Sorry for the slowness.
Still troubleshooting; the site has looked down, but it’s really just incredibly slow.
I thought yesterday was Monday?!.. What a day - apologies for the forum problems.
- Currently we're back up, minus private messages Note: We still have all the private messages, but that service seemed to be going crazy using up CPU, so we've paused it temporarily
I already wondered where my pm’s are… Maybe you can make them available again minus the posting functionality. That 's indeed the part that was very slow on my clients, too. Good you’ve found the culprit.
We’ll get PMs restored as soon as possible, but realistically that’s probably a day or two away; sorry about that delay. In short, I’m still not confident that we’ve figured out the root cause. I’ve set up some new monitoring, and will be looking through the performance logs for the past month to see if there’s a pattern (it does seem like it, based on the slowdown we had noted the previous week, which then went away). I’ll keep everyone updated in this thread, and feel free to ping me with questions.
Thanks for getting right at it, Chris. I was on the Forum and wasn’t aware of the slow down till you posted it.
OK, I’m about to reenable PMs. I think we’ll be ok on performance after making some changes. Worst case, we’ll have to re-disable PMs and do some more analysis.
The PMs are working faster now. Still not at the speed of light, but ok. And there used to be a two-line instructional text that went right through what you typed (or through the PMs). That’s fortunately gone. Thanks!
Thanks Mark! And yes, it is nice to have that frozen header out of the way now. We’re continuing to work on some additional tweaks to speed things up.
Ooh, wow, you even implemented the captcha when posting a message (?). What happened is the following: I used my tablet to reply to a message. When I pressed submit (or just before it, I cannot remember) I got a captcha. I think I filled it out correctly, but then I got the following error message:
“Cannot connect reCaptcha. Please try again.”
I pressed OK or a similar button and the error disappeared. I could press OK again and I got another captcha. I filled this out again and the message was posted.
I didn’t get it when I posted a message using my desktop PC.
P.S. Error. I do get the captcha now on my PC, I did get it when I posted this message on my desktop.
Hi Mark - I’ve removed the captcha from posts, it was there unintentionally. Thanks for letting me know, and please keep them coming.
OK, I think we’ve found and fixed the underlying problem that was causing our performance (slowness) problems. Our Private Message wordpress plugin was looking for a file that wasn’t there (inadvertently deleted at some point, oops) and now we’ve restored that file. This chart shows our errors before vs after the fix.
Thanks, Chris, you’re doing great work. The PM functionality seems indeed faster now. And very useful that you keep those statistics.
As far as the captchas are concerned, it’s always a trade-off between security and user-friendliness. I’m glad user-friendliness wins here (a captcha for every post was a bit over the top IMHO). I have no problem deleting the occasional spam message now and then, especially now I know how to block the spammer. (And now I’m thinking of it, it might well be that the last spammer was not a bot that by-passed the captcha, but a human being: he/she used the same account for all messages. For a human it’s of course much easier to fill out the captcha, but also more time-consuming. So I think it won’t happen too often.)