Trouble logging on...

[PatBlock]

I've been getting a lot of "Server too busy" errors recently, and have been unable to log on.
I know it gets busy during the worlds, but I've had to give up a few times over the last few days, seems unusually bad.

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[coomsey76]

Same as mate..... kept getting that message a lot last night when trying to post a reply!!

[Souwester]

I've had this on quite a few occasions over the last couple of days or so.

[Deepscrew]

Just getting hammered with traffic...not alot you can do at this time of year!

[ferret]

We have been bombarded by Chinese visitors that is why, if this happens just wait 5 minutes or so and try again, when you keep trying to post again or login again after you see this message you are actually making things worse by trying time after time as you increase the server load so waiting 5 minutes or so before trying again lets the server recover.

I have the server setup to stop processing database requests if there is a high load this will stop the server from crashing altogether but it will show that message to some people, once the load has reduced it will let you in again.

[PatBlock]

OK, thanks ferret.

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[ferret]

If you look at the stats at the moment we have 100 members logged in and 400 guests browsing the site and a majority of those guests are from China, our problem is that we rank quite high on Chinese search engines so we do see lots of traffic, I may consider blocking the Chinese search bots as we do not get many Chinese people signing up for the site so it is counter productive really.

For finals day you can expect a few problems like this unfortunately, last year at 10pm on finals day we had 941 people online and the server ended up crashing out for about 8 minutes so all in all last year was good as that was our only problem but this year there are new features on the site and the chat bar which all increase server load, if I was to take off all the Facebook, twitter buttons and the chat bar we would probably not see any of those message any more but that would be conter productive to why they are there.

Lets see how it goes today and if it gets worse I will see what I can do, just checked the server status and it is running at about 1/3 of capacity at the moment.

[daffie]

Thanks for the info! Btw as far as I'm concerned go right ahead and remove everything chat-related, facebook, twitter and the like

[FOXMULDER]

I couldn't get on for most of tonight's session, meaning I missed out on the discussion.

It would be great if something could be done about this. Regular members shouldn't be put out by fly-by-nighters who only appear on finals day...

[Neil Taperell]

Been struggling to gewt on tonight as well . Looks like Ferret has it in hand though .

[ferret]

I made a few changes last night which helped a little but to improve performance for tomorrow I will need to close the forum down for a few hours so I am going to get a pizza, watch a film then do that as at the moment there are 100+ members online.

[gazza147]

Yes I have also had this Problem for the Last 2 Days hopefully be sorted soon.

[daffie]

Just now again a lot of outage...it's too bad really, and rather frustrating because all we want is discuss, discuss and discuss some more snooker

I appreciate everything that is being done though to solve the issues. It is after all a free of charge forum, so who am I to complain really. Thanks!

[ferret]

Things should be better now, made a few tweaks to the server setup but I can not guarantee that it is fixed for good, the site should be able to handle 1,200 visitors at any one time now but if we get more than that then there will be problems.

[daffie]

Definitely seems a lot better now! No outages for the past hour or so...thanks!