Site loading slow
 

Today I find cfd-online pages take a long time to load. I am in India. Its actually been slow for last 2-3 days if I remember correctly, but today is still slower.

Are all parts of the site slow or only some sections?

I have checked forums and wiki, and they are slow. Hitting "Post Reply" to a message also takes a long time to load.

The server is not very highly loaded right now. A few days ago the server was under quite some stress due to a massive spam bot attack, but that bot is gone for now.

If CFD-Wiki and the Forums are the only sections that are slow it could perhaps be related to our database engine (MySQL), since those sections make heavy use of MySQL. I'm currently on a mobile connection so for me eveyrything is quite slow now. Is, for example, the links section quick for you or is that also quite slow? The links section is mainly plain HTML pages so if that is also slow it must be a problem which is not directly related to our server.

The last days cfd online has become incredibly slow, every page takes about 1 min to load for me.

It was very slow just a few minutes back. But now it seems to be fine.

We have changed some settings in our firewall just now. Apparently our web-host had imposed more strict hacking filters so that we automatically banned IP ranges that had computers that the filter indicated were trying to hack our server. We have relaxed the filters slightly now.

These firewall filters could be related to the slowness problems also. Is it better now?

Its again slow and practically unusable. Slow both from my office and home, which are different ISPs.

We are examining the network problems. Right now it is also very very slow for me, and then 10 minutes later it is quick again. We do not know why and our ISP is helping us to diagnose the problem.

Two server problems
 

We have had two different problems with www.cfd-online.com lately, one problem is related to our firewall and some unnecessary strict hacking filters and one problem is related to our Apache web-server installation and Apache stalling.

The firewall filters have caused automatic bans of IP ranges that we did not intend to ban. For example, a couple of universities have been banned automatically by our firewall because they have one student who has been trying his skills as a hacker... These filters have now been relaxed and we have received reports that the universities that got banned are now able to access CFD Online again.

The Apache web-server problems is what causes our site to become very very slow at times. We have not solved this problem yet. We can fix it temporarily by restarting Apache, but that is not a long-term solution. Hopefully we will soon find why Apache all of a sudden is breaking up for us.

We apologize for all these problems. These things always tend to happen when you are away on vacation :mad:

we want names :)

now it is working properly again.

Server has been working well for 24hours now
 

Is anyone still having problems with www.cfd-online.com being very very slow or delivering an incorrect frontpage (the Apache installation page)? If you do please post a quick reply here so that we know that the problem is not completely solved.

We have gone through our server installation with a fine comb and have fine-tuned several settings both on the Apache web-server and on several other tools that we use (DNS server, firewall, spam and hacking filters, mail-scanning, ...). We have not found anything that can explain why our web-server stalled and became virtually unusable earlier this week though. Now the web-server has been working well for 24 hours and we hope that all the things we changed will keep www.cfd-online.com quick and healthy.

However, it is a bit irritating that we haven't found a single root cause of these problems. Hence, they might come back an hunt us again.

Seems fine to me now. I dont feel any slowness at present.

Still working
 

Site seems to still be working well. Please contact us if anyone is still having problems. Yesterday we had a lot of traffic and easily served more than 3,000 web-pages per hour for a long period (see http://www.cfd-online.com/Stats/#hourrep) and the server was not even half-loaded.

hi. just want to report that the forum is getting really slow (has been few days)

it need around 1 minute to give me any page, even if ti contains just one message.

i'm in the uk and this happens with various isp.

I have also noticed the site being a bit slow over the last week. Not as slow as you mention, but slower than before. It is not related to the server being overloaded and it is not related to only http traffic. Most likely it is a network issue. I will send a question to our ISP to ask if he has any ideas what might be causing this. Anyone else who has also noticed this slowness over the last week?

I should also say that since around Christmas cfd-online.com has been running with a throttled network speed. The reason is that our ISP was attacked by a hacker who managed to start up very aggressive IRC flood-bots. These bots crashed his entire network. Several servers were compromised and we think that the hosting environment our ISP runs has a security hole. While we are still running on this vulnerable hosting environment we will run with a throttled network speed. I do not think that this is what causes the slowness seen over the last week though. This mainly affects large file transfers.

We have started to move over to a completely new hosting environment. Soon we will be ready to move over the entire site to a completely reinstalled server with a new hosting environment. Then we will run full speed without any network throttling. If you want to follow the development on this please read our twitter page: http://www.twitter.com/cfdonline

I have noticed the slowdown in the last days as well. Right now it's slow but tolerable; earlier this morning pages from cfd-online would take minutes to load.

Our ISP has changed something in our network configuration. Is the site quicker now or is it still slow?

It seems to be a lot quicker now!

definitely lot better!

well done.

How quick is the site now?
 

All you guys who complained about the site being slow. Could you please give me some feedback on how quick it feels now? We have reinstalled the entire server and switched to a different hosting environment. We started with the defaults settings and the site has felt a bit slow over the last week IMHO. Today I have tried to optimize apache httpd settings and database mysql settings to improve performance.

My feeling is that it has got a lot faster. Do you guys agree? On a scale from '1 - terribly slow' to '10 - lightning fast' how would you judge cfd-online.com today? It is always difficult to judge this based on how the site works at one time from one place, so it would be nice to get some feedback from other people.

its very good now, i'd give it 8/10.

N