Site Stalling

[NickT]

I used the site pretty heavy the last two days. PM's, Downloading finished works, Uploading a mix, saying Hi to Noobs.

I wonder if it's a certain time of day. I didn't have a single stall.

Weird! 

[napoleonboot]

what browser Nick?

[NickT]

I've been using Brave.

https://brave.com/



 

[napoleonboot]

Me too, but it stalls a lot for me!

[Gerk]

It's really hard to pin down in terms of reproducing the issues, that's the problem.  I use the site and rarely get stalls but others have them very often.  I know what is causing the stalls (PHP sessions and the heavy handed way that SMF forum software tries to manage them), but there's really not a fix for it aside from rewriting sections of the forum software.  Due to changes in the way they handle some things updating to the 2.x version of the forum software would mean breaking the collaboration module -- they would need a full rewrite to work with that software, and if I'm going to spend time doing a full rewrite then I'm going to handle things differently so that we're not stuck like this again in the future.  Have some good ideas for how to do that, it's just a matter of having the time to do it.  Since covid hit I've been busier than ever. 

I'm an IT/DevOps guy for my day job and with all the work from home I've been up to my eyeballs keeping up with supporting both the company I work for and my IT clients.  I'm also an avid gardener so the next couple of weeks all my spare time is needed to get all my plants and such in ... the timing on those can't wait.  But after that I plan on spending some quality time and getting a proper solution written and in place.

Stand by folks ... there will be good things in the near future

[napoleonboot]

Hi Gerk, I am IT guy aswell, but these days a manager. Years back I was a developer, but not PHP, rather C++ and Java. If I cant help let me know.

I know others are IT people, maybe some have the right skills to help

George

[Gerk]

Hi George ... thanks, but it's not so much the right skills, it's more that we've pushed this software many years past when it should have been retired.  SMF 1.x (what we're running) shouldn't even be capable of running in modern versions of PHP.  The only reason it's still hobbling along is that I found an unofficial hack that added in some stuff to give it backwards compatibility that I added to it.

If you haven't done so already try forcibly clearing your cookies and cache that's related to this site.  Since I did that with the last round of fixes the freezes have been very rare for me.

I also tried to see if it triggers after downloading files and I don't have that issue either, so I would suggest to try that if you haven't already gbm and see if that helps on that front.

[napoleonboot]

I cleared cookies and had improvements for maybe 1 or 2 days, and then it came back.

[Gerk]

Hmm ok.  How many cookies does the site give you?  I think the specific error here is that there is some race conditions between the cookie and the PHP session and when those happen everything stops dead until the default timeout (which has to be higher than normal because we have to allow for large file uploads).   I've seen multiple cookies sometimes as well which makes for a larger risk of this kind of deadlock.