Quicksand Fans

HTTP Error/Timeout

Looks like the system crashed for the third night in succession at about the same time - 9:40pm BST. I was posting some images tonight, got as far as the OK having selected the image files, got the HTTP error and a page refresh timed out. I pinged http://www.quicksandfans.com, the packets were lost "Request timed out", waited tried again with same result, refreshed the page and got the GoDaddy lock page (indicating that the server is coming up again), pinged again and this time got replies. Shortly after this the site was available again. Please note, each of these crashes were encountered doing different things, i.e. backing up a level in the forum, entering text in a message and adding files. See image below for ping details and GoDaddy Lock page.

Yea, it's pretty obvious that some of the members here are not having a good experience with all of this.

Based on the feedback taken as a whole, it's not clear if this is one issue, or several. In any case, the firewall (which I was hoodwinked into adding) seems to be a problem.

When funds and other resources become available, I will moving the board to an alternate hosting environment - one that we will have much more control over (and save a lot of money in the long run).

The only thing I can suggest in the meantime is to try different browsers and/or VPN settings (if applicable).

It's really terrible. After logging in (works really fast) i'm only able to do a few clicks and after the forth/fith one, i receive this loading-screen/timeout/godaddy....
It's barely usable at all. Different browsers, devices, LAN, WiFi doesn't matter at all.
I fear we will crash again soon

Sounds very odd. I am generally logged eighteen hours a day and have not experienced any such issue.

Fred588 wrote:Sounds very odd. I am generally logged eighteen hours a day and have not experienced any such issue.

Yea, it's been everything I can do to not bring this sort of thing up.

I use more board functions here than anyone, and get a firewall glitch about once every three or four weeks.

Sigh.

dlodoski wrote:

Fred588 wrote:Sounds very odd. I am generally logged eighteen hours a day and have not experienced any such issue.

Yea, it's been everything I can do to not bring this sort of thing up.

I use more board functions here than anyone, and get a firewall glitch about once every three or four weeks.

Sigh.

I am definitely not an IT person, but when a problem is intermittent, it suggests to me something to do with timing or perhaps routing. That is to say, something that is not constant. That doesn't eliminate a whole lot of possible causes, of course. The was one problem at quicksandland that happened after the recent "upgrade" at Go Daddy, but that was completely consistent. It had to do with a reference in some of my site's code to a database, that was not, and should not have been, changed during the upgrade. Once that was corrected everything works. So far as I know.

I was proficient enough with data networking maintenance and troubleshooting that I finished my nine years doing that as the daytime supervisor for the City of Los Angeles Network Operations Center (300 remote locations, 18,000 nodes). So, I know an intermittent problem when I see one.

This isn't so much of a network issue as what we used to refer to as an 'upper layer' problem (the firewall stuff notwithstanding). It's pretty much a waste of time to report this because it's a foregone conclusion that the hosting provider will report everything tip-top on their end.

Again, hopefully things will get better when we control the entire environment.

I think there are at least two distinct problems, the one Schlamm reports and the timeout/GoDaddy Lock.

I posted some of my experiences on the Schlamm issue on that thread, put simply, an image won't upload via the "Add Files" dialogue and you get an HTTP Error before the "Place Inline" button activates. My workaround for this is to edit the image in Photoshop and do a trivial change. Usually the image uploads then. I don't think Schlamm got that to work but found another way to fix the image so it would upload. This one is intermittent and only affects a very few images (in my case). The issue isn't related to size (it's not necessarily the bigger ones that fail) or type of image (mine are all pngs).

I'm not sure the timeout/GoDaddy Lock is intermittent. I haven't been noting actual times on this, but there does seem to be periods where it is more likely to occur. For me these are, early morning (7am to 8am) or evening (9:30pm to 10:30pm) UK BST, usually outside these times I don't get any issues.

Like Fred I'm often signed in for long periods, but you only notice the outages if you are active at the time the issue crops up. This morning (about 7:45am) I caught the end of an outage, I only got the GoDaddy page and missed the timeout bit.