"The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later."

This message comes up sometimes when I'm trying to visit this site.
Is this place just getting too popular or what?

no- just Alex downloading his porn. :p

yeah its the porn , HD now being available is beefing up the file sizes and bandwidth hogged up.

HD porn

all we need is blueray :drool:

:) Hopefully it's not popping up that message too often, let me know if the frequency does increase. It only shows that message when the server load climbs over a certain threshold. At that threshold, response time would be quite slow, and the site wouldn't be that usable anyway. It is certainly getting busier here by the week...

Yea I was very depressed when I tried to log on this afternoon on the cell and it wouldnt let me...almost ended up in the ocean:o

Alex,

I've been getting this message for about the last hour. It does seem to be increasing in frequency as I've seen this only a couple of times to date... now seeing it more often and for longer durations within the last couple of weeks or so.

I thought it was you updating the forum when these messages were displayed.

A "site is down for maintenance" message is me taking it down for upgrades. A "site is too busy" message is a server-generated message when it's humming along such that response time would be quite slow. I just upped the threshold a bit, which will make it less likely for that message to pop up, but it means it may let folks in at times when the response time may be a little frustrating.

it happen to me yesterday, i cried....

A "site is down for maintenance" message is me taking it down for upgrades. A "site is too busy" message is a server-generated message when it's humming along such that response time would be quite slow. I just upped the threshold a bit, which will make it less likely for that message to pop up, but it means it may let folks in at times when the response time may be a little frustrating.

Hi Alex,

The site worked (slowly) for awhile, then was was down until now. Others have emailed me saying they have been getting the same "server busy" message today.

Jael,
cry me a river. :p

happened to me today

Happened to me tonight as well. Earlier in the day it was fine if a bit slow. Then tonight for about an hour it wouldn't let me in with that message.

Yup, server load is higher than I'd like it to be. Last time this happened, I started to look at different hosting providers, and by the time I narrowed it down our server load came down and everything's been fine for months (up until a day or so ago). This server load spiking isn't due to increased ninjette.org traffic; there are many other sites on the same server and it's clear that one or more of them are spiking crazily very recently, and though I've reported it to GD, they are convinced that nothing is wrong.

With any luck, things will be better for no apparent reason very soon, but if not I'll continue to look at some different options. Upgrading the site is unfortunately not point & click, and if we do end up moving to a different webhost, would involve some significant downtime that I'm not looking forward to.

I don't want to jinx us, but it looks like they may have killed whatever process(es) were loading up the server, our server load is quite low right now and responsiveness should be pretty great.

it's back to it's usual quick response, for now. tell them you want your money back if it slows down again. :p

I was way bummed last night when I came home and couldn't get online! I had been spending the day riding with my daddy and some of his gang - and to not be able to get online was a big bummer because I wanted to post about it!

i kept getting this error on friday, i was so frustrated at work! hahaha

Server load bounced up again pretty high earlier today, but it looks better now. I bit the bullet and provisioned a new VPS at a new hosting provider. I'll play with it over the next 2 or 3 days to get it up and running, and hopefully move the production site over by the end of the week if everything works OK.

Right now we're on shared webhosting, which means that many, many websites (hundreds, or even thousands) are being served by the same server at an ISP. It's the most common website architecture, and most small to mid-size sites are run that way. It's inexpensive, is easy to set up, and generally works well as long as the ISP doesn't oversell the server, and manages the outliers quick enough when one of the sites explodes. But eventually, sites do outgrow that architecture.

The next step is some type of Virtual Private Server (VPS, sometimes referred to as a VDS for virtual dedicated server). In this method, each user gets their own virtual server. This means that 1 physical box is running something like VMWare, or in this case Xen, which allows the server to act like many different servers. Each of these virtual servers gets a guaranteed portion of the overall server resources, including ram & disk i/o. In the earlier shared hosting model, 1 site that goes mega can slow or even stop activity for everybody else on that server. With a modern VPS, that's supposed to be impossible as long as everything is working as expected. If there are 20 VDS's on a machine, each one really does get 1/20th of the capabilities of the server, and no matter what happens with the other 19/20ths, the share that you do have can be relied upon. There are still hiccups from time to time, but should be much less likely than in shared hosting. Downsides of VPS is that there's much more work to be done by the admin. I.E. me. :) I need to now not only maintain all the vBulletin and MediaWiki applications, but now the actual OS (Linux) pieces that they rely on (MySQL, PHP, Apache, etc.). It's not as hard as it once was, as the particular distro is made for webhosting. But it's still more work.

As we still grow from there, what folks do is grow their VPS. Instead of x MB memory for your slice, you can go to 2x, or 4x. You can add disk space. Basically instead of paying for 1/20th, or 1/10th of a server, you can move up to 1/4th, or even 1/2 of it. Costs go up, performance goes up. But eventually, if the traffic gets high enough, a VPS is no longer cost-effective, and you need to move to the next level.

A dedicated server. This is what you'd expect, an entire machine dedicated to the site. Its own disks, its own memory, etc. This offers the highest guaranteed performance, but can be a little bit more work for the admin, and of course it's the highest cost. At this point you can make that particular server larger/bigger/faster/better until at the very highest limits of sites, you can move to even multiple servers shared by a load balancer for the same site. I don't know of many forums on the internet that require that, but I'm sure there are a few.

I know some people may be curious about costs for this, so here's some general ranges:

Shared hosting: $5/mo up to $30/mo.
VPS hosting: $20/mo up to $150/mo
Dedicated server: $150 up to $500/mo.

I had that happen to me for 2 days!! Thus my absence after my 1st post! I was trying to get on and I just couldn't!

wow. well with all that said Alex, I still have to say congrats on how well ninjette has done and still is doing.

With all this growth I really hope that the forum maintains to be filled with a majority of good folks and those willing to share their knowledge so we all can pay it forward. I can say that I definitely would be less knowledgeable about the ninjette and motorcycling if it were not for this forum's help.

A version of the site is already up on the new host, but still having some teething pains. vBulletin is working fine there, but the integration with mediaWiki isn't working yet, and I'm trying to figure out why. Same exact config, and redid it several times to make sure (took hours! :(), but still no luck. I don't want to go live without that userID integration, but may choose to if it gets later in the week and still no movement. Life gets busy next week, so this is actually a good time to spend a bunch of time getting things in order here.

Life gets busy next week, so this is actually a good time to spend a bunch of time getting things in order here.

you have a life outside ninjette???? I'm shocked!! :eek:

This server load spiking isn't due to increased ninjette.org traffic; there are many other sites on the same server and it's clear that one or more of them are spiking crazily very recently, and though I've reported it to GD, they are convinced that nothing is wrong.


What is GD?

GoDaddy.

Thanks for making the transition, Alex. :thumbup:

You're welcome! It may be a little hokey over the next few hours, DNS transitions aren't instant so different people will start seeing this new site at different times. www.theninjette.net is hardcoded to point to the old site, and www.theninjette.org is hardcoded to point to the new site. Both of them have been like that for awhile now, so if you have issues and want to make sure you're coming to the new site, just go to www.theninjette.org for the next few hours. Also, the old site has the forums turned off, and the new site has them on, so it should be clear if folks are having DNS issues.

The new site is working pretty great, I think people will be pleased with the response time. The good news is that we should now only be affected by our own traffic, so if it does get slow it really is because of us. And now to speed it up if it ever becomes necessary it's only a few clicks to up the memory and disk on this server. If we ever have to transition off onto our own server, it will be easier at that point than the transition we just did.

Everything isn't gravy, though. While the wiki works fine for read-only mode (which 99% of people are using it for), the userID syncing is not functional yet. What this means is that if you already had a wiki account, you still do, but it may ask you to set a new password there. I intend to get that back up and running, but I didn't want to hold this up just for that one issue.

Thanks Alex!
Everything seems to be running smoothly, good job :thumbup:

Thx! If anyone does happen to see something that doesn't look right or isn't quite working right, please let me know. There are some little niggling things that I'm still chasing down over the next few hours (pushing ninjette.org to www.ninjette.org, re-adding some more .htaccess rules for SEO, etc.).

You're welcome! It may be a little hokey over the next few hours, DNS transitions aren't instant so different people will start seeing this new site at different times. www.theninjette.net is hardcoded to point to the old site, and www.theninjette.org is hardcoded to point to the new site. Both of them have been like that for awhile now, so if you have issues and want to make sure you're coming to the new site, just go to www.theninjette.org for the next few hours. Also, the old site has the forums turned off, and the new site has them on, so it should be clear if folks are having DNS issues.


I dont understand this. I'm at ninjette.org and the forums are working so I'm definitely at the new site. So, what is theninjette.org? When I go to theninjette.org, it is blocked by the content filter here at work! Normally this would be a problem, but tomorrow is my last day of work for the summer so I wont have to deal with this crappy content filter anymore. :)

Your computer's/ISP's DNS is already pointing to the new ninjette.org, so there's no need to use any of the other URL's. Those are just if someone for some reason was able to see this once, but on another pc they weren't, or if it was acting flaky and going between the two sites for some reason. It is strange that www.theninjette.org is blocked for you, right now both it and www.ninjette.org are pointing to the exact same IP address.

Alex,

Congrats and Well Done! :thumbup:

Looks good and the site is snappy for me. Thanks Alex, job much appreciated. :)

WOOHOO!!!! up and running up to speed again

thanks Alex :thumbup:

Yup, I made sure the virtual server was virtually painted red, so it screams. They offered me virtual green or virtual blue, but I'm no fool. :)

Yup, I made sure the virtual server was virtually painted red, so it screams. They offered me virtual green or virtual blue, but I'm no fool. :)

idk.. too much redlining can be bad..
but I understand, since blue is too fast for most of us, so I guess it's ok :p

Thanks for all the hard work Alex! I'd know a lot less than I do now without this forums and the wonderful people that post here!

Yup, I made sure the virtual server was virtually painted red, so it screams. They offered me virtual green or virtual blue, but I'm no fool. :)

Smart man :thumbup:

Yup, I made sure the virtual server was virtually painted red, so it screams. They offered me virtual green or virtual blue, but I'm no fool. :)

Oh man, just think how sexy this site would be if it was blue. :rolleyes:
Good job Alex, the site is really kicking

nb

Alex,

Just letting you know, the emails I get about thread notifications don't have anything in the "who" column in my email client as they did before the switch

I've been seeing that sporadically as well. It's weird, most of my thread subscriptions and PM notifications have the from & sender fields filled in just fine, but every once in awhile one of them doesn't and it comes through with the sender field blank. Always problems and never problems are a piece of cake. Sporadic problems are the bane of troubleshooters everywhere. :) I'll keep looking into it, but the good news is it looks like all of the emails are at least being sent and received.

Yes, not a show stopper, but thought you would like to know, knowing how meticulous you are about keeping the site running perfectly. I was going to say anal, but I didn't think that would make it past the profanity sentries... oh wait, I just did. :lol:

OK, I tweaked some settings, and the last few emails I've gotten after the tweaks all have the sender field in them. Let me know if you continue to see blank sender fields. Frankly, I'm not sure why the minor tweaks I made would make a difference, but they seemed to at least in my limited testing so far.

nope... mine are still blank.

If you could, please forward me an email that shows the full headers (likely have to toggle a setting on your email client to see all headers) and I'll take a peek. You can copy & paste the headers into a PM if you like, but make sure they are the full headers and not just the from/to/reply-to lines.

What it used to look like for me (no sender):

3460

What it looks like for me now (sender exists):

3459

I haven't seen one without a sender field since I played with it, but it sounds like you still are...

Tried another tweak. What's the verdict?

now it works! :thumbup:

If anyone noticed the server going down a minute or so ago, it had to be rebooted. I upped the disk and memory allocation for the VPS, which required a quick reboot. All is well, and this should make the site a bit more responsive...

any progress on the wiki yet? I was going to update my latest entries with better pictures, but can't log in :(

Try and log in to the wiki with your same userID, enter in a password, let it fail, and then ask it to email you a new password. It'll send you a new password which you can use to log in to the wiki, and it will probably make you change that temp password to a real one. You can then use the same password that you use for the forums if you like.

Everything is working as it should on the wiki side, the only sticking point, and it's unfortunately still a sticking point, is that seamless auto-syncing of wiki accounts to vB accounts that we enjoyed on the prior host. I hope to get it up and running on this host, but I ran into a wall and haven't been getting great support from the folks that put that bridge together as of yet.

Whatever happened to the decal contest eh? XD

Working on it, needed to get some feedback from the folks actually producing the decals about which of the entries are doable and which just aren't. Should have 'em posted by the end of the day.