# Extreme slowdowns?



## Douane (Feb 15, 2008)

Hi!

Over the last 20 hours it has become nearly impossible to post on EN World anymore as I suffer from extreme slowdowns and outages (only this site here).

Anybody experiencing the same or is the problem somewhere on my end?


Thanks,

Folkert


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## Michael Morris (Feb 15, 2008)

As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with the machine.  Recently I made a change which locked out some hackers which have been plaguing us for awhile now - it is possible that they are DDOS'ing the machine in frustration.  At least one of the seize ups was caused by someone trying to break into the SMTP port - a hole that has been closed for awhile now.

If it is a DDOS attack, there's next to nothing that can be done about it.


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## Thornir Alekeg (Feb 15, 2008)

I noticed the site was slow at responding to opening a page the past couple of days.  My browser would give up after a while and tell me the server wasn't responding.  

Once it starts to load the page it does fine.


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## moritheil (Feb 15, 2008)

One player in a PBP had to post 20+ times to make his posts go through.

http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4051352&postcount=124


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## Douane (Feb 16, 2008)

moritheil said:
			
		

> One player in a PBP had to post 20+ times to make his posts go through.
> 
> http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4051352&postcount=124



Thanks for bringing it up! 




			
				Thornir Alekeg said:
			
		

> I noticed the site was slow at responding to opening a page the past couple of days.  My browser would give up after a while and tell me the server wasn't responding.
> 
> Once it starts to load the page it does fine.



Sounds exactly like my problem. When the page actually started to load, everything was okay, but I had to hit "reload" 10-20 times to actually get it to load. (Sometimes even worse - the 23 attempts mentioned in my post on the PbP thread was the "highlight".)




			
				Michael Morris said:
			
		

> As far as I can tell there is nothing wrong with the machine.  Recently I made a change which locked out some hackers which have been plaguing us for awhile now - it is possible that they are DDOS'ing the machine in frustration.  At least one of the seize ups was caused by someone trying to break into the SMTP port - a hole that has been closed for awhile now.
> 
> If it is a DDOS attack, there's next to nothing that can be done about it.




Thanks for the quick reply, Michael! Good to hear that the site is okay. 

I wasn't looking to cast any stones, but merely frustrated with the state of things and wanted to know if this was a general problem or one on my end. (Especially as other members seemed to post without problems.)

Today (yesterday) has brought more of same problems but right now (alomost 1 AM over here in Germany) everything works as it should, no outages at all.   I'll chalk it up to a technical fluke and am now one happy camper to have EN World back for me.


Thanks!

Folkert


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## Kheti sa-Menik (Mar 6, 2008)

Agreed.  This site has slowed to a crawl in the last two weeks.
Just accessing the site, never mind posting has become SLOW.

Is there an issue?


Not just from my home and my ISP.  From two or three friends' places who have different ISPs as well as from my corporate network at the office.

Something is slowing access to Enworld in a major way.


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## Nyaricus (Mar 6, 2008)

Kheti sa-Menik said:
			
		

> Agreed.  This site has slowed to a crawl in the last two weeks.
> Just accessing the site, never mind posting has become SLOW.
> 
> Is there an issue?
> ...



Yeah, I can say the same - school, friends and my house are all super slow when trying to access ENW, at all times of the day and night over here.


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## Blackrat (Mar 6, 2008)

Nyaricus said:
			
		

> Yeah, I can say the same - school, friends and my house are all super slow when trying to access ENW, at all times of the day and night over here.



Strange. I only notice the slowdown during evening and night of local time. That would be around noon to evening in US. The majority of time I'm here, it's about 1000-1500 users online and the site works fine. When it get's over 2000 it starts to slow.


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## Angel Tarragon (Mar 6, 2008)

Tuesday was freakin' impossible for me. It took waaaay longer than necessary to connect, and I only connected once. All subsequent attempts to connect or refresh utterly failed until later in the evening. Was about 7 pm that I finally had a clear signal.  :\


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## Morrus (Mar 6, 2008)

Kheti sa-Menik said:
			
		

> Is there an issue?
> 
> 
> Something is slowing access to Enworld in a major way.




Yes.  Traffic has gone ballistic.  At times there have been over 3000 users online, which is far, far above normal load.  Now D&DXP is over, it should be calming down a bit.


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## Fobok (Mar 25, 2008)

I wasn't here a lot during the D&DXP event, but I have been the last week, and every day, starting around noon and lasting late in the evening, this site has been slowing down quite a bit for me, though it seems to bounce to nearly reasonable to incredibly slow. Sometimes it takes up to two minutes to load a page or make a post.


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## doghead (Apr 7, 2008)

Thornir Alekeg said:
			
		

> I noticed the site was slow at responding to opening a page the past couple of days.  My browser would give up after a while and tell me the server wasn't responding.
> 
> Once it starts to load the page it does fine.




I've started having this problem recently. Sometimes it loads up fine. Sometimes it takes ages to start, then loads fine. Sometimes I just get the 'server stopped responding' failure notice.

doghead
aka thotd


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## Bront (Apr 7, 2008)

I think we're hoping that the EW2 upgrade may resolve some speed issues as well by streamlining some of the inefficient and hodgepodge code.  ~11 days to go before we see that though.


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## Ydars (Apr 7, 2008)

I see this slowdown all the time, and it doesn't really correlate with number of users online either. Oddly, it goes away if I re-boot my computer or my broadband modem and it isn't a simple internet problem as it doesn't affect other websites.


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## Michael Morris (Apr 7, 2008)

Most of the time when I caught the exteme slowdowns it's because the spammers are at their non-sense again - so I reboot the machine to kick them off. Bastards.


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## Vempyre (Apr 8, 2008)

Woa that must be a lot of spam trying to get through


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## Blackrat (Apr 8, 2008)

Michael Morris said:
			
		

> Most of the time when I caught the exteme slowdowns it's because the spammers are at their non-sense again - so I reboot the machine to kick them off. Bastards.



So have you got something in the new database to keep them at bay? Must be stresfull to play whack-a-mole with them all the time.


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## Bront (Apr 8, 2008)

Vempyre said:
			
		

> Woa that must be a lot of spam trying to get through



Spam being sent from the server actualy.

I'm hoping the move to EW2 will let us upgrade the server on the software side.  That's up to the admins if they want to do that though.


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## Michael Morris (Apr 8, 2008)

Bront said:
			
		

> Spam being sent from the server actualy.
> 
> I'm hoping the move to EW2 will let us upgrade the server on the software side.  That's up to the admins if they want to do that though.



 Oh we definitely want to. I'd do it now if half the scripts wouldn't break or were known not to contain holes that would get us reinfected in short order.


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## Thornir Alekeg (Apr 8, 2008)

Yet one more reason to be excited for 10 days 7 hours from now.


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## Kheti sa-Menik (Apr 23, 2008)

I must say whatever upgrade was done, EnWorld does seem faster from a number of locations I log on from.  Bravo for taking steps to rectify this problem.


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## TheLe (Apr 24, 2008)

Kheti sa-Menik said:
			
		

> I must say whatever upgrade was done, EnWorld does seem faster from a number of locations I log on from.  Bravo for taking steps to rectify this problem.




I have not seen this. It seems to work "normally" some times, but usually only the first time I load a page. Then trying to navigate or trying to post causing really bad lag for me...

`Le


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## doghead (May 1, 2008)

I hate spammers. What I don't get is why anyone reads and responds to their emails? No response, no spam. Its simple really. *sigh*

doghead
aka thotd


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## kirinke (May 1, 2008)

Mhmf. Anytime I get email from somebody I don't recognize it goes into the virtual garbage. Well. Most of my email goes into the garbage unread..... But then it's mostly spam anyway. Grrrumph.

It has been pretty slow lately though. I mean just awhile ago, I couldn't connect at all to enworld. Then boom fine. Weird.


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## Bront (May 1, 2008)

Kheti sa-Menik said:
			
		

> I must say whatever upgrade was done, EnWorld does seem faster from a number of locations I log on from.  Bravo for taking steps to rectify this problem.



No upgrade was done as far as I'm aware of.  It hopefully will be done shortly.


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