[nadreg]

Is anyone experiencing problems surfing the site today? I had a report of database errors, and I wanted to know if this was just a blip, or something more serious.

Please reply to this thread if you're seeing any issues.

Thanks.

[PeakXV]

Yes - I was getting database errors a few hours ago & couldn't access the site until I cleared my cache and visited another site.

[nadreg]

Very strange, indeed. Is everything OK now?

[PeakXV]

*&( #qa$ ^(*&^(* ^(^(*& &^%())^( Qwerty ^(&^*(&!

[PeakXV]

.... just kidding everything seems to be fine now. I'll post here if the gremlins return.

[PeakXV]

One thing - yesterday my system started to hang when a 'new' graphic intensive advertisment appears (albeit randomly ... I think? Or is it a new sponsor!?) on the top of any given Indiamike page. The add is from a cheap/discount airline booking company ixigo and queries you for flight information etc. When this ad appears it will either totally crash my system or suspend it's operation for about 3 minutes. Don't know if it is related to the DB problem .... but it is a problem!!

[machadinha]

<cross-posted with Peak. Yes, quite. It doesn't crash my system though, but if it does others, that's even more serious of course.>

I've had no database errors (yet) no, or not recently anyway. Like I reported in private though (by PM, you may not have caught it), that new Ixigo banner/menu/thingy (welcome in itself I guess) on top of threads is causing me massive lags opening any thread that it's on. I think I was online as you were toying around with it; it's shifted from taking very long to open a thread, to now opening but then taking very long to finally load the full page. The window freezes up during the process, until it's loaded.

I imagine this must be harder even on people on slower connections/lesser machines, and it's a pain even here. Maybe others want to confirm or deny whether they have the same experience.

I thought it could be an issue with having to connect to Ixigo's server, but my firewall doesn't seem to indicate so; no connection to them is made I think (I don't keep logs on all traffic though). So I don't know what causes it.

(Wait: Checking on that again, loading a page some connections are made to some google servers it seems, but I wonder if that's not just because of the Google ads (which I block btw but not through my firewall, so some connections may still be made). It is possible of course that the banner calls up some other connections that I block, but my machine would still be trying, leading to those lags. And checking on that: Yes, I have logs on blocked connections to one indiamike.com... Maybe the banner calls for irregular traffic? Since I'm still happily reading and typing away here albeit a little slowly, I'm obviously not blocking all traffic to IndiaMike. I don't really get it though, it's just outgoing TCP http traffic, I don't block that at all, so it must have to do with the ports used or something.)

EDIT: To add, it's possible another type of traffic (outgoing UDP) gets blocked first though, after which a rule kicks in to block other types of traffic to the same address as well. I'm not that savvy on it to be able to adequately interpret those logs. My system is set up to allow most any regular type of traffic as far as I know, or it should give an alert if something beyond those rulesets is going on. So if there's no alert, whatever's being blocked should fall within fairly normal rulesets -- although it's always possible I've created a rule or two that are too strict.

[machadinha]

ps Nadreg, it reminds me of when you were toying around with weather banners for a bit, I think this led to similar effects.

I'm not doubting your webmastering capacities, but maybe you should get some webbie to look at how to properly install those banners? Other sites do it, so I can't see why it should be a problem here. It's just mysterious. But then I ain't no webbie.

[machadinha]

pps OK, I still find it very confusing.

Unless you've been working live on it for the past 24 hours or so whenever I was online, am I right thinking that banner gets thrown in at random? At first I thought it was only added to threads in certain (immediately travel-related) sub-forums -- but I now get the impression it gets randomly added or not to the same threads in any forum as you open them.

I now noticed upon opening a thread (that I can read and scroll through alright but won't fully load all the same) that a connection is being sought to im.ixigo.com -- which at least my machine can't establish.

Other than that, to add to my report above: It seems to vary between taking forever to open a page at all, or it opening alright but not loading for a long time. It's very irritating, and if I were a new visitor here I would browse away because of it (it's possible it only affects members though. It's a pain either way, makes the site practically unreadable unless you love it already and are really determined, and esp. if you want to quickly scroll around to look up some stuff.)

To clarify: The problem seems to only occur when trying to open a thread that that top banner is on. Scrolling around the site in other ways seems to function as normal.

I'd noticed before that since recently you had a side banner to Ixigo in certain sub-sections, which I don't think caused this problem. Then again I rarely go through any of those anyway (as distinguished from sub-forums, i.e., the Travel, Community, etc. sections), so I didn't pay it much attention.

[nadreg]

Originally Posted by PeakXV

One thing - yesterday my system started to hang when a 'new' graphic intensive advertisment appears (albeit randomly ... I think? Or is it a new sponsor!?) on the top of any given Indiamike page. The add is from a cheap/discount airline booking company ixigo and queries you for flight information etc. When this ad appears it will either totally crash my system or suspend it's operation for about 3 minutes. Don't know if it is related to the DB problem .... but it is a problem!!

Are you guys still having the problem? I tweaked the code a little bit, so it should be fine now. Let me know if it's still causing issues.

[machadinha]

Okidoki, will report again as I go along

[PeakXV]

The banner that was causing the loading problem seems to have vanished from all threads now(it was omnipresent this aft) ..... if you can link me to a page where it is still lurking - I can test it out for you.

[nadreg]

Hmmm... do you have an ad blocker on?

[chAos]

I had the same problem with the ixigo ad, making the site slow.

[PeakXV]

Originally Posted by nadreg

Hmmm... do you have an ad blocker on?

Yes - I have always had the Google ad blocker active. But 'that' banner, apparently 'transparent' to the ad blocker before your recent 'tweaking', is now being rejected.