If you can scale up redis that really sounds like it could be the bottleneck.
In the old days you had stateful servers. So as long as everything else worked, user sessions worked right along with them.
But now things are stateless so that they can be infinitely scalable - spinning up any new instances as needed. This means all the user sessions have to be kept in a store like redis - which is accessed on every request - and can become a bottleneck.
Our current disk space is included with the server and doesn’t cost anything extra. We can add more at a flat rate of $0.10/GB/month. I don’t know how that compares with Amazon because every time I look at their pricing it confuses the fuck out of me with zones and hours and requests and all sorts of other weirdly metered crap. I’ll gladly pay an extra dollar or two a month to not have to deal with any of that.
I think that’s just you. Try clearing your cache and doing a full reload of the site.
Welp, none of the Discourse peeps found our situation interesting enough to comment on. We should be more than fine with our current setup and traffic levels, and we usually are fine, even at our busiest. It’s just those random slowdowns that briefly grind everything to a halt that I can’t identify the cause of, and if I don’t know the cause I can only grasp in the dark for a solution.
I’m now considering a less drastic approach and adopting some of jmakin’s suggestions, plus a few other things. I can allocate 3x the memory to the DB buffers compared to what we had for the last debate. I can move a lot of the inactive parts of the forum into temporary quarantine, like all the 10k closed threads. And I can be on triage standby to shut down even more of the forum if it seems warranted.
It still feels random. I hate trying to solve a sporadic problem I can’t clearly identify.
Immediately after posting the above I found a button on my mouse that I never knew existed. I’ve had this thing for months, and I’m not entirely sure what the button even does.
I may not be the best person to be handling our tech concerns!
Yes, repeatedly in several different applications. All it seems to do is cycle through programs the same way as Alt + Tab. I’m not sure that’s a function I need an entire hidden button dedicated to.
I’ve always bought logitech MX mice with fun buttons like that.
My setup for poker had all of them mapped to fold, call, shove, switch to next table, etc. The mouse wheel raised by 1BB going up, and took off .5BB going down - using AHK. I also leveraged the Stars table templates - so that as I busted from my initial 17 SNGs it would switch to make the remaining ones bigger. I played in sets. It was pretty sweet.
I still didn’t use all the buttons and wheels.
Reminds me of
When I was 4 our house had a light switch that didn’t work next to a door that didn’t open. Freaked me out as a kid wondering what was going on behind that door.
Yeah, it’s this MX:
If you push straight down on the thumb rest it triggers the function, but only if you do it exactly in the middle. There’s no way anybody is finding that thing except by accident. I only found it by clumsily mousing southpaw.
I definitely never used that but I do remember noticing it. It shows up in the logitech software:
I’ve owned 7 or 8 Revolution MXs and Performance MXs.
Nerds.
Zikzak on election night:
Is there a reason why I can’t find the first POTUS BOWL thread anywhere? I was thinking about pulling up some old material for gameday, but I can’t find it anywhere.
But that’s the new one, not the old locked one. I want the old one.
It’s in quarantine. I’ve just opened that category to all staff so you should be able to get to it now.
It is my intention to be increasingly agressive about temporarily hiding threads over the next 24 hours.
So my forum experience was pretty much okay all things considered. Got the logged out message a few times but was able to jump straight back in to the Smackdown thread with no problem.
Anyway, when it makes sense it would be fun to see some sick server load giraffes so we can vicariously experience what @zikzak was experiencing tonight.
Big ups to @zikzak and @anon46587892, along with anyone else who plays a role, for providing us a home for this effed up rollercoaster ride.
I was scrolling quickly through the election thread and something popped up that I had flagged a Grue post. I didn’t even read the post let alone flag it so apologies for that.
