Weird BBS Loading Problem?

[Wayne 962]

Hi folks. I've been experiencing this problem for a while (ever since I got this new server).

The BBS pages will load lightning quick, but then the images come in much, much slower. Sometimes 5-10 seconds later.

- This only occurs the first time that you load up a page on the BBS. Subsequent loads are fast
- If you let the computer sit for about 5-10 minutes without going to the BBS, it resets, and does it again.
- Seems to occur only on the network, when I get on the machine, I think the pages load immediately (haven't seen it happen on the machine itself, only when checking over the network)
- Seems to do it from home, and inside my local subnet (probably not my T1 connections)
- Also does it for the domain www.pelicanbbs.com which is a text-HTML version of the BBS compiled each Sunday night soley for indexing by search engines.

How does it look on your end?

-Wayne

[pbs911]

I thought it was on my side, but some of the pages load very slow.

[emcon5]

I see that too Wayne, but not all the time. I just assumed it was due to heavy load on the server side.

Tom

[john walker's workshop]

the icons seem to take a while to show up. posted pics do the usual slow load from the top down. same as always. the system doesn't keep me logged in lately. that's all i've noticed.

[Wayne 962]

I'm getting tired of this, I think I'm going to move to Apache instead of Microsoft's crappy solution. For this dedicated BBS, where I'm only running one application, it makes sense...

-Wayne

[Wayne 962]

We do have a lot of people on this BBS right now (about 250+)...

Hmmm...

-Wayne

[widebody911]

I'd definitely move to Apache. There's lots of cool little add-ons, like being able to zip html on the way out for faster d/l's.

[Wayne 962]

IIS has compression too, but it just doesn't seem reliable...

-Wayne

[targa911man]

I've experienced slow loading today for the first time. I'm on a dial-up modem but have a pretty good connection speed (48k/sec). I've had it load quicer in the past with slower connection speeds.

[Wayne 962]

It's not uniform either. It's slow, then lightning, then hold on a sec, then lightning. I don't think it's the connection...

-Wayne

[Siena911]

Wayne,

I have not experienced any difference in performance at all.

What are you running, IIS4? Are you running Proxy 2, I know there are some problems with the sequence that the service packs need to be applied and you get similar problems to those that you are experiencing, just a thought,

Cheers Jakes

[cstreit]

Wayne,

Hows the disk activity? If there is a lot of contention for certain graphics files, that could delay the load of certain graphics... ...and since small graphics load serially, the rest may be waiting on just a few.

[HawgRyder]

Wayne...I run Linux on my machine...because I hate the way Micro-Slush handles memory.
MS tries to use all the available memory all thee time...so when you call for a different program that's not already loaded, it has to cache out something in order to load the called for prog.
Not the best idea...considering I have over a gig of RAM available!
With Linux...everything just runs faster, I think mostly because of the memory handling.
Bob

[thabaer]

The delay has been visible since the changes, I attributed it to the crappy NT kernel memory management and file cache tuning combined w/ IIS stupidity.

I agree that Apache/Tux/etc.. would do a better job, but re-converting would be a pain (again).

[beepbeep]

Hold it there!

It has nothing to do with IIS. It's called "browser caching" and browser does it automaticaly. You can even instruct it to do it every time or never (in "options"), or control it server-side.

For example, if you add (VB-code in this case, for IIS):

Response.CacheControl = "no-cache,post-check=0,pre-check=0"
Response.AddHeader "Pragma", "no-cache"
Response.Expires = -1

...to your headers all content to be delivered to browse will be reloaded from server every time you look at it (no cache). Otherwise it's up to your browser to decide when to reload pictures.

So it has nothing to do with web-server. M$-bashing is pretty popular "sport", but in this case it's not a culprit.

[old_skul]

I concur with beepbeep. I use IIS on many of my sites, and Apache/Tomcat on many sites. Set up properly, either one is a good web solution. IIS catches a lot of hell because of the security issues, but then again, Apache doesn't have armies of Microsoft haters trying to hack it.

Wayne, instead of a complete platform change, have you considered identifying the problems with vBulletin? Have you updated the version of PHP on the site lately? How's the machine itself doing? Bandwidth?

Don't just shotgun the situation and create another bucket of issues to deal with.

[Wayne 962]

Okay, I don't think it's the refresh/content issues like you guys suggested, but that's an interesting thought.

The BBS was running fine on the Pelican Parts Webserver, until we switched it to the new server. This new server has a faster processor, and the load should be less. The only change is that this machine has 512MB instead of 1 Gig in the webserver. I put the gig in the webserver when I was trying to diagnose another problem with TCP/IP a long time ago. I don't think it's a memory issue, as the BBS machine only uses about 50% of the available memory.

It loads the images slow whether it's on my internal connection or the internet. So, it's not the T1 either. I'm thinking it may be the network card, although the pattern is too consistent to really support that thought. It's only the small images at the top that load slowly. Maybe it has something to do with the banner rotation, I'm not sure...

-Wayne

[thabaer]

Originally posted by beepbeep
Hold it there!

It has nothing to do with IIS. It's called "browser caching" and browser does it automaticaly. You can even instruct it to do it every time or never (in "options"), or control it server-side.
...snip...
So it has nothing to do with web-server. M$-bashing is pretty popular "sport", but in this case it's not a culprit.

Ummm, two wrong assumptions:

First visits to PP-BBS pages had slowed, that has everything to do with server performance. It is impossible for the browser cache to be relevant to my comment, the server must deliver at least one copy of the data object to the browser before ANY client-side caching can occur. I was talking about the NT file system cache on the server and the lack of control in tuning it for the main use of a server, a long-standing problem since beta copies of NT v3.0 and not greatly changed in the latest renamed flavors of v5 NT.

Identifying deficiencies and better alternatives is not the sport of bashing, it's based on empirical data of identical hardware running identical site pages and measuring delays in the server's ability to deliver content. No opinions or fashion involved.

[beepbeep]

Charlie:

Huh...i'm working as a systems architect and i just finished buildning reasonably big IIS 5.0 -powered bank-system with pretty hard load. We have no perfomance issues yet, even tough we run both IIS and SQL on same (dual-processor) machine. I cannot speak of NT, as we built system on W2k Server and IIS 5.0, but Wayne's description sounds like cache issues with images in cache timing out after 15 minutes and needing reload again:

The BBS pages will load lightning quick, but then the images come in much, much slower. Sometimes 5-10 seconds later.

- This only occurs the first time that you load up a page on the BBS. Subsequent loads are fast

NT file-caching has little to do with IIS as long as you are running dynamicaly-created site as Pelican BBS and have enough RAM (which Wayne obviously has). This applies to sites generated from MS SQL-database (which fits nicely into IIS)...

On the other hand, i heard that Ultimate BBS (which Wayne uses) runs on top of it's own proprietary raw file-based database and not on modern SQL-like relational databases, so file caching might influence speed in that case...

Cheers!

P.S.
I'm browsing this forum trough DSL and never notice any speed problems...

[GoodMojo]

Hi Wayne,

Have you taken a look at the web server logs/Events to see there are specific diagnostics generated by IIS?

I just did a little digging around on Dejanews and turned up some things that you might be interested to check for, namely the ISAPI module issue (check your app-mappings). Some URL's of interest:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&frame=right&th=8abb8d8d773d351d&seekm=855c01c20737%242c786a80%2437ef2ecf%40TKMSFTN GXA13#link1

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&threadm=Ra9%247JFkAHA.288%40cppssbbsa01.microsoft. com&rnum=6&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF8%26oe%3DUTF8%2 6scoring%3Dd%26q%3DIIS%2B5.0%2Bvery%2Bslow%2Bafter %2Bupgrade%2Bfrom%2BIIS%2B4.0


-Wade
'88 930 slant coupe