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[Kerryd]

18 hours ago, SoiBiker said:

 

Nancy's such an expert, she was using forums a few years before the first web browser was even developed. Impressive.

 

Actually so was I. Shock !! What ??!! How is that possible ? 

Well for starters, the internet wasn't magically invented just a few years ago. It was first developed in the 60s and it started to become more widely used by the public in the early 80s.

 

"Back in the day" (the 80s for me) we had "UseNet" groups and Bulletin Boards and such. ( Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.[1] Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. )

 

Everything was done through the DOS command line. When ANSI graphics came out it was a big event as we could now create colour menus  ! That was back in the fun days of 2400 baud modems (or even before those for some people). People didn't "surf the net" like they do today - they dialed up the phone number of another computer and used the BB program on that computer to chat, read articles and play games. I ran a simple BB on my blazing beast of a 286 with it's 1mb of RAM, 40mb hard drive and 2400 baud modem back in '89/90. Had to have a program running that would automatically reboot the computer every so often because the modem would lock up and prevent anyone from connecting. Biggest annoyance was, if anyone was using my Bulletin Board, I couldn't dial out to anyone else's (unless I booted whoever was tying up my phone line.)

 

I remember one guy who ran a "small" BBS in his house - he had 8 individual 286 computers networked together as the bulletin board program would only allow a single user at a time. Even if you had 8 modems, if one person was playing a game, no one else could chat or look at pics or anything so buddy had to have the BB program running on 8 machines (or more if he wanted to have more concurrent users). 

(Early DOS wasn't very good for multi-tasking) !

 

Ah the good old days !

[NancyL]

29 minutes ago, Kerryd said:

 

Actually so was I. Shock !! What ??!! How is that possible ? 

Well for starters, the internet wasn't magically invented just a few years ago. It was first developed in the 60s and it started to become more widely used by the public in the early 80s.

 

"Back in the day" (the 80s for me) we had "UseNet" groups and Bulletin Boards and such. ( Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.[1] Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Usenet can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between email and web forums. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. )

 

Everything was done through the DOS command line. When ANSI graphics came out it was a big event as we could now create colour menus  ! That was back in the fun days of 2400 baud modems (or even before those for some people). People didn't "surf the net" like they do today - they dialed up the phone number of another computer and used the BB program on that computer to chat, read articles and play games. I ran a simple BB on my blazing beast of a 286 with it's 1mb of RAM, 40mb hard drive and 2400 baud modem back in '89/90. Had to have a program running that would automatically reboot the computer every so often because the modem would lock up and prevent anyone from connecting. Biggest annoyance was, if anyone was using my Bulletin Board, I couldn't dial out to anyone else's (unless I booted whoever was tying up my phone line.)

 

I remember one guy who ran a "small" BBS in his house - he had 8 individual 286 computers networked together as the bulletin board program would only allow a single user at a time. Even if you had 8 modems, if one person was playing a game, no one else could chat or look at pics or anything so buddy had to have the BB program running on 8 machines (or more if he wanted to have more concurrent users). 

(Early DOS wasn't very good for multi-tasking) !

 

Ah the good old days !

 

+1

I gotta tell ya'  a couple nights ago when I had my little tizzy fit, it was taking me back to the days of using bulletin boards and chatting with a dial-up modem.  At least with those forums, you could see the words printing out on your monitor and know something was happening.  All you had to do was be patient and soon the entire message would be revealed.  Gave you time to go get a refill, use the loo, look at the newspaper or whatever.  Sadly, with ThaiVisa you know it isn't right and sitting patiently staring at the screen isn't going to help when nothing's happening. 

 

P.S.  It's been interesting to see a couple of my "fans" hop into this thread to say, shall we say, their usual unkind things about me.  Gee, guys, do you have something set up that notifies you whenever I post so you can check it out?  

 

[SoiBiker]

14 minutes ago, NancyL said:

 

+1

I gotta tell ya'  a couple nights ago when I had my little tizzy fit, it was taking me back to the days of using bulletin boards and chatting with a dial-up modem.  At least with those forums, you could see the words printing out on your monitor and know something was happening.  All you had to do was be patient and soon the entire message would be revealed.  Gave you time to go get a refill, use the loo, look at the newspaper or whatever.  Sadly, with ThaiVisa you know it isn't right and sitting patiently staring at the screen isn't going to help when nothing's happening. 

 

P.S.  It's been interesting to see a couple of my "fans" hop into this thread to say, shall we say, their usual unkind things about me.  Gee, guys, do you have something set up that notifies you whenever I post so you can check it out?  

 

Wow. A 30-something page thread about a major event on the forum, and Nancy thinks people are here to read about her.

 

Could you get much more self-important?

[VBF]

1 hour ago, Kerryd said:

Perhaps I've overlooked it, but I was noticing today that there doesn't seem to be the "go to first unread post" option within the threads any more (yes, I know it is still in the forum listings immediately to the left of the thread title).

 

I just opened up a thread that had grown to 9 pages and had to wade through 6 of them before I finally got to the last post I could remember reading. Quite often I click a link that takes me directly into the thread (like I just did for this thread). Previously I could then click the "go to first unread post" and carry on. Now I find myself scrolling my mouse to the top-right corner of the thread and looking for the button only to realize it's not there anymore.

 

Not a big deal, just made things a little more convenient now and then. 

 

(ps: site is really lagging this afternoon and appears to have crashed for a few minutes at least.)

@Kerryd Good point!  I've just been searching for that and yes I agree it would be very useful. @Tech Doctor Could you add this to your "to do" list when all the indexing bugs are sorted please.

[Carib]

7 hours ago, bdenner said:

May have been asked?

Why are quotes displayed in OVERSIZED fonts?

Why can't I review a post before submitting it?

 

Yes, why the OVERSIZED fonts??

[Tech Doctor]

Its a bug, we are looking to fix it after speeding the forum back up.

 

TD

[NancyL]

53 minutes ago, SoiBiker said:

 

Wow. A 30-something page thread about a major event on the forum, and Nancy thinks people are here to read about her.

 

Could you get much more self-important?

At least one miscreant hadn't posted in this thread until I did.  And then he started to "follow it".  I don't really have time to do research on the rest of you.  And don't worry, SB, I don't consider you a "fan".

[balo]

51 minutes ago, Tech Doctor said:

Its a bug, we are looking to fix it after speeding the forum back up.

 

Visiting TV is like travelling back in time to the buggy software we struggled with in the 90's.   

 

 

 

[Carib]

Can we please cut the crap about self importance and answers to that, I come here to look for possible solutions/answers for the new forum setup, not personal nonsense. 

[transam]

39 minutes ago, NancyL said:

At least one miscreant hadn't posted in this thread until I did.  And then he started to "follow it".  I don't really have time to do research on the rest of you.  And don't worry, SB, I don't consider you a "fan".

But you had problems dealing with me on the POTY thingy, your fear of failing, yep it's true..Now you post crap because TVF is going through a change and you ain't got the balls to bolster support....Dear oh dear...

[JJGreen]

8 hours ago, SattaheapSea said:

 

well, I have used and worked lots before.

but comparing this one with the old one if not wrong , it has  preview button sitting right next to submit button.

Then I would say for me it's going to take awhile to understand all the functions  provided by TV forum.

I don't know how other members feel about the design  because i found out that there are different levels of computer literacy here.

 

 

just play around with it...have a go. Its painful reading postings from the wilfully helpless

[JJGreen]

2 hours ago, NancyL said:

.  I don't really have time to do research on the rest of you.  

 

Only a very few are research worthy.

JJGreen. Check me out

[SoiBiker]

2 hours ago, JJGreen said:

 

just play around with it...have a go. Its painful reading postings from the wilfully helpless

 

Absolutely. The old format wasn't particularly user friendly. If you could figure that out, you can figure this out too - unless you've reached the stage where you're unwilling to engage with anything new. 

[Tech Doctor]

quotes fixed, patches applied. 

 

TD

[NancyL]

Doesn't look like one of the "old problems" was fixed.  A short time ago, I added a reply to a thread on the Health forum.  When I hit "Submit Reply", I was greeted with a blank screen.  Huh, now what to do?  I waited a time and then tried to refresh and was asked if I wanted to resubmit the form.  I've done this before only to find I've created a double post.  This time, I opened the Health forum on a new window and found my new post hadn't been added, so I did indeed hit refresh on the previous window and see that the post is indeed on the Health forum, thankfully just one time.

 

It's stuff like this that wasn't fixed from the old version that's making it frustrating to use TV.

[SoiBiker]

16 minutes ago, NancyL said:

Doesn't look like one of the "old problems" was fixed.  A short time ago, I added a reply to a thread on the Health forum.  When I hit "Submit Reply", I was greeted with a blank screen.  Huh, now what to do?  I waited a time and then tried to refresh and was asked if I wanted to resubmit the form.  I've done this before only to find I've created a double post.  This time, I opened the Health forum on a new window and found my new post hadn't been added, so I did indeed hit refresh on the previous window and see that the post is indeed on the Health forum, thankfully just one time.

 

It's stuff like this that wasn't fixed from the old version that's making it frustrating to use TV.

 

So they've fixed the old double post problem?

 

Awesome. Good job!

[NancyL]

No, not really.  I got a blank screen when I went to post and I had to go thru some extraordinary steps to make sure I wasn't double posting.  That's hardly what I'd call a "fix".

[SoiBiker]

You didn't get a double post, though. 

[MJCM]

Double Posting has many causes and there is unfortunately not a solution available that I know of.

 

- It can happen because the Forum Server is stressed to it's limits

- It can happen because of the Forums internet connection

- It can happen because of problems with the users Internet connection

- It can happen because of problems with the users PC.

- etc ....

- And it can also happen because of a PEBKAC error

 

 

Edited August 20, 2016 by MJCM
Changed error message ;)

[thaibeachlovers]

This time I am sending congratulations!

I just found out I can now stop those annoying notifications. WELL DONE and thanks.

[MJCM]

Getting an Error message, when I press "Clear Notifications" in the Notifications Screen (pressing the Bell Icon)

 

The page it refers to is this one

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/?app=core&module=system&controller=plugins&do=clearNotifications

 

And the error message I get is

 

 

Quote

 

Page Not Found.

Error code: 2S106/1

 

 

[Fabricus]

54 minutes ago, MJCM said:

Double Posting has many causes and there is unfortunately not a solution available that I know of.

 

You can run a PHP script to check for identical posts (ie, username + content) inserted into the DB within the previous five minutes, or simply compare the new (pending) entry with the previous dozen or so.

 

This kind of stuff is easy to program.

[MJCM]

4 minutes ago, Fabricus said:

 

You can run a PHP script to check for identical posts (ie, username + content) inserted into the DB within the previous five minutes, or simply compare the new (pending) entry with the previous dozen or so.

 

This kind of stuff is easy to program.

 

A couple of days I was posting and the save button wouldn't go away, after 15 seconds or so I closed the browser window (didn't press anything else). Opened a new browser and went back to the forum were I was posting and there were 4 identical double posts of my post, I am not sure if they also had the same time stamp.

 

Question, though, Wouldn't such a script eat a lot resources on the server side ?

[manarak]

41 minutes ago, MJCM said:

 

A couple of days I was posting and the save button wouldn't go away, after 15 seconds or so I closed the browser window (didn't press anything else). Opened a new browser and went back to the forum were I was posting and there were 4 identical double posts of my post, I am not sure if they also had the same time stamp.

 

Question, though, Wouldn't such a script eat a lot resources on the server side ?

 

no, a simple SQL script like that is easy to program and also doesn't eat a lot of resources (because only recent posts are concerned, so the portion of the table is small), should be pretty straightforward.

Edited August 20, 2016 by manarak

[manarak]

I am having problems with the new board.

I get timeouts, it is generally slow, double posts when timeout, I can't see older posts with "load more activity", the search doesn't seem to have been indexed, can't find stuff, etc.

 

Building the search index is a heavy task, very heavy on server resources.

I guess the new forum software is much more resource hungry than the old one, I would be interested to know specifics about the server hosting the forum, i.e. RAM, procs, average server load, etc.

 

The best solution might be to simply upgrade the server.

 

I'm also wondering if ThaiVisa has its own server admin or if they use a "managed server" for silly $$$. 

I'm also wondering about the HTML/CSS/scripting capabilities of the webmaster.

For running such a site economically, a technical person is needed for taking care of an "own" rootserver and of the HTLM templates and the occasional tweaking of script sourcecode, for example PHP.

 

For example a lot of server load can already be taken off by setting up the apache modules mod_security and fail2ban can be used in such a way that they will automatically bans the IPs of hackers and spammers in the server's IP tables firewall, so that these IPs won't be able to connect with the server anymore.

Slow database queries should be logged and analyzed to see if there are any frequent queries run on unindexed columns, etc.

 

One more thing that can cause huge problems and is often overlooked is the server's storage I/O performance.

That's what the server uses to access the database.

For any normal webserver I'd recommend at least 100 MB/s, never falling below 20.

But Forum sites like TV have a very heavy database usage, and unless the whole database can be loaded into RAM, the server will use storage I/O, so I'd recommend a minimum of 250 - 300 MB/s, never falling below 100 MB/s.

 

Admin, if you read this, open a shell and use this command to check I/O performance:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

 

P.S.

also, the ajax doesn't seem to work properly. When I tried to post this, the button remained stuck saying "saving post..." or something but nothing happened. So I copied the text and reloaded the page, and the post wasn't there. I'm so happy I copy-pasted! :-)

 

good luck admin, just say if you need some help.

Edited August 20, 2016 by manarak

[Tech Doctor]

Manarak,

 

All the above is being used, however we are having to wait to sort fixes from the old architecture,  we have inherited a lot of this and have to work not only with our vendor on there software issues in this version until we can use load-balancing and multiple front end web farm architectures. The main issues is the load on the DB which has numerous CPU and over 30GB Ram but gets hit with over 300 connections. This is causing the double posts and timeouts.

 

You also forgot about the caching services we use both on the db and front end, the teams that run Thai Visa are aware of configurations that improve performance, however we are hindered as we have been told to remove them whilst our software vendor troubleshoots.

 

TD

[manarak]

1 hour ago, Tech Doctor said:

Manarak,

 

All the above is being used, however we are having to wait to sort fixes from the old architecture,  we have inherited a lot of this and have to work not only with our vendor on there software issues in this version until we can use load-balancing and multiple front end web farm architectures. The main issues is the load on the DB which has numerous CPU and over 30GB Ram but gets hit with over 300 connections. This is causing the double posts and timeouts.

 

You also forgot about the caching services we use both on the db and front end, the teams that run Thai Visa are aware of configurations that improve performance, however we are hindered as we have been told to remove them whilst our software vendor troubleshoots.

 

TD

 

yes, caching is one aspect too, but I would expect IPB to be pretty up to date with caching techniques.

on a related note, there are also code optimizers/accelerators like Zend, but I would be surprised if that really improved IPB's code performance.

 

as the software vendor troubleshoots, I guess they have the expertise and issues will be identified quickly.

 

Just out of curiosity, what is the result if you run this command:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync

?

 

300 connections is not that big. the troubles you describe sound a lot like a slow I/O issue.

 

In the past, "fast" cloud servers were touted to me, but as soon as I brought a site over to test, it failed dramatically... did the dd test... and yep, between 1 to 4 MB/s throughput.

Cloud servers are only performing well when they can either load the whole site contents in 20% of their RAM, the rest being for httpd and mysqld to use, or when their storage array has a really fast link, which most of the time is not the case.

 

another way to diagnose slow I/O is if the server often goes into wait states, which seen from outside, seems to happen. This would then cause the ajax to time out, because the ajax request remains unanswered.

Edited August 20, 2016 by manarak

[VBF]

2 hours ago, MJCM said:

Getting an Error message, when I press "Clear Notifications" in the Notifications Screen (pressing the Bell Icon)

 

The page it refers to is this one

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/?app=core&module=system&controller=plugins&do=clearNotifications

 

And the error message I get is

 

 

 

@Tech Doctor Just looked in for the first time today  (08:45 here) and having cleared all browsers etc before shutting down last night, can confirm what @MJCM says above happens exactly as quoted. Only mention it FYI because this worked earlier this week so there's been a mis-configuration introduced somewhere.

[SattaheapSea]

300 users concurrently shouldn't be a big issue.  Think of e-bay, new york times and other sites, people across the globe access it and query million of items and let's Imagine that how much would be to suck their RAM and CPU.  

 

load balancing is very common for cloud service as the outrage doesn't show up all the time but otherwise it appears only a certain of time. I think you should've seen traffic flow from activity logs.  I am not saying Amazon Cloud hasn't got enough resources to provide TV forum.   It's because possibly something's wrong with the initial configurations. Or security provided by your Amazon is preventing us from interacting with DB or HTTP server(occasionally) like it keeps dropping every single PING package. 

 

I wonder if your team have installed and tested IPB on a separate server before  launching.

this morning my emoticon was empty and later on this afternoon it works.

 

Edited August 20, 2016 by SattaheapSea

[Tech Doctor]

1 hour ago, VBF said:

@Tech Doctor Just looked in for the first time today  (08:45 here) and having cleared all browsers etc before shutting down last night, can confirm what @MJCM says above happens exactly as quoted. Only mention it FYI because this worked earlier this week so there's been a mis-configuration introduced somewhere.

 

Please try now. Should be ok.