They should just stay away from here. BaT seems more their speed and type.
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They should just stay away from here. BaT seems more their speed and type.
The rest of the world, sadly. Is probably more their speed and type. I think you’ve just carved out and maintained a particular breed of high brow integrity (or low brow integrity in my case, but integrity all the same) for the cars covered here. Good on you for that. I’m glad to participate and learn.
Cheers,
maw
Cheers,
maw
Come to think of it, I SHOULD. Perhaps $250 per car.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. I believe that this site has a lot to do with why these cars are changing hands for so much money. I don't think that it would be wrong to do so, and national security appears to be a perfectly acceptable reason for adding a tariff 
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I have started getting extremely high levels of errors from the hosting company’s database server over the past few days.
Some of you may also have seen site errors increase on your end.
It appears as if the periodic (about every two years) database server memory leak situation is happening, which slowly strangles the server and eventually brings it down until it is properly rebooted.
If the site does go down, please have patience and know that it is a situation that is beyond our control. The site will likely be down until the hosting company realizes the problem and remedies by rebooting.
We do have appropriate database backups in place, though we’ve never lost any data in the past.
This all may pan out not to be a problem as well, particularly if the database server is rebooted before it self-implodes.
Just wanted to let you all know what is happening. This happens as I said every 18-24 months, and all is well after the hosted remedies the problem on their end. This very very likely affects all of the customers whose sites rely on this same database server that ours uses.
Cheers,
Gerry
Some of you may also have seen site errors increase on your end.
It appears as if the periodic (about every two years) database server memory leak situation is happening, which slowly strangles the server and eventually brings it down until it is properly rebooted.
If the site does go down, please have patience and know that it is a situation that is beyond our control. The site will likely be down until the hosting company realizes the problem and remedies by rebooting.
We do have appropriate database backups in place, though we’ve never lost any data in the past.
This all may pan out not to be a problem as well, particularly if the database server is rebooted before it self-implodes.
Just wanted to let you all know what is happening. This happens as I said every 18-24 months, and all is well after the hosted remedies the problem on their end. This very very likely affects all of the customers whose sites rely on this same database server that ours uses.
Cheers,
Gerry
Over the past few days, I continue to see several database-related errors per hour. It's an exceedingly high level of errors -- sometimes 5-10 every 60 minutes. This tells me that the hoster's database server is continuing to descend into hell. You may also be experiencing site errors when you try to read threads or post.
If the site goes down, be patient and know that it is nothing to do with the forum software, or forum database itself. It's 100% on the hosting company, and they eventually will clean up their mess and reset things.
I've attached a copy of my e-mail inbox with all of the error messages I've received just since 6:30 this morning, which was the last time I cleared all of the old errors out. Not pretty to see.
Cheers,
Gerry
If the site goes down, be patient and know that it is nothing to do with the forum software, or forum database itself. It's 100% on the hosting company, and they eventually will clean up their mess and reset things.
I've attached a copy of my e-mail inbox with all of the error messages I've received just since 6:30 this morning, which was the last time I cleared all of the old errors out. Not pretty to see.
Cheers,
Gerry
Not sure if this is relevant to the current problems, but here in the UK, over the last 2/3 days - and indeed for much of today - the site has not been accessible. I'm not sure if my experiences reflect those of others this side of the pond, but up to about 2 hours ago, the site displayed the message "server too busy". (Posted at 21.00 GMT).
I was unable to access the site for a couple of hours this morning.
vBooletin message "The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later."
This has been happening intermittently for about a week now, after a few hours the site usually comes back up. I assumed it's related to 1&1's head-in-the-sand approach to the database problems.
Checking the system logs, for the past couple of weeks the site has been experiencing a HUGE amount of traffic from China-based IP addresses.I was unable to access the site for a couple of hours this morning.
vBooletin message "The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later."
This has been happening intermittently for about a week now, after a few hours the site usually comes back up. I assumed it's related to 1&1's head-in-the-sand approach to the database problems.
Looking back to the beginning of October, there was literally ZERO traffic from China. It's only in the past couple of weeks that this has been happening. I'll do some additional investigation, but it appears that this traffic is overwhelming the number of available simultaneous connections on the database server.
I have seen spikes like this in the past, on rare occasions, often from Chinese Baidu search spiders which swarm the site, suck it up, and move on after a period of time. That may be what is happening now. I'll check this out. I can exclude any search spider from the site by updating the robots.txt file, and have done so in the past for nuisance spiders. I generally don't mind the BingBot, Google and Yahoo search engines as they are not serious resource hogs. But I have excluded Yandex.ru (Russian) search spiders in the past for their same "swarm" tactics.
I've attached screen shots of the site logs. Check out the activity in the past week or two as to what it was before, both from the logs and from the graphs.
Wow.
It appears that traffic and site activity levels have returned to more of a "normal" range during the past 48 hours, so hopefully the assault by the Chinese servers has ended. This was overwhelming the number of open & simultaneous connections to the database, which was why folks were getting the "server busy" error messages.
This assault lasted for several weeks, interestingly, starting in early October.
I expect things to return to normal, down to a level of our normal 1,500+ visitors per day.
Do let me know if you continue to get error messages based on things being busy.
Cheers,
Gerry
I’ve programmed a “Tachy Goes to Coventry” (Google it) server-busy mode for all members of this forum who are tagged as TFTSNBN (Banzworld 126) LPS (Lifetime Premium Sucker)/active contributor/FoMs (Friends of McLiar).
Remember .... if McLiar has ever called you “Bro” or “Broham” on TFTSNBN, that’s a lifetime
...
I expect things to return to normal, down to a level of our normal 1,500+ visitors per day.
Do let me know if you continue to get error messages based on things being busy.
...
You asked...
I'm getting bombarded with forum posts, text messages, PMs and e-mails on all my accounts in recent days -- at least a dozen breathless communications daily -- asking me whether I know that the site is always busy and/or slow, why this is happening, and/or what am I doing to fix it?
1) I know the site is slow, and giving errors. I am very aware of this. I am on the site most days at least several times per day, and often several times per hour schedule and work permitting. It has been doing this for weeks, as the database server slowly descends into the abyss of hell before the hosting company reboots it.
2) This slowness and "server is too busy" errors is NOT being caused by the forum traffic, forum software, forum database, forum attachments, or anything else related to the forum itself. It is being caused solely by the hosting company's servers being of reduced performance at the moment, compounded by a major spike in traffic from China in recent weeks (which seems to have abated over the past few days) that is overwhelming the servers.
3) There is nothing that I can do about this situation. There is basically nothing I have done about it in the past years when it has happened. Basically we are in a waiting game for the hosting company's shared servers to completely implode under their own weight, and reboot. At that point in time, the site will return to its normal performance levels.
4) Unfortunately being a "hosted" situation, I do not have control over the servers and cannot perform a reboot or otherwise reset things. It's just the way things are set up. For now.
5) I have been as transparent and pro-active as possible with regard to the site's problems. I recall several weeks ago (posted earlier in this thread) noting that there were pending problems I was starting to see on my end. These problems have progressively gotten worse, and I have even posted screen shots of my e-mail inbox showing the error messages I was getting as the situation deteriorated. I expect the situation at some point to deteriorate further, and even for the site to go down. When the site goes down, I cannot tell you for how long it will be down, because it is at the mercy of the hosting company to reboot/reset the servers and bring things back up. In the past it has been a matter of hours, to several days. Hopefully it will not be in the "several days" range when this happens -- and it WILL happen.
6) Please be persistent and retry to load the site if you receive "server too busy" messages. Generally it will allow you to access things if you wait a few minutes.
1) I know the site is slow, and giving errors. I am very aware of this. I am on the site most days at least several times per day, and often several times per hour schedule and work permitting. It has been doing this for weeks, as the database server slowly descends into the abyss of hell before the hosting company reboots it.
2) This slowness and "server is too busy" errors is NOT being caused by the forum traffic, forum software, forum database, forum attachments, or anything else related to the forum itself. It is being caused solely by the hosting company's servers being of reduced performance at the moment, compounded by a major spike in traffic from China in recent weeks (which seems to have abated over the past few days) that is overwhelming the servers.
3) There is nothing that I can do about this situation. There is basically nothing I have done about it in the past years when it has happened. Basically we are in a waiting game for the hosting company's shared servers to completely implode under their own weight, and reboot. At that point in time, the site will return to its normal performance levels.
4) Unfortunately being a "hosted" situation, I do not have control over the servers and cannot perform a reboot or otherwise reset things. It's just the way things are set up. For now.
5) I have been as transparent and pro-active as possible with regard to the site's problems. I recall several weeks ago (posted earlier in this thread) noting that there were pending problems I was starting to see on my end. These problems have progressively gotten worse, and I have even posted screen shots of my e-mail inbox showing the error messages I was getting as the situation deteriorated. I expect the situation at some point to deteriorate further, and even for the site to go down. When the site goes down, I cannot tell you for how long it will be down, because it is at the mercy of the hosting company to reboot/reset the servers and bring things back up. In the past it has been a matter of hours, to several days. Hopefully it will not be in the "several days" range when this happens -- and it WILL happen.
6) Please be persistent and retry to load the site if you receive "server too busy" messages. Generally it will allow you to access things if you wait a few minutes.
Gerry, can you at least submit a support ticket with 1&1 IT and read them the riot act?
Alternately, is there any way we can make the problem worse (fire up some bots!) to speed up the demise and subsequent server reboot? Best case you'd just ping Ethan Hunt and have him infiltrate their data center and pull the damn plug, that might get their attention.
Alternately, is there any way we can make the problem worse (fire up some bots!) to speed up the demise and subsequent server reboot? Best case you'd just ping Ethan Hunt and have him infiltrate their data center and pull the damn plug, that might get their attention.
...and did you explain to them they are full of something brown and stinky? I have zero tolerance for arrogant, incompetent tech support.
You can't argue with stupid/arrogant tech support robots. It's sort of like tech support with those large PC/printer companies....and did you explain to them they are full of something brown and stinky? I have zero tolerance for arrogant, incompetent tech support.
Put another way, it's a bit like arguing with you about "mushroom." One person (mushroom/champignon) is correct; the other person (creme beige) thinks he is correct.
lots of work tonight has determined that indeed shown that the hosting company’s server is operating somewhere around 2-3 times over capacity. This means that across all of the web sites that the server is hosting (not just ours) the server is completely maxed out by a factor of two or three. This overloading is probably caused by other web sites being hosted that are using too much bandwidth and/or as I suspect, the server is imploding (slowly operating on reduced resources for processing and memory.
Nothing I can do about that.
However, I pulled out all the stops tonight and removed a key “server usage threshold” setting in the bBulletin software. This removes the throttling limitation that has been causing the “server too busy” errors that many of you have been encountering.
It is really the very very last thing I can do from a technical standpoint, at this time, to try to make your experience with the site better.
Hopefully the server overload will go down and the hosting company will either reboot the server, add more resources or remove some of the websites on the server that are hogging resources.
I’ve done all I can and hopefully you guys have a better experience in the short term. I’ve REALLY tried.
Cheers,
Gerry
Same here, glad to got in again. Thanks, Gerry. [emoji106]
Let’s give Gerry a hand!!
I can’t imagine if we didn’t have Gerry overseeing this site at his own expense. I think the site would be down a hell of a lot more than it is.
I hope you folks realize that we have a “Real IT Guy” w/ an overwhelming amount of knowledge about computers.
Gerry,
THANKS FOR WHAT YOU DO!!
I for one appreciate your selfless effort and enthusiasm.
Take Care
I can’t imagine if we didn’t have Gerry overseeing this site at his own expense. I think the site would be down a hell of a lot more than it is.
I hope you folks realize that we have a “Real IT Guy” w/ an overwhelming amount of knowledge about computers.
Gerry,
THANKS FOR WHAT YOU DO!!
I for one appreciate your selfless effort and enthusiasm.
Take Care
+ 1 !
Over the next few days, I plan to make a few significant updates to the site:
1) I am going to upgrade the php version from 5.6 to 7.1. This is a major update, as php 5.6 is at end of life, and is only officially being supported to the end of December, 2018. PHP 7.0 is also only being supported until the end of this month. PHP 7.1 will be officially supported until the end of 2019.
For those interested, php is the computer language that the vBulletin software uses (the XenForo forum software also uses php, but I will be implementing the current 7.3 version of php for that migration).
2) I will be updating the vBulletin software from the current version 4.2.4, which we've been using for the past couple of years, to the 4.2.5 software. 4.2.5 does not add any functionality or security updates - it is mainly a bug fix version to provide compatibility for php versions 7.0 and 7.1. As the vBulletin folks have made very clear, 4.2.5 is the very last development of the version 4 of vBulletin, and it is (and has been) at a dead end for effectively the past 3-4 years. They are trying to get everyone to migrate to the even more bloated 5.X version of vBulletin, which I will not do. We are moving to the XenForo software as I've stated for a long time.
3) I will be updating the forum database to MySQL version 5.5, to version 5.7.
Basically these moves are to bring the 500Eboard up to date with the (relatively) latest versions of the software.
I don't expect much site down-time as a result of these change-overs ... perhaps 30 minutes at the most. I'll probably do it very early in the morning, Eastern Time, to minimize disruption.
You will see the usual "DO NOT WIG OUT" message during the time the site is off-line.
Cheers,
Gerry
1) I am going to upgrade the php version from 5.6 to 7.1. This is a major update, as php 5.6 is at end of life, and is only officially being supported to the end of December, 2018. PHP 7.0 is also only being supported until the end of this month. PHP 7.1 will be officially supported until the end of 2019.
For those interested, php is the computer language that the vBulletin software uses (the XenForo forum software also uses php, but I will be implementing the current 7.3 version of php for that migration).
2) I will be updating the vBulletin software from the current version 4.2.4, which we've been using for the past couple of years, to the 4.2.5 software. 4.2.5 does not add any functionality or security updates - it is mainly a bug fix version to provide compatibility for php versions 7.0 and 7.1. As the vBulletin folks have made very clear, 4.2.5 is the very last development of the version 4 of vBulletin, and it is (and has been) at a dead end for effectively the past 3-4 years. They are trying to get everyone to migrate to the even more bloated 5.X version of vBulletin, which I will not do. We are moving to the XenForo software as I've stated for a long time.
3) I will be updating the forum database to MySQL version 5.5, to version 5.7.
Basically these moves are to bring the 500Eboard up to date with the (relatively) latest versions of the software.
I don't expect much site down-time as a result of these change-overs ... perhaps 30 minutes at the most. I'll probably do it very early in the morning, Eastern Time, to minimize disruption.
You will see the usual "DO NOT WIG OUT" message during the time the site is off-line.
Cheers,
Gerry
