Did the Website go Down?

Backups get taken daily - and the database is now so large that the site stops responding for a few minutes until it completes.

The time was chosen to be approximately the low point of daily traffic on the site.

The following chart shows the number of sessions (visits) for each hour of the day, with times in GMT:



You'll see that the quietest time of the day is approximately 5AM GMT, which is 15:00 (aka 3PM) on the east coast of Australia.

So as annoying as it is for it to be unavailable in the middle of the day here in Australia - I figured it was the least disruptive time of the day overall when we consider the international audience of the site.

 

I wonder if it would help if it was something like 2:45PM or 3:15PM?

I presume not - since you were likely already on the site when it went down?

 

Curiously, it has been faster than ever for me of late! ZooChat is hosted on the east coast of the US and I'm in Australia - so there's a lot of network between me at the site, but it's still quite snappy.

It could be local network congestion at your end or a problem with your internet? I assume other sites have been functioning as normal?

 

I looked at some of the logs and analytics for the site and server and I did note some anomalies where there seemed to be some timeouts occurring - with one happening around 4pm my time, which is around when lintworm reported the issue above.

I'm not sure exactly what is causing the problems at this point and it's not typically an easy thing to identify the root cause.

I'll continue to investigate - but it may require a server rebuild and upgrade to reduce the number of timeouts occurring.

 

Happening to me as well over the last few days (in New Zealand). For short periods through the day pages will be really slow to load or there will be host error messages.

 

I can see the errors - but I haven't yet worked out what is causing them.





Those times are Sydney time (UTC+10), and the first of the two peaks corresponds to the time you mentioned the issue.

 

It continues to be a problem.

The purple lines below represent the number of errors visitors have received over the past 24 hours (Sydney time).



I've been trying to analyse the root cause of the issue - I suspect there's too much bot traffic on the site, so I have tried implementing some firewall rules to block the worst of them to see if that helps.

I need to upgrade the site to new infrastructure - but I can't do that until I get the software upgraded, and unfortunately that's a few months away, so I'm going to have to ask everyone to be a bit patient for now.