Forum crash

Hi guys, we are having trouble loading our forum. The topics won't open and we keep getting a "forum maintenance" message. I am wondering if our site is crashing because of excessive traffic?

We are a Star Wars forum and the full trailer for the new movie just got released. Is there anything we can do fix this? Thanks!

Edit: here is our forum http://reylo.skyforum.net

When I visited your forum and read some topics, I did not encounter any issues as a guest. Is this only happening to logged in members? Also is this only occurring for certain topics?

One more thing: When you say we, who is we?

@SLGray thanks for your reply. I'm an admin there, the mods and I have been emailing since we can't communicate at the forum. We're all having the same problem. The topics are loading on and off, and there seems to be a delay. I was able to make a post to let people know we are experiencing technical problems just now.

The area with most traffic is here:
http://reylo.skyforum.net/t506-the-last-jedi-trailers

So it is only that one topic?

SLGray wrote:So it is only that one topic?

No, all the topics I've tried. We have a "mods only" area that only 6 people have access to, and I'm having trouble loading topics there as well.

This is definitely the worst one to load though: http://reylo.skyforum.net/f6-the-last-jedi-and-episode-ix-speculation

The last half of the page is not even loading for me, intermittently.
Do you think it's because we need more space or memory or whatever? (I don't know the lingo, am not technical, sorry. XD)

Memory would be on the user's side (computer) not forum.

Space will be called storage, but you can only purchase more storage for attachments and the gallery.

SLGray wrote:Memory would be on the user's side (computer) not forum.

Space will be called storage, but you can only purchase more storage for attachments and the gallery.

Ah, got it. What do you think is going on?

We usually have around 30 users online at a given time, and today we went up to 89 at one time, and everyone was trying to access the topic to discuss the new movie trailer (link above). Could that be why things are so slow and is there a way to fix it? It's getting better now, but still really slow and not loading properly.

It could be that this is causing a strain on the server that your forum is on. Try this: move the topic to a section where only a small amount of users can see it and check if it opens then.

You need to understand that topic can be viewed by members and guests.

SLGray wrote:You need to understand that topic can be viewed by members and guests.

Yup, I know. We have members only areas and staff only areas.

We can move it and see, but honestly even the members only ares are not loading well right now.

Thanks for your help.

Ok then do not move it.

SLGray wrote:Ok then do not move it.

Thanks, we are all set now that the traffic slowed. I will mark this topic as solved.

So it was the heavy traffic causing the issue?

Hello today we had some maintenance in the datacenter This should be over now and your forum should be working fine again.

We are sorry for any problems you may have had.

From the Forumotion Team

SLGray wrote:So it was the heavy traffic causing the issue?

Yup, pretty sure it was the heavy traffic. Everybody was trying to post their reactions to the Star Wars trailer at the same time, right when it was released, plus a bunch of guests were also trying to access the site to view said reactions.

The whole forum froze for some time, and topics wouldn't load. Then there was a lag of about 20 minutes for posts to appear, and we got duplicate posts - some users got their posts duplicated 7 times or more. Check out this page and the one before:

http://reylo.skyforum.net/t506p575-the-last-jedi-trailers

APE wrote:Hello today we had some maintenance in the datacenter This should be over now and your forum should be working fine again.

We are sorry for any problems you may have had.

From the Forumotion Team

Thanks for your reply. Honestly I don't know if your maintenance is related to the issue we had. The issue was yesterday from around 9PM to midnight Central US time. It started immediately after the release of the full trailer for the upcoming Star Wars movie, which brought triple our usual traffic to our Star Wars forum. Once the traffic dropped the problems resolved. We haven't had any issues at all today, which is when you did your maintenance, correct?

We are concerned because we can expect even more traffic once the new movie is released on December 14th 2017. We don't want the site to crash.

Do you have any suggestions about what we can do?

Your forum is not crashing. It is just lagging because of the heavy load on it.

Our servers are designed to handle a siginificant amount of traffic, of course if you have hundreds or thousands of visitors at one time you can expect the forum to slow down, it may even a safety measure for the server itself, see there are many forums on one server, so if one site creates such a heavy load that the server crashes, then a number of forums will go down not just yours. As such, there may be a safety measure in there that if the servers get bombarded with requests from one forum, it may slow down that forum or try to only accept so many requests at once, so that it can cope with the huge traffic demand while note crashing.

You also need to keep in mind, when this happens the server is not only dealing with the huge traffic from your site, but all traffic to other forums on that server as well.

I think your site freezing and lagging was the servers way of coping with the huge demand it was presented with from all the traffic and it may have simply just stopped accepting requests or something to prevent an all out crash of the server.

I do not know all of this for sure, I am just theorizing, I do not know all that much about how servers work so.

-Brandon

also note that our datacenter dose work at funny times of day / night and is mostly when things are not so busy but now and then they need to do some updates and fix things so this will slow things down a lot as they are inputting data to the system that in it's self slows things down there end so it will show on your end as well so if your site is really busy at that time it will slow right down.

I hope your forum is back to the 100% now thou.

kind regards.

APE

APE wrote:also note that our datacenter dose work at funny times of day / night and is mostly when things are not so busy but now and then they need to do some updates and fix things so this will slow things down a lot as they are inputting data to the system that in it's self slows things down there end so it will show on your end as well so if your site is really busy at that time it will slow right down.

I hope your forum is back to the 100% now thou.

kind regards.

APE

Thanks for your reply. Things have been back to normal. ^^