h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Starting about a week and a half ago, the site seemed to be slo-0-0-0-w-ing down again. It has also become a 50/50 chance of logging on at all or getting the 'trouble with your password' message. It is very intermittent and random but becoming increasingly consistent and frustrating.

If able to log on, it continues to get slower (as it was last time the New York server had problems) until opening new pages just times out. Then I find I'm not even able to refresh my homepage, getting the browser's (IE) error 404 'cannot find page' message.

It all feels very similar to the last New York server problems.


~jwf~

I am in the middle of the UK, and it is just as slow for me,

and it is getting on my nerves

and no one will say what it is

manda

This time round it started late in the night (in North America) before the h2g2 '4th anniversary' day when hundreds of curious newcomers came online as a result of promotion in other media.

It seems that whenever more than 100 users are online the North American service slows and fails. And while it comes in fits and starts for a few days after, it generally continues to degrade to a snail's pace in spite of my having a 'high speed' cable connection.

Because it seems to be operating reasonably well at the moment, I have taken this opportunity to report my experience while I still can. If it follows the same pattern this time, I expect service to be down to a 1 in 4 shot of logging on pretty soon, and when lucky enough to get online it will allow me only one or maybe two postings before deciding to bog down completely.

This is very frustrating when trying to create articles for as I do each week for <./>AggGag</.>/CAC and will be trying to do this weekend. I do this by constantly updating the page after each paragraph and after installing each link so you can imagine how many times I get 'logged off' before it gets done.


jwf

It certainly doesn't appear to be a problem with the h2g2 servers themselves - our logs aren't showing any particular slowdowns, unless I'm missing something. So I shall have to ask Internet Services if they are aware of any likely problems between the front end servers and ours.

It definitely appears to have started early last week - and it's not just on the US servers this time.

Hi ~jwf~

I've been getting similar problems to you, just maybe not as serious, but then I'm closer to the servers.

I timed the loading of conversation threads whilst using Opera (ie the fast browser) earlier today. It was taking on average 23 seconds from the request for the thread to fully load. True I'm using the graphics heavy Goo skin with frames turned on. But for heaven sakes I have Broadband connection - it shouldn't take that long

Jim,

The timescale's definitely right - it's in the past week that h2g2's been slower to load for me.

RhoMuNuQ

And irony of ironies, in the few minutes since I bitched that it was really slow, it has suddenly started cooking on gas!

It's still fairly slow for me but nowhere near as bad as sometimes.

Given that my tech support friend said the whole internet had been bad and that the news said there was a spate of net "terrorist" attacks, has anyone checked the various sites which monitor the whole(?) net and collect statistics? These could be compared with the h2g2 loading graph to help determine if it is an internal or external server problem.

I'm getting the occasional "The Document Contained No Data" (Mozilla 1.3), and things seem a little slow, but the connection's mostly normal for me. Maybe things have cleared up now. Of course, I might just be bypassing the affected route or something...

Robert
(Logging on from San Francisco, CA)

>> It definitely appears to have started early last week - and it's not just on the US servers this time. <<

Phew! Then it's official? I'm not just a crazy whiner.


~jwf~

No, you are, it's just that we to are getting the slow server speed...

Update: my Mozilla sidebar (displaying Who's Online and My Conversations) encountered a server error about two hours ago, which cleared up after about three minutes. Still normal connection speeds. No problems apart from that.

Another UPDATE:

Logons seem to be OK, and page opening speeds are generally quicker than when I first complained but still slower than 'normal'.

I blame TV for setting our standards of expectation.
That is to say, until the internet can consistantly 'change channels' as quickly as a TV set does, some of us will just never be satisfied.

I saw a dial-up connection in operation once. It was like watching the Wright Brothers trying to push their plane into the air. White knuckles, clenched teeth, and no comfort or satisfaction levels to speak of. Not the way to fly.


~jwf~

There had been occasional noticeable improvements in speed today - the most dramatic being around 15:00 BST or just after. I was about to post here when performance suddenly dropped again at around 15:30 BST. I have also been spot-checking the number of users. I think they are largely irrelevant since the site has been very bad when the number has been relatively low. I'm more certain than before that the problem is something to do with servers - either internal or external to h2g2/BBC.

If that was you fixing something earlier this afternoon, Jim, then congratulations, it worked and please do it again or make it more permanent.

If it was not anyone in h2g2/BBC then does anyone else know of anything which occurred at around those times - or even notice the same brief speed improvement as I did?

I have a suspicion that some automated process (possibly a search spider, but also, possibly, an individual) if fetching rather too many pages at once. If it were an individual, I wouldn't be particularly happy about that, and I might have to take steps to prevent this happening (like blocking access) as I have to do occasionally for search engines.

Do you have any idea how many pages is too many? One thing which caused trouble before was collecting a large number of postings on just one page. So it probably depends on the data type as well as the amount.

The timings don't make much sense though. It is all times of the day and night (according to my not entirely random checks) and it got dramatically worse about the time of the advertising campaign. So are you suspecting one of the new users or some external agency whose attention was suddenly attracted to the site at that point? In fact the search spider idea would make sense. If more people suddenly started demanding info about h2g2, more spiders around the world might be crawling into the site more often.

Getting a little bit faster...

That fact that it's particularly slow now worries me - Sunday is usually a very quiet day. What I suspect is an automated bot of some kind systematically fetching as many pages as it can. If it's a search engine, fair enough, but such a program being used by a researcher might well earn that researcher a temporary ban - after all, it's hardly good community behaviour to prevent other users from having a decent experience.

It's not better for me. Right now it is almost completely dead when trying to open threads but can display my posting list with much less trouble. It will let me start/post a reply but stalls at displaying the result in a thread page.

Well, when I say getting a little faster, all things are relative. I mean it has moved from 'near dead stop' to 'not quite dead stop'