Intermittent Access

[Scarlet Pimple]

Scarlet is on the windup Manfer. C.mon, it's now all in fun.

[old caley girl]

Just got a wierd message when I clicked into a topic saying FORBIDDEN in large letters. Ok when I tried a second time. Never seen this before.

[+Fraz]

Hi

Was getting a page (copied & pasted below) from Cloudflare everytime I tried to access the site from around 5.30pm till about 6.30pm today, also tried from my smartphone but the same thing happened.

Edit - forgot to add that if you click on the link after 'if you believe that the website is live'

it does to take you to CTO.

Website Offline, No Cached Version Available

The website you are trying to access is currently offline. The most likely causes are the server is down for maintenance, there may be a network problem, or the site may be experiencing excessive load.

The site uses CloudFlare in order to help keep it online when the server is down by serving cached copies of pages where they are available. Unfortunately, a cached copy of the page you requested is not available, but you may be able to reach other cached pages on the site.

If you continue to receive this error after you believe the site is back online, you can retry a live version of the site.

• ? 2011 CloudFlare, Inc.

Edited December 6, 2011 by fraz

[old caley girl]

Same as fraz.

[PullMyFinger]

I've been having problems connecting to the 'net in Forres from a couple of addresses. Not just to CTO though, is there a network problem causing all these issues? Where is the server?

[tm4tj]

Behind the baseline

[CaleyD]

Please don't feel like you are being ignored if we don't answer or give feedback every day.

Scotty and I are monitoring the situation and appreciate the feedback, so keep the information coming. It's important that we know (from your feedback) when and what kind of glitches are being experienced.

One thought is that it's nothing more than the seasonal increase in web use that happens this time of year when people spend more time inside online due to dark nights and poor weather. This is backed up by the fact that we are seeing higher than expected numbers of site visitors at certain times of day.

[CaleyD]

I've been having problems connecting to the 'net in Forres from a couple of addresses. Not just to CTO though, is there a network problem causing all these issues? Where is the server?

Servers - Because we use a cloud service the site is served from 13 different locations.

London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Newark, Chicago, Ashburn, Dallas, San Jose, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong & Singapore....with new locations being added on an almost monthly basis at the moment.

Under normal circumstances you will be served pages from the closest server to your viewing location.

[PullMyFinger]

Cheers Don, probably traffic then. :irritated:

[bigjohn]

Just experienced the big "forbidden" ?when I tried to log on. It was fine when I retried.

[Scotty]

Just experienced the big "forbidden" ?when I tried to log on. It was fine when I retried.

thats a quirk - nothing we can do about that. Its basically a miscommunication between the server and your browser based on web traffic so you get whats called a 403 error ... normally that just looks like any other browsing error, but we defined a page to be shown as there are some users/IP addresses that are actually forbidden. hitting refresh button or F5 key will normally clear it.

[Scotty]

OK. If you tried in the last half-hour you will have experienced a longer term outage than recently.

Everything on our server spiked and we had to turn the site off for a while and reboot our VPS server. Turns out there was another user on the same node as us causing huge traffic spikes and it wasnt our fault at all.

Although we are on a VPS server, which means we have a dedicated amount of memory, cpu and other resources, and basically operate in a bubble in terms of the hosting, we can still be affected by other users who cause the physical box to be under great stress .....

We have been assured by our provider that things are returning to normal - the other user had services switched off until they can be resolved - but we will continue to monitor it and fire emails off to them when we notice any issues.

I would just note, that we were able to use your reports of outages or Cloudflare messages as an indication of how often you guys had been experiencing issues, so the reports did come in handy.

We hope you dont have to post more of them, but if you do encounter an issue, please keep them coming.

[bigjohn]

it wasn't a problem or an issue Scotty, just letting you know in case it was relevant. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

[Scotty]

no worries, we didnt take it as a criticism. As Don mentioned above, even if we dont reply in the thread, we do check out any messages about access issues and there have been a few more recently ..... if we know about them it makes it easier to check the relevant logs or to take it up with our provider .... so although we hope they dont occur too often, keep the reports coming when they do ....

Its a much more cohesive argument to be able to say "we had "x" number of users in UK reporting a problem, it was also experienced in Canada and Australia ... It happened at "this time". etc". and we actually used this one today when the initial response was that we were causing the spike ourselves .... a little bit of extra info from our side caused the provider to check further and find the real culprit !

[Scarlet Pimple]

The Scarlet fella is reporting a major improvement in his access times for this site and he has not encountered another scarlet warning message. Just thought you would like to know. The posting of comments on the threads seem to be much quicker too.

You could also use SP's experiences as further ammunition with your Associates since he invariably posts either late at night in the U.K. or early morning there. Meaning that it can hardly be your site experiencing high volumes as the cause of the problem-- when he experienced the warnings at say (for example) 11am Canada / 7p.m. U.K or 10p.m. Canada/ 6a.m in U.K.

Haven't been on for a while since my gout is giving me gip; but great site, chaps.

Daddy Pimpernell