# Site lagging / long load times



## Erethzium (Nov 18, 2018)

In the past few weeks/months, the main site randomly takes 30+ seconds to load a page. Seems to happen completely at random, I'll be in the middle of browsing and then all of a sudden the next page load takes 30+ seconds. No other site does this, just FA.


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## torchlight (Nov 20, 2018)

I've been having this issue a lot lately, came here to see if anyone else was


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## Cawdabra (Nov 23, 2018)

I thought it was just my ISP being garbage. I wonder what's causing it.


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## Garold (Nov 28, 2018)

Haven't visited here in a long time and noticed too it loads slower than I remember.


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## 2ndVenus (Dec 16, 2018)

Thought i would post, as i have been noticing this as kind of a large problem lately over the last few months

It feels like FA is alive for 3 minutes and down for 1, constantly. Browsing has actually become frustrating as of late due to these massively abundant spikes of FA ceasing to be.
This seems like a a pretty major issue that i hope staff (they probably are considering how big this is) are already aware of it.


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## 2ndVenus (Dec 17, 2018)

It seems to have gotten worse. I just got this today:


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## StarrLion (Dec 31, 2018)

Any update on this?  It is still doing the 30 second pause on me.


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## Firio Zifirion (Jan 1, 2019)

Happend again and I made a screenshot...


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## Twopaw Tarnished-Silver (Jan 4, 2019)

Confirmed here as well. I haven't gotten a Cloudflare Error 250 Timeout (like 2ndVenus posted on December 17th, above) but frequently if I'm going between pages (say, switching from the Submissions to the Comments tab or vice-versa) it can take almost two minutes until the page 'updates'; it doesn't hang, but the time it's taking is odd and it's been doing this for a while now. I also thought it might've been at my end rather than FurAffinity's, but the trouble has been both intermittent (as in sometimes FA will work as fast as always) and the majority of the sites I frequent haven't seemed to have this trouble, certainly not for this long.

Aside from the wait between pages sometimes, the actual functionality of the site hasn't been (for me) impacted. I just have to be patient sometimes. Your own mileage may vary.

-2Paw.


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## FoxWolfie (Jan 4, 2019)

I'm having the same problem. I first noticed it some time before Thanksgiving in November. When it started to happen, the site would freeze for about 20 seconds about once every 15 minutes. It was mildly annoying, but not too bad.  Since Christmas, the site only works normally for 3 to 5 minutes, then totally freeze for 30 to 60 seconds. It is growing beyond frustrating at this rate. It is definitely not my 100Mb/s connection, as this is not happening with any of the other dozens of sites I use each day.

Time of day doesn't seem to matter, number of users online doesn't seem to matter. I might be commenting, journaling, submitting, searching, browsing, or anything else on FA, and the freezing keeps happening.

I have gotten any errors pages or cloudflare pages, just the random intermittent freezing.  If it helps, I'm using Firefox under Windows, but temporarilly tried with Internet Explorer to see what would happen. It still froze the same.


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## StarrLion (Jan 4, 2019)

I haven't gotten any errors either.  It just stops for about 30 seconds then goes back to normal.  No other sites do this.  And been doing it for a few months or so.  Kinda surprised no one in admin hasn't noticed it.


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## quoting_mungo (Jan 5, 2019)

StarrLion said:


> I haven't gotten any errors either.  It just stops for about 30 seconds then goes back to normal.  No other sites do this.  And been doing it for a few months or so.  Kinda surprised no one in admin hasn't noticed it.


It could be as simple as the slowdowns being associated with particular nodes between the server and the end user. If the bad nodes aren't between the admins and FA, they're never going to see any of it no matter how bad it is for certain users. Bringing this up as there was some suggestion of geographical components to the problem earlier in the thread.


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## 57_Wolve (Jan 5, 2019)

quoting_mungo said:


> It could be as simple as the slowdowns being associated with particular nodes between the server and the end user. If the bad nodes aren't between the admins and FA, they're never going to see any of it no matter how bad it is for certain users. Bringing this up as there was some suggestion of geographical components to the problem earlier in the thread.



Cloudflare would have spotted it months ago as they try to connect you to the closest node based on your location. My best guess is that database queries are getting pretty big to handle. I don't know what kinda of setup FA has, I just know they Co-Locate the servers and that they own the equipment.

The site lagging to respond has been an issue since I moved from California back in last week of October to Wisconsin. I was using different ISPs in the process of the move, started in my California home using Frontier, then AT&T & a hotel room while going across the country, to now my new home using Spectrum. (Blech! Spectrum, eww.)

Based on my experience and knowing what Error 520 is, it's on FAs side that the issue seems to be occurring.


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## FormerUser (Jan 5, 2019)

57_Wolve said:


> Cloudflare would have spotted it months ago as they try to connect you to the closest node based on your location. My best guess is that database queries are getting pretty big to handle. I don't know what kinda of setup FA has, I just know they Co-Locate the servers and that they own the equipment.




Having been around for a long time, I have some knowledge of FA's setup.
Yes the site is coded poorly so queries are likely to not be 100% efficient, however the issue is likely an upstream issue from the server farm (FA's ISP) to cloudflare themselves. Since CF's CDN system is global, it would make sense to have a poor response coming from the source ISP than the distribution nodes.
Also note that FA does use some older hardware, so it is possible that hardware may be in need of some TLC.


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## 57_Wolve (Jan 5, 2019)

FormerUser said:


> Yes the site is coded poorly so queries are likely to not be 100% efficient, however the issue is likely an upstream issue from the server farm (FA's ISP) to cloudflare themselves. Since CF's CDN system is global, it would make sense to have a poor response coming from the source ISP than the distribution nodes.
> Also note that FA does use some older hardware, so it is possible that hardware may be in need of some TLC.



Yep, bad/poor SQL design can cause way more RAM usage than necessary. I think FA's had issues with the ISP in the past but I'm not 100% sure.
Error 520 is CloudFlare's catch-all error code, I wish they'ed log the server response in this case for much faster troubleshooting.

I don't know if they already use it or not, but maybe they should look into either hosted Sentry.io or an on-premises Sentry.io setup like I have. Telemetry such as Observium or NodeQuery would be good to have if they don't already for basic monitoring.


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## Firio Zifirion (Jan 5, 2019)

57_Wolve said:


> Yep, bad/poor SQL design can cause way more RAM usage than necessary. I think FA's had issues with the ISP in the past but I'm not 100% sure.
> Error 520 is CloudFlare's catch-all error code, I wish they'ed log the server response in this case for much faster troubleshooting.
> 
> I don't know if they already use it or not, but maybe they should look into either hosted Sentry.io or an on-premises Sentry.io setup like I have. Telemetry such as Observium or NodeQuery would be good to have if they don't already for basic monitoring.


Good that you figured that out... I am laging more than I did in last 3 days... I am on my phone 90% of the time so it lags even more...


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## 57_Wolve (Jan 5, 2019)

Firio Zifirion said:


> Good that you figured that out... I am laging more than I did last 3 days... I am on my phone 90% of the time so it lags even more...



Ouch... That's gotta hurt.


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## Firio Zifirion (Jan 5, 2019)

57_Wolve said:


> Ouch... That's gotta hurt.


It doesnt lag that bad but sometimes its inposible to use forums.. or Fur Affinity.


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## FoxWolfie (Jan 5, 2019)

StarrLion said:


> I haven't gotten any errors either.  It just stops for about 30 seconds then goes back to normal.  No other sites do this.  And been doing it for a few months or so.  Kinda surprised no one in admin hasn't noticed it.



I left a ticket for the problem and they linked me to the known problems page here in the forums. However, this one isn't listed under the known problems there. It also said to not reopen the ticket. Well, that totally sucks. Then I see a message here saying it could be a particular node between me and FA.  There aren't many jumps between me and FA, and I'm pretty darned sure that something like that wouldn't go uncorrected for over two months now.

It's definitely not a lag, as I think they are trying to call it. The entire site completely freezes. Also, when it freezes for me on Spectrum, it also freezes exactly at the same times through my roommate's cell phone, using his data - not wifi. In other words, it would almost surely be two separate paths to FA, yet they are both freezing at the same times for the same durations.

I hope everyone in this thread is leaving tickets about this, so they can't just blame it on a couple users.


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## 57_Wolve (Jan 5, 2019)

FoxWolfie said:


> I left a ticket for the problem and they linked me to the known problems page here in the forums. However, this one isn't listed under the known problems there. It also said to not reopen the ticket. Well, that totally sucks. Then I see a message here saying it could be a particular node between me and FA.  There aren't many jumps between me and FA, and I'm pretty darned sure that something like that wouldn't go uncorrected for over two months now.
> 
> It's definitely not a lag, as I think they are trying to call it. The entire site completely freezes. Also, when it freezes for me on Spectrum, it also freezes exactly at the same times through my roommate's cell phone, using his data - not wifi. In other words, it would almost surely be two separate paths to FA, yet they are both freezing at the same times for the same durations.
> 
> I hope everyone in this thread is leaving tickets about this, so they can't just blame it on a couple users.



If you get a CF error page log the Ray ID, you can report that to Cloudflare and they can tell you on the spot if its an issue on there end or FA. I can say its definitely FA themselves though.


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## StarrLion (Jan 5, 2019)

I just got the cloudflare error.  And Ray ID.  I posted a screen shot for the ones on here that know what to do with the info.  

There was no freezing.  Just bam.  Right to the error page.  First time I gotten this before.


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## FormerUser (Jan 6, 2019)

Quick look at the screenshot that looks more thank likely to be a FA issue with one server.
Most of FA's static content (so pages etc) is served out of "Smaug" server.
I'm not too sure of the current naming to do with the DB server, but it looks like Smaug and DB are not playing good buddies right now.
Either the DB server is being a total asshat and not up to scratch in specs and the efficiency of the code, or one of the servers is starting to show hardware issues.
Honestly my expertise lies elsewhere in IT but knowing FA, all i said above is possible.


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## 57_Wolve (Jan 6, 2019)

FormerUser said:


> Quick look at the screenshot that looks more thank likely to be a FA issue with one server.
> Most of FA's static content (so pages etc) is served out of "Smaug" server.
> I'm not too sure of the current naming to do with the DB server, but it looks like Smaug and DB are not playing good buddies right now.
> Either the DB server is being a total asshat and not up to scratch in specs and the efficiency of the code, or one of the servers is starting to show hardware issues.
> Honestly my expertise lies elsewhere in IT but knowing FA, all i said above is possible.



99% of the time its the host and not CloudFlare. We have pretty much established at this point its all at FA's end of the connection. Now it's down to FA and fix it or at least start investigating it.


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## StarrLion (Jan 8, 2019)

FoxWolfie said:


> I left a ticket for the problem and they linked me to the known problems page here in the forums. However, this one isn't listed under the known problems there. It also said to not reopen the ticket. Well, that totally sucks. Then I see a message here saying it could be a particular node between me and FA.  There aren't many jumps between me and FA, and I'm pretty darned sure that something like that wouldn't go uncorrected for over two months now.
> 
> It's definitely not a lag, as I think they are trying to call it. The entire site completely freezes. Also, when it freezes for me on Spectrum, it also freezes exactly at the same times through my roommate's cell phone, using his data - not wifi. In other words, it would almost surely be two separate paths to FA, yet they are both freezing at the same times for the same durations.
> 
> I hope everyone in this thread is leaving tickets about this, so they can't just blame it on a couple users.




Well.  I do believe it finally crashed or someone finally found out there was a problem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


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## 57_Wolve (Jan 8, 2019)

StarrLion said:


> Well.  I do believe it finally crashed or someone finally found out there was a problem!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Yep, it had finally crashed with a butt load of error 502s. That's still unacceptable, should have never got to this point for something to be done.


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## FoxWolfie (Jan 8, 2019)

57_Wolve said:


> Yep, it had finally crashed with a butt load of error 502s. That's still unacceptable, should have never got to this point for something to be done.



I hope that whatever happened today is actually related to the freezing problem.  After all, I never saw any of the 502 errors. Last night was really bad with the constant random freezing though, as it was doing it every five minutes and lasting for two to three minutes per freeze.


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## maxgoof (Jan 8, 2019)

FoxWolfie said:


> I hope that whatever happened today is actually related to the freezing problem.  After all, I never saw any of the 502 errors. Last night was really bad with the constant random freezing though, as it was doing it every five minutes and lasting for two to three minutes per freeze.



One can only hope.

In the meantime, The Site Is Down


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## tbonethebunbun (Jan 8, 2019)

maxgoof said:


> One can only hope.
> 
> In the meantime, The Site Is Down



Seriously, again? - _ -

This Mewtwo is becoming rather annoyed with this... Speaking of which, where are all the Mewtwos at?


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## Twopaw Tarnished-Silver (Jan 20, 2019)

tbonethebunbun said:


> Speaking of which, where are all the Mewtwos at?



They're over having lunch at the Mew-multiplication table. ^_^ At least in the last week or so, I've had no experiences with the intermittent slowdowns that had been happening for a while. I know FA went down after a bit of a server-side business just prior to that around that long ago, so for the moment the 'rebuilt' database setup seems to be maintaining things well; no issues with missing thumbnails or anything I can see that's out of place on my FA page, anyway. 

While I regret it took a huge database rebuild to get things (apparently) back to normal, I'm at least glad things are smoothed out for now. My thanks to the efforts of FurAffinity's behind-the-scenes crew, if I may offer them!

-2Paw.


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