Unreliability...

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Fri Mar 05, 2010 7:24 pm

testing meta refresh with this post, will edit with any findings

When trying to mark the topics of forum #3 read this is the head generated.

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<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;url=viewforum.php?f=3">

here is the head for a page causing errors that do not even trigger firefox from showing the allow button when it prevents the redirect in the first place. The page is any one in which you go to viewtopic.php and the type is newest post...so basically clicking on the newest post button generates this kind of head.

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<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http&#58;//tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=139103#139103">

aside form being not formatted to separate lines i will do that and compare the refresh meta tags below...

mark forum read:

Code: Select all

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3;url=viewforum.php?f=3">

view newest post:

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<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http&#58;//tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=139103#139103">

both are trying to redirect to another URI but the broken one has a zero second delay, which gives no time for the page itself to load before the browser tries to redirect, while the working one gives at least 3 seconds.

not sure the space between the delay and URI is needed either, but that is one little glitch in the code that could cause other problems if the database is trying to access on those pages that should be redirected and don't have anytime to output anything before someone moves away form that page during the refresh redirect.

a simple scan of all refresh meta tags to find the ones that are under 3 seconds delay, and make them match should help see if that fixes anything. maybe something just minor, and i don't have a running phpBB currently to check the "newest" section in viewtopic.php..nvm yes i do and know it makes several calls to locations in the db that could be hanging things up with the delay set to zero because without looking at the code it has to figure out based on your session key when the last time you visited was since phpBB for this version does not have inline post tracking.

matter of fact here is what generates the redirect....or should be close to it for this version...

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redirect&#40;"viewtopic.$phpEx?" . POST_POST_URL . "=$post_id#$post_id"&#41;;

maybe nothing big, again but one of the glitches going on recently. i will run a scan and see where any other meta refresh commands are and present a list of files that may also have the corrupt zero second delay in them in a few minutes.

List of files containing the meta refresh string:

admin_cal_ug_auth.php
admin_db_utilities.php
admin_forumauth.php
functions.php
functions_post.php
groupcp.php
index.php
modcp.php
posting.php
privmsg.php
usercp_activate.php
usercp_email.php
usercp_register.php
usercp_sendpasswd.php
viewforum.php
viewtopic.php
viewtopic_backup.php

functions.php specifically has the "<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=" which is causing that problem...though not sure exactly what is going on unless TGD was moved from one type of server to another say from a linux server to windows because functions.php is using that line for what is commented as being

// Redirect via an HTML form for PITA webservers
if (@preg_match('/Microsoft|WebSTAR|Xitami/', getenv('SERVER_SOFTWARE')))

love how they identify windows servers as Pain In The Ass webservers.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Fri Mar 05, 2010 10:13 pm

Still getting timeout errors, also 'thread does not exist' however the post action didn't actually fail, only the response.

I have noticed that with the general slow-down that it isn't clearing the 'read' flags on every thread I read, only the most recent. It doesn't even always manage when I post to a thread.

-Crissa

neilhuiz · Post by **neilhuiz** » Fri Mar 05, 2010 11:52 pm

Interestingly, the server did get moved from one OS to another, but both servers were Windows. The previous server was WS08, the current is WS03. That means we went from IIS7 to IIS6, which may have caused some undesireable consequences.

Data Vampire · Post by **Data Vampire** » Sat Mar 06, 2010 1:08 am

I got the following error when I submitted a post.

Could not connect to smtp host : 10060 : A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

However the post was successful.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Sat Mar 06, 2010 3:12 am

Just got a

General Error

Could not connect to smtp host : 10060 : A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

with the 1 thread didn't exit text at the bottom.

Got it while trying to preview and when trying to submit without previewing.

Zherog wrote:
Parthenon wrote:And is it just me or is the load time, even when up and running normally, about 3-5 times longer than normal?
Nifty also had been getting progressively worse as far as performance goes, and for a few hours yesterday our new host's entire system was offline. My hunch is the degrading performance is tied to the offline-related downtime, but I don't have any actual evidence for that. I'll keep an eye on overall performance.

Just been using the standard status bar (well, actually the Extended Statusbar addon) to time my browsing the forums in a really unscientific test, and while I was moving from page to page only opening one page at a time, the load time started off as 5 1/2 seconds- not unmanageable.

However, the load time started increasing. 10 seconds, then 17, and going up to the longest load time of 56 seconds. With a 10 Mb/s connection. Somethings really not right at that point.

However, suddenly it seemed to speed up again and vary between 5-10 seconds.

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sat Mar 06, 2010 4:57 am

The board is really starting to chug, I've been getting the same errors Parthenon has gotten, and the previous error is showing up again.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Mar 06, 2010 8:20 am

Yeah, the full error is:

Error Message wrote:Could not connect to smtp host : 10060 : A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.

But the post stills gets made. But the boards are sloooooow.

-Username17

Post by **Zherog** » Mon Mar 08, 2010 7:21 pm

Fuckity fucking fuck!

My apologies (again). We had DNS issues. Neil did his voodoo (which I think involved kicking somebody from tech support in the balls) and got things up and running.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:25 pm

Thanks for all the effort you're going through to keep the site online.

How feasible would it be to make a page for the next week or two to describe whats happening to the site? So if the site goes down and I see the woman with the backpack I don't worry that the domain name has been sold or something.

Weird problem I'm having: the thread pages don't stop loading. They're currently still loading the page... about 5 minutes in. Takes about 10 seconds to start loading the page, 5 to actually load it up, then more than 5 minutes doing absolutely nothing.

So far only one page has finished loading with a time of just under 5 minutes, and the thread lists are fine, but it keeps loading, and loading, and....

Not actually a problem, but it does seem pretty stupid and might be a sign of something else going wrong.

EDIT: It just started finishing loading normally. No idea why.

Just got another error when replying to a thread:

Could not connect to smtp host : 111 : Connection refused

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:31 pm

To the folks fixing the den, you have my utmost thanks. The Den basically just fell off the internet for me for the past week. Thank you for your hard work and dedication.

neilhuiz · Post by **neilhuiz** » Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:46 pm

Parthenon wrote:So far only one page has finished loading with a time of just under 5 minutes, and the thread lists are fine, but it keeps loading, and loading, and....

Not actually a problem, but it does seem pretty stupid and might be a sign of something else going wrong.

That is likely not the site's problem, but rather the loading of some resource. A page will claim to still be in the loading state until all images, scripts, etc. have been loaded. Do you see a broken image anywhere?

Hicks wrote:To the folks fixing the den, you have my utmost thanks. The Den basically just fell off the internet for me for the past week. Thank you for your hard work and dedication.

You are most welcome, Hicks.

Zherog wrote:My apologies (again). We had DNS issues. Neil did his voodoo (which I think involved kicking somebody from tech support in the balls) and got things up and running.

I have kicked one or more people in one or more balls, each of those one or more people being of one or more flavors of asshat extraordinaire. The results of the one or more kicks to one or more people is that we don't do business with them anymore. For those that are keeping score, we are now hosted by Blue Host, who have a very good track record for getting shit done.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Mon Mar 08, 2010 9:57 pm

neilhuiz wrote:That is likely not the site's problem, but rather the loading of some resource. A page will claim to still be in the loading state until all images, scripts, etc. have been loaded. Do you see a broken image anywhere?

No, I don't see anything missing. I only looked at a couple of the things it was loading on the status bar, and from what I can remember, one was status.icq, one was wizards.messageboard and the others were tgdmb.com. Hmmm... probably one was an avatar, one was obviously the icq status, but the others I have no idea. Anyway, as I edited in my post above, it seems to have worked itself out now.

The weird thing about it was that they had been loading for 4 minutes or so before I started typing up that post and continued loading for a minute or two after I posted the message, so up to around ten minutes. With a reliable 10Mb/s connection.

But thanks again for the judicious kicks in the balls.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Mar 09, 2010 8:04 am

I know I posted a couple of times earlier, but now the posts aren't showing up for me.

Also, not messing around or closing Firefox for a while logs me out of the Den now, despite it formerly letting me skip logging in for weeks at a stretch.

Edit: Also, I'm with Hicks. I was about to hit withdrawal due to people repeatedly asking questions that I really wanted to refer to the Denizens.

Thanks a ton for getting this place back up.

neilhuiz · Post by **neilhuiz** » Tue Mar 09, 2010 4:36 pm

Whenever the boards do a move from server to server, the session management can get sort of screwy. It should work itself out, but if it doesn't, I'll reset everyone's sessions in the database to get us back to a clean state.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Tue Mar 09, 2010 9:14 pm

New error:

Could not connect to smtp host : 111 : Connection refused

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Tue Mar 09, 2010 11:29 pm

Yeah, just got the same

General Error

Could not connect to smtp host : 111 : Connection refused

error yet again when posting.

Second time it's happened.

shadzar · Post by **shadzar** » Wed Mar 10, 2010 3:58 am

seems to be working fine now...

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:12 pm

I've gotten this one as well:

Could not connect to smtp host : 111 : Connection refused

It appears to have no meaningful effect in the main forum. The post still gets posted, it just doesn't send you there to look it over (but you can navigate there yourself). It seems that when it comes up after sending a PM that the PM is not sent, or at least, does not appear in my sentbox.

The short answer is that there seems to be more people wanting Kitchensink Fantasy Role Playing, and more importantly more people willing to contribute to it than Black Forest. I would not have been able to get aWoD to the "nearly finished" state it is in now without all the contributions and brain storming from others. So likely, KFRP is the next project. Further delaying both Black Forest and Fantastic.

I rather predict that KFRP will end up in the 300-400k word range. But a lot of that can and should be High Adventure and Culture Focus articles, which are quick to write and require a lot less research than a "...by Night" article does.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Mar 10, 2010 1:15 pm

I noticed several more posts from this thread are gone. I posted something here yesterday around 10:00 AM or so.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Wed Mar 10, 2010 7:56 pm

Frank wrote:It appears to have no meaningful effect in the main forum. The post still gets posted, it just doesn't send you there to look it over (but you can navigate there yourself). It seems that when it comes up after sending a PM that the PM is not sent, or at least, does not appear in my sentbox.

It's because - if I recall correctly - it's in your outbox until the recipient reads it.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Tue Mar 30, 2010 10:19 pm

Just an update, I'm still getting:

www.tgdmb.com wrote:General Error

Could not connect to smtp host : 111 : Connection refused.

when I post. Still posts the message without issue, but that error kills the redirect that normally comes up after a post.

Edit: It's not all of the time, this post went through without incident.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Wed Mar 31, 2010 12:36 am

The smtp post goes through on threads that have subscribers. It's the little warning that says there's a problem with the subscription eMail system.