CSR has become almost unusable for me

yeah i gave up last night but for about 4 or 5 days in a row before that it was fine
 
Once upon a time....I was hired to evaluate IT staff at major US companies. So the following words are in that spirit.

Four weeks of this crap.......I would fire everyone involved with the operation (including the CEO for not communicating every day with the forum members).

They clearly don't know what they are doing and it is an embarrassment. Think about it......all that is going on here is using the Xenforo platform. Either it is on Xenforo or it is the hosting operation or html mods to the system. Xenforo is a major player in internet forum software. They have private hosted and cloud hosted versions.

Why is this so hard to fix? The only answer is that they have the wrong people in charge and trying to fix it.

Without some dialogue......the only hope is that someone trips over the problem enough times to realize it.

I would put @ttmott and @KevinC on it and pay them to fix it. My bet is that it would be running perfectly in a week.
 
It could be my ex and her team of black hats. She would not miss one detail to alienate me and make life miserable for anyone associated with me.
 
blaster said:
It could be my ex and her team of black hats. She would not miss one detail to alienate me and make life miserable for anyone associated with me.
Click to expand...

Who are you? :p
 
PlayDate said:
Once upon a time....I was hired to evaluate IT staff at major US companies. So the following words are in that spirit.

Four weeks of this crap.......I would fire everyone involved with the operation (including the CEO for not communicating every day with the forum members).

They clearly don't know what they are doing and it is an embarrassment. Think about it......all that is going on here is using the Xenforo platform. Either it is on Xenforo or it is the hosting operation or html mods to the system. Xenforo is a major player in internet forum software. They have private hosted and cloud hosted versions.

Why is this so hard to fix? The only answer is that they have the wrong people in charge and trying to fix it.

Without some dialogue......the only hope is that someone trips over the problem enough times to realize it.

I would put @ttmott and @KevinC on it and pay them to fix it. My bet is that it would be running perfectly in a week.
Click to expand...

I am literally getting advice on this from a guy with a one page website that doesn't even work. A website he advertises for free on my site. This is too damn comical. Too bad you can't fire yourself. https://restorationmarine.com/

My network of people doesn't include Xenforo experts or server experts. However, the server it is on is owned by a CSR member, and it is a major hosting company. I don't even have to deal with the tech desk, I deal with his long time engineer who is probably too far up the chain of command to spend too much time on this issue unfortunately. I have a xenforo expert who has worked on this site for 10 years, and has done great for us. He is pretty sure everything is great on the xenforo front. I have hired a third party expert to come in and check both their math.

Guys, this forum stuff is so easy. Instead of complaining here with non-productive ideas and pointing fingers, just go start your own forum.
 
PlayDate said:
Once upon a time....I was hired to evaluate IT staff at major US companies. So the following words are in that spirit.

Four weeks of this crap.......I would fire everyone involved with the operation (including the CEO for not communicating every day with the forum members).

They clearly don't know what they are doing and it is an embarrassment. Think about it......all that is going on here is using the Xenforo platform. Either it is on Xenforo or it is the hosting operation or html mods to the system. Xenforo is a major player in internet forum software. They have private hosted and cloud hosted versions.

Why is this so hard to fix? The only answer is that they have the wrong people in charge and trying to fix it.

Without some dialogue......the only hope is that someone trips over the problem enough times to realize it.

I would put @ttmott and @KevinC on it and pay them to fix it. My bet is that it would be running perfectly in a week.
Click to expand...

I generally think that programmers no longer know how to properly architect systems and program and the new generation is not being properly instructed. Programmers today simply play with "lego" blocks (plugins) to amass a mess of code they know nothing about.

Because of time and cost restraints also I see too much "cut-n-paste" of code and then when there is a problem found it is spread through out the systems. Because of this our general rule of thumb is if code is used more than once it needs to be generalized and turned into a core function. Find a problem - 1 fix - add a feature - 1 update.

From what I see from the outside on this forum we have many things that could be at play and may be fighting many different battles. Here I rely on my old rule of thumb that states just because you can does not mean you should. Things that work well in limited test environments can crash systems when exposed to larger use.

One case in point - there was a recent discussion about people not being able to upload images. That was most likely because phones now are mega-mega pixel and the images are very large - and in fact too large for real use on these forums. Yet now we allow that. So to fix the problem of the uploads we simply allowed larger files - not the real solution - these files could be allowed to be uploaded and then automatically scaled to an appropriate size for display but that would take more work. This additional overhead will then translate into more data read/writes to drive and more traffic on the network. Both of which can cause slow downs. So where is the congestion - the only way to know is to look at the drive performance vs the network interface performance at the same time.

Another problem we see is the abuse of databases. Poorly designed SQL statements and poorly implemented indexing or "tuned" systems can cause a problem. This only gets compounded as we add more and more entries to the tables. Here is an example, when we come to the forum there is a little indicator that tells us if we have any alerts (this also runs in the background). The more users on the site the more this is being called and if it is poorly implemented delays can clog the site. Example if it take 1/4 to respond when you are on the site by yourself that is not noticeable. When there are 100 people that becomes 25 secs and more noticeable. Then compound that with possibly not ignoring spiders/bots and it could become unusable with 1000s of open sessions. Also from a human level we tend to try again when something does not work so we only increase the number of requests.

Years ago I saw this when I had a company in the paging (beeper) industry. We saw one of our vendors system reach the tipping point of congestion and almost crash. Why - too much simultaneous use? People would page others and expect a response. When they did not get a response they would try again and again and then even page themselves to see if the system was working. Well, we saw what normally would have been one message multiply into many and only increase the message backlog - eventually catch up 20 minutes later as people gave up trying.

So in a similar fashion are the indexes not setup properly, are the responses getting too large and we are running out of memory and require page-swaps, or is there congestion at the drive controller reading all the data for too many simultaneous queries?

Just some not-so random thoughts... oh and it is much easier to diagnose a canvas or upholstery issue.

-Kevin
 
CSR_Admin said:
I am literally getting advice on this from a guy with a one page website that doesn't even work. A website he advertises for free on my site. This is too damn comical. Too bad you can't fire yourself. https://restorationmarine.com/

My network of people doesn't include Xenforo experts or server experts. However, the server it is on is owned by a CSR member, and it is a major hosting company. I don't even have to deal with the tech desk, I deal with his long time engineer who is probably too far up the chain of command to spend too much time on this issue unfortunately. I have a xenforo expert who has worked on this site for 10 years, and has done great for us. He is pretty sure everything is great on the xenforo front. I have hired a third party expert to come in and check both their math.

Guys, this forum stuff is so easy. Instead of complaining here with non-productive ideas and pointing fingers, just go start your own forum.
Click to expand...

Jim,

Unfortunately, they all need to be available to look into the issue when the problem is occurring - which I know can be a scheduling nightmare. Since the site was fine before the upgrade I would look at a couple simple metrics - 1) has the network utilization increased on your server port?, 2) have your memory page-swaps increased since that time?, 3) track performance on your drive for any read-write backlogs, and 4) look at the online user counts. Of course if possible do this all simultaneously when the problem is occuring.

I know this is all technical and probably out of your control but this is what I would demand. We need to approach this differently from looking for something that is broken as this is working just slow.

Sometimes it can also be as simple as one new feature that was added in the new software that is over stressing the systems.

-Kevin
 
Jim,

Since you went with:

I am literally getting advice on this from a guy with a one page website that doesn't even work. A website he advertises for free on my site. This is too damn comical. Too bad you can't fire yourself. https://restorationmarine.com/

Restoration Marine has gone through multiple upgrades since 2006. It is an ecommerce site that sells a lot of laminate material that is no longer available for Sea Ray interiors. It is not a one page site which is your way of throwing an insult. It has project sections, videos and pictures to teach people what problems they may have with their interiors and how to fix them. I'll agree that it is a niche business but that is okay with me because I started that business in 2006 to serve Sea Ray owners globally. We help customers from the EU to China maintain their boats.

We used to advertise with CSR but 90% of our leads come directly from Sea Ray and Marine Max so we work directly with them now.

You don't have to take my advice but you know who I am and my internet technical background isn't really a question is it?

I express my frustrations because I care about CSR and what it represents. I enjoy helping other members with issues that they may have and 99% of the time it has nothing to do with interiors.

I sincerely hope you get it sorted out.

Best,

John
 
Anything I offer about the site it to help, to add to the list of things to check out. For example, I no longer receive Alerts and when I looked at Alerts today I see no new ones, and the last one is from Saturday. When I go to an active thread I see posts since Saturday. Every time I left the site over the weekend I had to log back in, even though the "Stay Logged In" checkbox is checked, for example. That seems to have resolved itself today.

It's not a complaint, more sharing/saying to "Get it in the backlog" in case you are not aware. I also work in Software Development/Engineering so I try to share, like @KevinC just did, what it could be, what to look at, check, from my experiences with similar performance challenges.

For me yesterday it was not slow, rather it would not load at all after about 5 seconds, and I received a "Did not reponed" kind of error.
 
CSR_Admin said:
I am literally getting advice on this from a guy with a one page website that doesn't even work. A website he advertises for free on my site. This is too damn comical. Too bad you can't fire yourself. https://restorationmarine.com/

My network of people doesn't include Xenforo experts or server experts. However, the server it is on is owned by a CSR member, and it is a major hosting company. I don't even have to deal with the tech desk, I deal with his long time engineer who is probably too far up the chain of command to spend too much time on this issue unfortunately. I have a xenforo expert who has worked on this site for 10 years, and has done great for us. He is pretty sure everything is great on the xenforo front. I have hired a third party expert to come in and check both their math.

Guys, this forum stuff is so easy. Instead of complaining here with non-productive ideas and pointing fingers, just go start your own forum.
Click to expand...
Another IT pro here Senior system engineer/ Infrastructure Architect

I cruised the Zenforo community threads for performance issues.

A number of sites having issues with excessive hits from search engines.

Most respect the “robots.txt” file settings some lately are not.

A few the only solution is to block them.
 
hughespat57 said:
Another IT pro here Senior system engineer/ Infrastructure Architect

I cruised the Zenforo community threads for performance issues.

A number of sites having issues with excessive hits from search engines.

Most respect the “robots.txt” file settings some lately are not.

A few the only solution is to block them.
Click to expand...

1698174412283.png


To your point, look at all of the "guests". Highly un-likely that many real people are just reading post's. Seems like there would be a high number of bot's in that number.
 
Every forum has a significantly higher number of guests on than members. Just the way it is. Here is the number I just took from THT

471 members and 1562 guests
Most users ever online was 51250, 09-30-2011 at 01:03 PM.

Hosting company made a major change today that had been overlooked so let's see how it does and report back if you experience outages.

I will report the notifications to the xenforo programmer but i suspect your setting may have been reset with the upgrade and you may need to re-adjust them.
 
CSR_Admin said:
Every forum has a significantly higher number of guests on than members. Just the way it is. Here is the number I just took from THT

471 members and 1562 guests
Most users ever online was 51250, 09-30-2011 at 01:03 PM.

Hosting company made a major change today that had been overlooked so let's see how it does and report back if you experience outages.

I will report the notifications to the xenforo programmer but i suspect your setting may have been reset with the upgrade and you may need to re-adjust them.
Click to expand...

Yep for sure, just not at that high of a ratio usually.

But Dam Jim, don't compare us to them (THT), I mean really :D
 
CSR_Admin said:
Every forum has a significantly higher number of guests on than members. Just the way it is. Here is the number I just took from THT

471 members and 1562 guests
Most users ever online was 51250, 09-30-2011 at 01:03 PM.

Hosting company made a major change today that had been overlooked so let's see how it does and report back if you experience outages.

I will report the notifications to the xenforo programmer but i suspect your setting may have been reset with the upgrade and you may need to re-adjust them.
Click to expand...
I didn't realize until this weekend, when I was not automatically being logged in, how much you could do as a guest since I've always been a member. I didn't know I wasn't logged in, and didn't know non members could even look at the threads.
 
mrsrobinson said:
I didn't realize until this weekend, when I was not automatically being logged in, how much you could do as a guest since I've always been a member. I didn't know I wasn't logged in, and didn't know non members could even look at the threads.
Click to expand...
Somthing that is not related to the site but to my email client, is if I click on a CSR link in an email, I am not logged in automatically. FWIW, this has gone on long before the site server changeover.
 
Approx 8:30am this morning. Took forever to login.

1698237290189.png


After first loaded page things seemed normal again.
Looking at the response times from components it was all in the index.php which is tiny at 34.69KB.

Maybe there is something going on with the user session setup.

-Kevin
 
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