Error Message

[Big23]

Hi, in the last 2-3 days I often get the following error while browsing TSF:

Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.4.29 (Unix) mod_hive/6.6 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 Server at thesilverforum.com Port 443

 

Already cleared my cache and deleted cookies... Is it just me or is something not working properly?

BR Big23

[Rat]

It’s been happening to me too. Assumed it was down for maintenance but could be wrong. 

[sixgun]

It happens quite often - It usually corrects by refreshing the browser a couple of times and if not i come back in a few minutes and it has sorted. i just read it can sometimes be corrected by deleting browser cookies. i have not tried that, i am happy to leave it a few minutes and try again.

There we go it just happened.

Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

---

Apache/2.4.29 (Unix) mod_hive/6.6 OpenSSL/1.0.1e-fips mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 Server at thesilverforum.com Port 443

 

i refreshed a couple of times. i tried tried getting on the forum on Explorer - i was on Firefox. i got the forum and immediately refreshed Firefox and i got the forum there. It is one of the trials of using TSF.

[SILVERFINGER]

Yeah its been happening to me also, the popularity of the site is killing it 

[kimchi]

2 minutes ago, SILVERFINGER said:

Yeah its been happening to me also, the popularity of the site is killing it 

I get it quite regularly and often find it's when the Mods/Admin have been fiddling with things or tidying up/moving threads/posts.

[fehk2001]

maybe you need diamond membership to avoid all these problem 

[Xander]

Same here.

[Norskgeld]

Must be the Russians!!!

[kimchi]

503s very often today here.

[Mark43]

24 minutes ago, kimchi said:

503s very often today here.

Totally. Took me 10 minutes to get on earlier. Still playing up when switching between individual forums.

[kimchi]

2 minutes ago, Mark43 said:

Totally. Took me 10 minutes to get on earlier. Still playing up when switching between individual forums.

It's a real pain when you compose a post and it doesn't go through.

Is @ChrisSIlver aware?

[SILVERFINGER]

Yeah its been driving me nuts, did a long winded reply to someone and then just sodding errors, forgotten now what it was all about.

[Roy]

The forum has become unusable ?

[HelpingHands]

 

@ChrisSIlver

[augur]

I think this forum is becoming too popular. @ChrisSIlver might have to invest into some more server capacity or limit the size of the uploads (images)

[Amazing]

Server is over capacity, that's why. Cheapest solution would be to limit the amount of images being uploaded.

[ChrisSilver]

I recently upgraded the size of the hard drives, (about a week ago) it’s a massive 90GB but I am pretty sure that isn’t the reason the page isn’t loading, it will be due to too many people accessing the forum for the size of processors and ram, however as I have 2 cores and 5GB of ram I would expect that the reason some of you are facing pages not loading is due to spam traffic stealing the bandwidth.

I will speak to the web host to see if the traffic looks like usual traffic or if it might be spam traffic as if it’s spam,, if it’s spam then we should be able to filter it or by paying for a better cloud fare service. Or maybe upgrading the ram or processors also.

If it is standard traffic then I will see what needs to be upgraded, either the RAM or the processor cores, or both and upgrade accordingly. 

Currently away with limited internet but I will try to get this done as soon as possible.

Please rest assure that any upgrades to the servers that are needed will be done and paid for, it isn’t an issue of not paying, I am currently paying siteground a lot for high quality dedicated servers so these issues really shouldn’t be happening.

It doesn’t help that I am not around that much on the forum to notice the recent issues, this is due to my current work.

Apologies for the in incoinvience and I appreciate your patience as I try to fix these problems as soon as I can. 

[SILVERFINGER]

I have my own military forum on what used to be freeforums for the past 8 years, believe me the minor problems we are having here don't phase me at all compared to the year long balls ups that happened on mine when they were taken over by a new host.

[ChrisSilver]

I have emailed the web host and asked if they can have a look at the traffic to see if it’s genuine traffic or not and if it is what exactly needs to be upgraded, RAM or processor cores or both. 

[fehk2001]

Let’s give Chris some support .....

thanks chris 

[ChrisSilver]

From the report that the web host has provided, as far as I can tell (though I am not a developer) everything seems to be just a normal load on the servers.

The web hosts reply:

”In such case upgrading the CPU cores should allow more CPU consuming tasks to be performed, however, note that issues such as slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries etc. would make the CPU upgrade pointless, as the resources would still be exceeded.”

I have increased the cores on the severs, please let me know if these seems to fix the situation / at least improve it. I can increase further if needed, if that doesn’t improve anything then I will hire the web developer to look though the logs etc.

[kimchi]

Thanks Chris!

[Big23]

@ChrisSIlver I don't think it is hardware based (as long as there is no broken part) as the use of the forum shouldn't produce that much load. Even with lots of pics it should be no problem.

Do you know the server configuration concerning web/application server and database server? Are these separate machines or just virtual server in a datacenter? Is there some kind of load balancing in between? To me it looks like an internal communication or accessibility problem. Or it's a bug/configuration problem in the forum software?

[MancunianStacker]

Happens on my iPhone quite a bit too

[Big23]

In the last view days the forum worked quite well. Something seems to have helped