Main page won’t load

[Cecil Terwilliger]

No matter what device or browser I use https://forum.calgarypuck.com/index.php won’t load.

Tried chrome and safari for iPad and iPhone plus chrome on windows.

Strangely though it is only when I’m logged in. If I’m not it works fine. And all other pages work regardless of whether or not I’m logged in. Tried clearing history with no success.

It’s not a huge deal because I can still get around as long as I use the “main forums” as my browser bookmark. But it is kind of annoying when navigating as sometimes I just go back to the main page to navigate around the forum.

[activeStick]

I wonder if there's some sort of big event today that impacts the Flames? You'll be fine in 30 min, if not already good.

[Cecil Terwilliger]

If it were traffic related why would it only affect one page on the whole site? That makes no sense.

[activeStick]

That's true....

[Zary's-Mustache]

I've been having problems since about 12pm. Won't load.

[fotze2]

Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger

No matter what device or browser I use https://forum.calgarypuck.com/index.php won’t load.

Tried chrome and safari for iPad and iPhone plus chrome on windows.

Strangely though it is only when I’m logged in. If I’m not it works fine. And all other pages work regardless of whether or not I’m logged in. Tried clearing history with no success.

It’s not a huge deal because I can still get around as long as I use the “main forums” as my browser bookmark. But it is kind of annoying when navigating as sometimes I just go back to the main page to navigate around the forum.

Ya, site is a disaster today. I assume that’s why we don’t see user counts or anything to try and throttle back traffic.

I didn’t think people would be refreshing CP for a 5% chance at something that wouldn’t change anything or future decisions. Win and pick celebbrini lose and pick whoever we would have picked. Def not trade deadline day.

[prosh]

Weird thing is it won't come up on Chrome but trying on Edge, it's loading fine.

[KootenayFlamesFan]

I'm on Chrome and it's loading very slow for me, and has already been stated I can't get into the main page.

[photon]

Bingo and I have been having that issue all day, but I thought it was just related to us but I guess it isn't. I guess that eliminates some possibilities if it's happening to regular users.

I've been sifting through logs and tweaking settings and turning some things on and off for quite a while and I haven't found anything that's made any difference. It's just weird that not everyone is impacted.

The Ukraine thread bot population is particularly heavy today so I may do some things to see if that is a cause. Though I'm scared of drawing the ire of Russian state hackers.

Otherwise I am really having difficulty tracking down what it might be.

[photon]

Oh and yeah the fact that it's the main page is what makes it really weird. I thought it was related to user count or whatever but I turned that off with zero impact.

[Bankai]

Same thing happening to me.

Just to add a data point - Main page won't load on chrome mobile, even tried clearing all cookies, etc. However, it WILL load through incognito mode, weird.

Also it WILL load through Android "internet" app.


Edit - Once I am logged into the forum it no longer loads on incognito mode. If I am not logged in it works on both normal and incognito.

[woob]

Reboot!

But yeah, same issue here. I can load other pages, just not the main one.

[bigrangy]

Also not working for me if it helps. When logging in on the main page I just get a white screen. Had to incognito around it due to cookies and now I’ll avoid the main page.

[photon]

Yeah going to have to try some more drastic things tomorrow like rebooting or some database table maintenance. Put up a notice with some URLs to hopefully help a bit.

[Johnny Makarov]

Maybe have everyone who visits here sign up instead of having guests. That would save the Moscow Mitch problems.

I seriously thought I broke CP after thanking that Putin ass Clown pic.

That and I thought the Flames won the Draft Lottery and it crashed the servers.

[photon]

Oh hey it loaded for me this morning! Though it still takes a lot longer than normal.

So that makes me suspect what the issue is.

I think it's due to the weird bot activity on the Ukraine thread. There was a couple of bots in Hong Kong that would scrape that thread constantly generating multiple requests per second. No idea why. Very weird. To be honest I was a bit scared of doing anything overt about it and drawing the ire of nation state actors or something lol.

Anyway when I started digging into what exactly the database was doing all the time there was a lot of activity in the guest table where the forum keeps track of guests (which makes sense as the bots showed up as guests and not official bots).

On the front page there's that part that says "Total guests that have visited the forum in the last 24 hours: 307,310", which I think runs a query on the guest table which kept getting longer and longer until finally the query started to break.

I "broke" the feature they were using to scrape (print thread URL) and the # of requests from those IPs have gone way down, though it still seems to be coming once per second or so. I could ban the IPs as well though that'd be more obvious.

So I think as the guest table naturally gets cleaned up speed on that page will improve. If I get a chance I will see if I can find an obvious query to dump some records from the table without breaking things.

So weird.

[photon]

I dumped out all guest entries from those IPs in the guest table and it sped it up immensely for me.

Will have to keep an eye to see if they start using the normal show thread to scrape with (harder to parse), if so might have to start banning IPs.

Oh wait be right back there's a couple of guys in a track suits at my door.

[KootenayFlamesFan]

Works great for me now. Awesome job Pho

[Finger Cookin]

The way it was working yesterday I thought we traded Iginla again. Thanks for your work in getting this up and running again as always, photon!