Hey Guest!
Offline
Some of you have undoubtedly noticed that the site has been painfully slow at times recently. After working with my data center, we've identified what appears to have been causing the problem.
The web server was repeatedly reaching its maximum capacity for handling incoming connections. Interestingly, the server itself had plenty of available CPU power and memory. The problem wasn't a lack of computing resources, but rather that too many connections were being tied up.
One possible contributor is something known as slow HTTP requests. Normally, when you visit a website, your browser sends a request, the server processes it, and the connection is released for other visitors. However, some automated clients can open connections and then send their requests extremely slowly, sometimes deliberately leaving them incomplete. These connections can remain occupied for extended periods, consuming the web server's available capacity without using much CPU power.
My data center discovered that Apache, the software serving our forum pages, was repeatedly reaching its maximum worker limit. I had them install additional protections that place time limits on how long slow or incomplete requests can hold connections open.
We don't know whether this traffic was caused by poorly behaved automated crawlers or something more deliberate, but these protections should help prevent such connections from interfering with legitimate visitors.
Thanks for your patience while we worked through this!
Basil
The web server was repeatedly reaching its maximum capacity for handling incoming connections. Interestingly, the server itself had plenty of available CPU power and memory. The problem wasn't a lack of computing resources, but rather that too many connections were being tied up.
One possible contributor is something known as slow HTTP requests. Normally, when you visit a website, your browser sends a request, the server processes it, and the connection is released for other visitors. However, some automated clients can open connections and then send their requests extremely slowly, sometimes deliberately leaving them incomplete. These connections can remain occupied for extended periods, consuming the web server's available capacity without using much CPU power.
My data center discovered that Apache, the software serving our forum pages, was repeatedly reaching its maximum worker limit. I had them install additional protections that place time limits on how long slow or incomplete requests can hold connections open.
We don't know whether this traffic was caused by poorly behaved automated crawlers or something more deliberate, but these protections should help prevent such connections from interfering with legitimate visitors.
Thanks for your patience while we worked through this!
Basil
