Help with forum crashing due to heavy traffic

Hi everyone, I'm writing because we have a real problem at our forum (http://reylo.skyforum.net) with connectivity/loading speed since yesterday. We are a Star Wars forum and the new Star Wars movie premiered yesterday in the U.S. for the press, and will premiere on December 14th for general audiences.

We typically get around 40 visitors per day, and our highest number of visitors was 85. As of today, we're getting around 80 visitors at any given time and the highest number of visitors went up to 118 today. The forum has been super slow, and at times it won't load at all. We're getting a "Maintenance 504" error message, or the page will just get stuck while loading and a gray screen will appear. Also posts don't get posted while this loading issue is going on, or they get duplicated and posted >6 times.

We've had this problem before whenever something big happens in the Star Wars fandom. When the first full trailer for the new movie was released in October we had a similar problem, and I posted about it in this thread: https://help.forumotion.com/t154376-forum-crash#1058572

I understand that we're not able to purchase more storage, but I'm wondering if there is another solution here? Would purchasing more storage for attachments and the gallery be useful?

The concern is that we are getting a lot of new members and more and more visitors each day. If the forum keeps crashing over the next week because of the expected increase in traffic I'm concerned we could start to lose members.

Thanks so much in advance.

-Lee

Edited to add:
This is what our forum maintenance message looks like. It only comes on when there are too many users online at once (more than 100):

Hello,

There is really nothing you or we can do about that. See your forum is on a server with many other forums and when your forum gets alot alot alot of traffic all at once, the server slows down your forum a bit to try prevent the whole server from crashing. The issue your having is simply our servers trying to cope with the increased number of requests it getting, while 128 at once may not seem like alot on its own, when you consider you could a couple hundred, maybe even thousands of forum on one server, all sending requests at once, it adds up. So under conditions the server is fine and can handle everything, now you suddenly get double the volume on just your forum, plus the normal requests of all the other forums and it can put a strain on the server. So to keep from crashing completely (which would mean not only your forum going down but hundrends, if not thousands of others on that server as well), it tries to cope by slowing down and limiting the number of requests it will accept at once or whatever in order to handle to prevent from crashing.

This is normal when traffic is severly heavy and there is really nothing you or we can do about this.

-Brandon

brandon_g wrote:Hello,

There is really nothing you or we can do about that. See your forum is on a server with many other forums and when your forum gets alot alot alot of traffic all at once, the server slows down your forum a bit to try prevent the whole server from crashing. The issue your having is simply our servers trying to cope with the increased number of requests it getting, while 128 at once may not seem like alot on its own, when you consider you could a couple hundred, maybe even thousands of forum on one server, all sending requests at once, it adds up. So under conditions the server is fine and can handle everything, now you suddenly get double the volume on just your forum, plus the normal requests of all the other forums and it can put a strain on the server. So to keep from crashing completely (which would mean not only your forum going down but hundrends, if not thousands of others on that server as well), it tries to cope by slowing down and limiting the number of requests it will accept at once or whatever in order to handle to prevent from crashing.

This is normal when traffic is severly heavy and there is really nothing you or we can do about this.

-Brandon

Hey Brandon - one thing that we have noticed is that our forum's ability to handle high volume of traffic seems to be expanding gradually. Back in October 2017 when we had a surge from the usual 30-40 users per day to 84 users all at once the forum had a pretty bad crash. In the past 2 days we've been able to manage 90-100 users without crashing (although traffic is delayed). We get in trouble when it's more than 100, and we went up to 128 this afternoon. Do you think the server might be adjusting to our traffic?

One thing we tried that helped was that we moved the most popular sub-forum (the movie spoilers discussion) to "members only" as opposed to publicly visible, and that drove our traffic down significantly. Still, we don't want to slow our growth. It's a dilemma at this point, lol.

Another question for you: do you think that buying more storage for images will help at all? Thanks!

Well it could be maybe, it could also be that other forums on the server are not as active at once today as they were a few months ago, which would mean the servers have more capacity to deal with. This is just an educated guess anyway, I know very little about how servers work to he honest, I just know the basics and that are safeguards in place most times.

And no I do not think buying more space for images would help as this has no bearing on the servers ability to accept requests or its request capacity.

A couple things you can try to do to help possibly increase the amount of users you can get away with is minimize the amount codes you have to those that are nessecary only, try to also minimize video posting and image usage as much as you can as all 3 of these things can increase the workload of the server. Especially codes more then anything because each code sends a request to the server in order to be pulled up and used, it does this each time on every page. This means instead of 1 user sending just one request per page, their browser could actually be sending 2 or 3 requests per page per user. So if you minimize codes, this may help a bit as well. Again this is just an educated guess on my part, but can not hurt to try it.

Hello @Lee Green

Sadly adding more storage space will not help anything at all the storage space is hosted outside of our servers and with an outside company.

The more you add to your site the slower it becomes.

We have to look at things like this our servers like Brandon said can slow down at really busy times but our systems can cope with this most of the time. Sadly our system has to do backup's to make sure your forum and al the forums on that server is safe.

Now we don't know when the system will do a backup but when this is being done it will make all forums slower on that server at that time so if your forum is really busy at the time of a server backup it will give you a warning on your screen as we would be taking data from your site at that time.

We understand this is a pain in the backside and we try and do our best to make sure you Don't get any down time and I'm sure this is not a problem most of the time.

Also our datacenter dose updates late at night and dose system dumps at night also

This is classed as Quiet times to them where ever they are in the world.

I know the system our end will reset at 12 midnight uk time and if you was doing some thing on your ACP it would send you back to the home page of the ACP and any data you may have changed at that time would not be saved.

Sadly there is very little we can do about this.

@Ape, thank you for that information.
Our solution was to move the sub-forum that is pulling most traffic and making it members-only. This has helped drive down our traffic. Thank you! I will mark this topic solved.