# Incredibly slow performance



## Mogu (May 6, 2009)

Every since last night, FA has been abysmally slow.  Pictures load slowly or (usually) not at all.  Pages take 2-3 minutes to become visible.  Etc.

Forums are slow too, but not terribly so.


All other websites work fine.


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## tsawolf (May 6, 2009)

The fact that it seems to affect both the forums and the mainsite is a wonderful indication that it is on your side.

Both those systems are totally separate, in different locations, in different parts of the country.

Run a traceroute to the different servers, you will find the slowdown is somewhere between you and the servers.

Cheers.


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## Mogu (May 6, 2009)

Nope.  Both have great latency right up to your site.

Conglomeratively under 25ms until hop 8, then it spikes to 200 (atlas.cogentco).  Reaches 500ms by the time it gets to ash.he, and then explodes to 1607ms on the last 3 hops (266.66.0.250, 66-22-208-26.ironpath.net, lastly 66-112-210-126.ironpath.net)
A 100-ping test shows 4% packet loss.  Marginally a problem.  It shows the packet dropping consistantly at hop 16:  10gigabitethernet2-1.core1.ash1.he.net [72.52.92.5] oddly.

The forums are 104ms total trip, from me all the way to the end, conglomeratively.  No idea why they're still being slow.  0% packet loss across a 100-ping test.


Ping to google shows a total conglomerative latency of 58ms.

Ping to yahoo shows 46ms.

By the time my ISP passes it off to routing (IE, me-to-backbone) it's 9ms.  13ms by the first hop.



Any other ideas?


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## Carenath (May 6, 2009)

Well to be fair... tsawolf, its not an accurate indication, its not uncommon  both sites to load slowly on occasion.

First, FA's hosted/connected by IronPath who have lousey connectivity... if your ISP uses Level3 you get along fine... but if your ISP uses Cogent... no so much. So the issues the OP is having with the main-site are not so much to do with his ISP, as they are to do with IronPath being cheap with connectivity and using only one T-1 provider.. that doesnt play so nice with Cogent. RackForce dont have this problem, so the forums generally never suffer the intermittant issues the main site can.

Second, the Forum is hosted on a VPS, running software that, like vBulletin, is known to be resource-heavy. I've often had issues with the forum timing out, only to load fine when you refresh the page.

I've had the odd issue with the main site, but never much. The forums on the other hand.. I get the occasional time-out or server-busy errors.


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## tsawolf (May 7, 2009)

The likelyhood of a single user reporting performance decrease and it not being a network issue is... slim.

Now, I'm certainly not saying that FA or FAF are particularly known for their rock solid stability.  Quite the opposite, really.  However, in this case... response times for FA proper is normal for the site. 4-7 seconds for complete pageload without cache is... not my favourite thing, but certainly about normal for FA.

Not what I would characterize as "incredibly slow performance", especially since one should almost never be doing a complete pageload without any cache.


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## Carenath (May 7, 2009)

tsawolf said:


> The likelyhood of a single user reporting performance decrease and it not being a network issue is... slim.
> 
> Now, I'm certainly not saying that FA or FAF are particularly known for their rock solid stability.  Quite the opposite, really.  However, in this case... response times for FA proper is normal for the site. 4-7 seconds for complete pageload without cache is... not my favourite thing, but certainly about normal for FA.
> 
> Not what I would characterize as "incredibly slow performance", especially since one should almost never be doing a complete pageload without any cache.


True, but in this case the issue is outside his control.. and down to Tier-2 Network issues. Its probably not something his ISP can deal with right away. He is not the first person to have trouble accessing FA..  because of issues similar to Level3's spats with Cogent over peering.

The forums can have similar symptoms.. but those are Software Issues.


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## Mogu (May 7, 2009)

You guys are almost over my head.



All I know if i'm having network issues that seem to begin outside of my ISP and the middlerouters.


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## tsawolf (May 8, 2009)

Again, I am fairly certain that the problem doesn't exist with the FurAffinity servers, but rather somewhere in between.

However... you should IM me. I may be able to assist you in debugging what's going on. 

AIM: tsawolf


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## Mogu (May 8, 2009)

Log in, foo'!  =D


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## Mogu (May 8, 2009)

It's really getting to the point of being completely unuseable.

I load the same page over ten times and it fails a different way each and every time.

Usually generates the page instantly, but none of the pics, or pics are missing.  Random, different pics each time.  Sits there loading for 1-3 minutes before they fail to download.
Also getting page timeouts and 404's, even domain errors.

I've tried loading my submissions all day today and yesterday, and it just won't fucking work.  Not on this or my other computers, nor on any browser.  And other people are replying to my journal (which I can barely get a post onto, after MANY attempts) with the same issue.

Am I just going to gave to give up and switch sites?  I'm really out of ideas here.


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## Mogu (May 8, 2009)

This time the image loaded, but with no background and 'broken' formatting, everything on a white background.

"tool tip is here!" in the top-left corner.

It's like a page-load error grab bag.  Something different every time.


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## Mogu (May 8, 2009)

Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.


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## CyberFoxx (May 8, 2009)

I'm not sure what else can be said/done. As others have said, it's a problem somewhere between you and the FA servers. I hate saying it, but the site still loads fast for me.

It could be a fun case of somebody breaking Network Neutrality ("That ISP smells funny, we're going to slow all their traffic through us.") for all we know...


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## Mogu (May 8, 2009)

Since FA's the only site doing this, and noone has any ideas or offers, I guess i'll change sites until it's fixed.


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## Raithah (May 9, 2009)

Change ISPs? But I'm assuming that's a fair bit too much hassle to try . Under the heading of Less Radical Maneuvers, you could try using a free proxy (you can use this guide if you're unfamiliar with such operations), or try Tor. The former will only work if it isn't your ISP that's shaping your connections, Tor, on the other hand, should work against pretty much anything - however, from experience, the speed hovers at ~8kb/s, so it could be slower than what you have now.


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## Mogu (May 9, 2009)

I tried a proxy, same shit.  I'll give TOR a try later.


Also, there's only one ISP in this county.  Westel.  DSL or Cable, same company.  I've never had a problem until the past few days, where FA specifically and exclusively has been getting slower.


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## SFox (May 10, 2009)

I've had this happen to me on FA both main site and forums once or twice, I never found anything out about what was causing the problem. It eventually went away on its own however.

I did suspect it was an backbone or proxy issue somewhere far down the line from me.


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