpbb_posts' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [1194]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.

[timer]

test this topic

[Cody]

test this topic

Who? Me? Okay...

[hiran]

Confirmed - the Screenshot Thread is borked with the following.

Code: Select all

General Error
SQL ERROR [ mysqli ]

Table 'phpbb_posts' is marked as crashed and should be repaired [1194]

An SQL error occurred while fetching this page. Please contact the Board Administrator if this problem persists.

Interesting. That code 1194 for sure comes from the underlying RDBMS (=MariaDB). Indeed https://mariadb.com/kb/en/e1194/
produces the same error message "Table is marked as crashed and should be repaired" but does not provide any instructions what to do.

@timer: How did you create the database and populate it with data?

Edit: As soon as we have backups running, let's try to repair as mentioned in https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions ... e-repaired

[timer]

@timer: How did you create the database and populate it with data?

try to ssh login to server
/var/www/phpBB3 is awaiting u
UPD PS ip see in CF DNS settings )

[hiran]

try to ssh login to server
/var/www/phpBB3 is awaiting u
UPD PS ip see in CF DNS settings )

Confirmed. I have access.