The site has become quite sluggish these past few weeks and I’m seeing “Due to extreme load, this is temporarily being shown to everyone as a logged out user would see it.” a lot lately. What happened?
Haven’t seen that at all.
I’ve seen it too, though it has been a few days. Have a memory that it was a ~recurring time of day, but didn’t pay enough attention. Just came back a little later and all was good.
I’ve noticed it, too, at least for the last week, if not a little longer. I’m not sure when it started, but I’d say no more than a month ago.
It has been most noticeable when posting comments, though overall performance has ranged from “normal” to “noticeably slower than usual”.
I wouldn’t characterize it as “poor”, but it clearly has declined. I only ran into the “due to extreme load” message once.
Edited to add: when I posted this comment, it seemed fine.
Update #2: I just posted a two sentence comment on another thread, and it took 3-4 seconds to save it. Acceptable, but not the nearly immediate result that has been the case in the past.
FWIW, I can’t ever recall thinking “hmmm, TidBITS Talk seems slow today,” and I’ve certainly never seen the message @Simon posted. I wonder if it has to do with location/routing/load-balancing? I’m in southern California, for one data point.
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I’ve noticed some slowdowns, but the only thing that triggers the extreme load warning for me is when I Command-click a bunch of discussions to open them all at once in separate tabs.
It looks like I’m a month or so behind on Discourse upgrades, so I’ve installed the latest, which also had the side effect of clearing a lot of space on the drive. Let’s see if that helps.
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Earlier today, I saw a message that started with this on both occasions that I was typing a search query (in the field that appears after clicking on the magnifying glass at the top right of the window).
Famous last words, but the site seems to be working nicely again since the update.
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Just right now experienced laggy behavior again after posting and again after editing (blue bar with its wait swirly thing). It’s 6:30am local here in the Bay Area. Any server side maintenance tasks scheduled around this time?
And now, almost 11am (and same location), page loads are still lethargic.
Can you quantify what you mean by lethagic? As the admin, I get a little page load timer for each page I load in Discourse, and for reading posts today, everything is loading in between 0.5 and 2 seconds. For instance:
I don’t think there’s any way to turn that on for others.
I noticed a “slow” comment save earlier today, around 5 seconds or so. Until the last few weeks, my recollection is that saves were nearly instantaneous. Again, I wouldn’t call it unacceptable, but when Simon started this thread, I felt that I knew exactly what he was talking about. (I’m located in the northeast.)
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The title here is a bit overwrought. There’s no evidence that it is Tidbit’s specific as opposed to a problem with @Simon configuration. Seems an overreaction.
I have experienced the slowdown and is quite noticeable. It has, however, improved a bit in the past few days.
Making comments isn’t nearly as fast as loading pages—the difference with writing versus reading. But I’m having trouble understanding Discourse’s timer, since it seems cumulative for everything I do on a particular topic.
I’d also be curious if there’s any difference between browsers. I read almost entirely in Arc, which isn’t one of the faster browsers out there.
Understood, but there has been a change in performance in the last few weeks. It’s been minor, so I wasn’t planning on mentioning it. When Simon raised the issue, I thought I’d chime in to confirm he wasn’t imagining things. I had assumed that it was an increase in bot activity, similar to something I’ve seen recently on a WordPress site I administer, or perhaps some change on the server.
FWIW, on my end of things, it’s not so bad that I’d invest heroic efforts investigating it, but perhaps others are experiencing worse issues than I’ve seen.
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Again, I have not seen it, so let’s not be so conclusive.
Several geographically dispersed people have noticed an apparent change in the behavior of the site in the same timeframe. I would wager that the reason it was noticeable is that performance of the site generally has been excellent.
Accordingly, the issue was reported in this thread.
You have indicated several times that you have not experienced the issue. Thank you for sharing. That is helpful.
I am sure that a site owner with Adam’s experience will investigate and take action as is reasonable and necessary.
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Around 5 sec for the post to be saved or the edit committed. Exactly as @josehill mentioned. The reason it’s so obvious when this happens is that the site otherwise is usually fast and highly responsive. Such saves or edits usually are so quick I don’t even see the wait widgets show up before the thread reloads.
This is from basically two different networks, both in Berkeley, the difference being home (wifi to 1 Gbps fiber, achieving ~600 Mbps to server) vs. my office on campus (10 Gbps wired Ethernet achieving ~1.2 Gbps to server). But in both cases the board is super fast and responsive when all runs well. It’s just that in these periods when things slow down, it becomes highly apparent simply due to how considerable the slow-down (lag) is compared to the otherwise near-instantaneous behavior. Plus of course the "Due to extreme load, this is temporarily being shown to everyone as a logged out user would see it.” which I used to never see.
I honestly was expecting some kind of bot assault (data harvesting for LLM training, etc.), but I figured you would have already mentioned something if that was happening. I guess it must be more subtle.
I can add that this happens in Safari (my main browser, due to its speed). But switching to Firefox changed nothing. Laggy stayed laggy. “Due to extreme load…” showed up in both browsers.