Memcache errors

[Shinx3000]

took me around 15 mins to get on site and for this thread to work. Seems worse than they were for me now.

 

[Kawaii-Pika]

They've gotten even worse for me. They used to only be at night (around 6:00 EST), and now they're happening frequently. I'm just hoping it gets fixed soon.

 

[Archaic]

In an attempt to try and control the memcache problem, I've disabled a number of addons on the forums which, while adding extra functionality for users, I don't consider essential to the operation of the board. I've already been doing this for a while, but I've gone and disabled a few more noticeable ones today. With any luck, reducing the amount of queries each user puts to the database on each page load may make some small amount of difference here.

Please let me know if you now see any difference in the amount of memcache problems. If we don't see a fairly dramatic reduction of them, my theory here is wrong, and we can safely put them back in. If we do however....at least our tech people should know exactly where the issue lies, though how we'd fix that without improving the hardware on the server I'm not sure.

 

[Chosen of Mana]

The memcache error have gone down a noticeable amount, but are you saying that these addons are the cause of our problems?

 

[AiedailEclipsed]

just curious, but which features did you take away?

 

[Archaic]

Not the addons as such, no. Basically, some addons may add extra database queries to each page load when in use, increasing the load on the database. Since all these memcache errors are effectively database timeouts from the sound of the error message, I'm simply reducing the amount of queries being made.

It's treating the symptom, it's not a cure. We had all these addons installed for a long period without memcache errors occurring, so the fault doesn't lie with them. Disabling them may very well make things a little easier to deal with for a while though. If the problems get worse again even with them off, then we're looking at a much deeper issue.

 

[Shinx3000]

Still having a lot of errors, a tiny bit less, getting slightly better

 

[Halberd Bravo]

Same here. The errors have slightly decreased, but they're not gone entirely.

 

[hopeandjoy]

I don't think it's helping for me. There where three when I was trying to post last, four to delete the extra one it caused, and two just to get here.

All of these were in a row.

It's 8:45 EST.

 

[Juputoru]

I'm getting these errors too(about 60% of the time I try to load a page), and there's only 124 people on(maybe that's a lot for here, I don't exactly pay attention to how many people are usually on here)

I'm starting to become convinced that SPPf got better at loading pages by draining that ability away from BMGf.

 

[Archaic]

Had someone point something out to me earlier, so I've disabled another addon. We'll give this a day and see how it goes.

Apparently, one of the features included in most modern browsers, including Firefox, involves "prefetching". That is, it looks at all the links on a page, and starts loading these in the background.

One of our addons involved basically a "quick search" under the search menu in the navbar, where someone could check all the posts they'd made or threads they'd made/posted in, which I'd installed so people could easily keep up to date on the threads they were interested in. However....if you have hundreds of users browsing at once, all using modern browsers that are pre-fetching....then every single time you loaded a forums page, you'd be making a two forums searches, significantly clogging the database.

Now, I'm not convinced this is the issue, especially since they apparently only pre-fetch pages which they think you're likely to want to look at from previous usage habits (for instance, pre-fetching a specific forum on the list on the main page that you always visit, and not any of the others), but if a lot of people had been making use of this functionality, it's plausible.

So...it's off for now, and we'll see if things improve. If not...well, we'll keep looking.

 

[Silverwynde]

Just had three errors pop up about five minutes ago. And things were running so smoothly, too. (Thankfully, refreshing the page helps.)

 

[Archaic]

So for the most part, symptoms are easing? We might not have found the root cause, but anything which makes it easier for people to browse the forums can only be a good thing.

 

[*Leeney*]

They're a little better but these errors almost prevented me from logging in. It's annoying but i'm getting used to it.

 

[Shinx3000]

It took a while to login and its taken a little longer than usual to type this as its seem to got a little slower for some reason. I am still getting errors, but not as bad.

 

[Archaic]

Any slowdown right now is probably due to the server techs actively working on the issue. We've brought in some outside professionals to look over the server and work out the issue.

 

[*Leeney*]

Great. Hopefully the professionals can fix it so all of us users can go back to our normal Bulbagarden lives.

 

[Shinx3000]

I have only got one or a few errors today, seem a lot less now, thanks for trying to fix em, hopefully it stay like this and get less frequent until they are gone

 

[Nekusagi]

Been having a lot more luck lately. Only 2 this afternoon.

 

[Pidgeot]

Does anyone know anyway to stop it?