503 errors and other errors

[rayan]

Hi everyone, I figure I may as well pop in and let everyone know what is going on because I'm sure its frustrating getting so many errors when trying to use the forum. Trust me, I am 10000000000000x more frustrated than you guys.

So just a background a 503 error happens when the server is overwhelmed and is unable to process a request. This is usually caused by too much traffic or some kind of unstable code that is running on the server.

I honestly don't know why our 503 error rate seems to have jumped up drastically since December. I have been trying to figure it out everyday for the past month and I'm not sure if I'm getting any closer to the solution.

The potential fix would be to move the forum from our current hosting to something more stable like a cloud service and they manage these types of scaling issues.

There are issues with this however as the forum is now 11 years old and there is just gigabytes of data in the database alone. I'm not sure if we could even find a new home.

We're in a unique situation where these problems are so rare, I can't really find help. If anyone is a database or server expert, please contact us cause we're really at a loss at this point.

[rayan]

our goal at UU has always been to be as helpful as possible to people trying to learn to play the ukulele. Preventing guests from viewing the forum wouldn't be good for that.

[kerneltime]

The state of art has moved quite a bit, not sure what the stack for UU looks like..
@Rayan I am a UU+ member too, I can try to help, you know how to reach me :-)

[Joe King]

Hi Rayan,

Thanks for the update.

In my web design work, I know that some of my colleagues have used different "content caching proxy" aka "content delivery networks" for scaling.

I'm not involved in that side of things, but from what I understand, these services can buffer against scaling and server response problems.

Two that I know of, that I've seen used to good effect are Cloudflare and Cachefly:

https://www.cloudflare.com/performan...-availability/

"Cloudflare’s global Anycast network consisting of 155 data centers spans across 75 countries, offers a scalable infrastructure backbone that prevents downtime and unavailability."

https://www.cachefly.com/

"The CacheFly network is free of outage inducing headaches because our servers are strategically located worldwide near the internet’s major peering points. Placing your content closer to your end-users for the fastest, more efficient and reliable delivery of your content."

From what I understand, these services allow you to keep your existing setup without having to move your hosting or database, and act as a real-time multi-homed DNS content-caching-proxy, and as such can reduce the load on your primary domain by replicating your content out around the world, locally in each location that these companies have a footprint.

I have no hands-on with any of this, but maybe it is something worth looking into?

I am not sure of the costs but maybe these can help?

FWIW, even though it is joining the Evil Empire, I think Google also has a similar service. Google's service might be "free as in beer" since it will allow them to vacuum all traffic to feed their analytics and surveillance avarice.

[Chopped Liver]

Could all those "guests" really be bots (or whatever you call them) that are trying to get into the system?

[Joe King]

Could all those "guests" really be bots (or whatever you call them) that are trying to get into the system?

From what I know, anyone listed as a "guest" is at least someone who is not actually logged in to UU.

Could be bots (which are not necessarily evil, like the Google-indexer program so it knows things when you do a search), and could be people "just looking" without having a UU account and password.

[kohanmike]

I use a hosting service out of Canada, DotEasy.com with unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth transfer rates, etc. Not sure how it might be used as a forum, but they've always been very supportive of my simple needs.

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[AQUATOPAZ]

Just a victim of your burgeoning success. I think it makes sense that traffic would increase during the holidays, with gifting research and extra time to browse the forum.

[AQUATOPAZ]

I have been working my way through past postings, as I am sure many people do. Separating older posts in an archived section is one thing, but deleting posts would limit the usefulness as no one can actually know what someone else might be searching for.