Server Issues Corrected?
To anyone who has had problems connecting to SurveyorConnect.com or BeerLeg.com, I think we may have resolved it. After some intense digging around over the last few days, we found some DNS-related issues that could have been causing problems for some people. So if you have had issues getting here, whether it be ridiculous loading times or not able to connect at all, we invite you to try again.
Please keep in mind that because of the way the site is built, it will always be a bit slow loading, especially upon your initial visit. This tree-style structure and the way the software was written means that it is loading a whole bunch of data at once.
Anyway, let's see how this latest round of adjustments fares. Anyone that has had problems connecting in the past, please reply here to let us know if you notice any difference and how much of a difference. If we continue to have problems with load times, we'll likely upgrade our hosting plan to throw another CPU core at the site to help with that.
Thank you!
So far today it's much better!
Thanks!
It seems faster today.
Andy
Night and day!
The site does seem a bit faster, but the initial load of a thread still lags 10 seconds or more for me.
My network runs BIND with DNSsec.
dig I surveyorconnect.com - Query time: 12 msec (obviously cached)
From Southcentral Alaska, ping to surveyorconnect.com averages 110ms, which is about the same as Bluehost (google.com=55, google.ca=49).
Traceroute times out after 30 hops, but the latency is spread out evenly from my ISP to Comcast Seattle ibone (hop 7, 50ms)to Comcast Il. trunk, to liquidweb, where it asterisks hops 16-30.
I can send you the output of whatever netcat, dig, or curl commands you'd like to see run.
It does appear to be faster from my vantage point.
I didn't have connection problems but things were slow coming up. It does seem to be better now.
it is definitely much faster here.
Much better.
It is faster. It still has the hang up at about 1 second but it resumes loading again much faster. Before it would hang for 10 seconds or more.
Thanks everyone for the feedback. It looks like we've killed the biggest bug we've had since day one.
As I've mentioned before, load times will always have a bit of a pause, as much as 10 seconds, mainly on the home page. This is to be expected from this software and will vary depending on your connection, the hops between you and this server and how much traffic we are experiencing at that moment.
This software pulls a ridiculous number of MySQL database requests on the home page, which is the biggest issue with the pause. This is because it's not just loading the thread titles (which IMHO is all it really should be pulling), it's also pulling the content from each first post in order to enable the little comment bubbles on the thread titles that gives you a preview. I've often thought about finding a way to eliminate that feature, but I end up surprised by the number of people using it.
I may have to start a little poll to see if anyone still uses it...
