Why does Fluther get extremely slow at times?

At first I always panic thinking it must be my computer, but then other sites have no problem and respond just fine.

Huh. I don’t experience that at all, unless a server is down. How often does this happen for you?

Mostly on weekends @longgone sometimes 2 to 3 times a month, sometimes you try and post an answer and it just goes on and on then times out before it posts,

Yes, it is happening again this morning, a repeat from this a few days ago.

www.fluther.com/188504/anyone-else-seeing-odd-performance-today/

Definitely, happening again. Not today, but yesterday or the day before. I don’t remember which.

It did it to me yesterday, for a great part of the day.

@JLeslie and @SQUEEKY2 Is it slow for you right now? I wouldn’t know, I’m on my mobile.

Because if it’s slow for several of you, that would likely be a server issue again.

No @longgone it seems to be fine at the moment.
Sometimes these slow times will last a few hours to a couple of days.

@SQUEEKY2 Okay, good!

Whenever it gets slow for you, be sure to use the ‘Contact’ button and tell us – or, better yet, start a thread asking whether things are unusual for anyone else. As soon as we have reason to suspect server issues, we can contact Ben. While just one jelly’s report is not much evidence, things are much less ambiguous if we come online to find a thread of several users experiencing the same. In that case, we would let Ben know immediately.

It’s mariah’s fault.

We need to ask the Quija board.

Because essentially it’s a lame duck, but by gum, it’s our lame duck.

Dude, mainly because our creators are screwing around on Twitter and are ignoring this poor step child. But…they have allowed us to live and for that I’m glad. I just put up with the slowness until it goes away. I don’t know if someone flags Bendrew to fix it, or if it fixes itself.

What I suspect is happening here is that the set-up here is something like this.

Fluther is made up of multiple servers. As far as I know there is a load-balancer, two Apache server. and a database server.

When you make a request to Fluther there is a server that takes your requests (load-balancer) and then it randomly picks one of the two Apache servers and sends your request off to that. If one of those servers is having problems it will hang (ideally it gives up and tries the other server after a bit). That is why reloading the page will sometimes result in a pretty fast page load. It is all random.

And I wouldn’t really give them much shit about this. Apache can pretty easily go bonkers and kill a server. That is why I have my server reboot every night at 3am. It is on a SSD and takes under 30 seconds and eliminated Apache weirdness. Not ideal but cheap and easy.

Sometimes it does yes. It was slowing down a few days ago, when the activity on the site was a lot higher.

Why does…Why does Fluther get….Why does Fluther get slow?...Sometimes??
...

Well…I mean…let’s see…not all the time…are we…necessarily…going at our….fastest pace.
I guess…that should be….a good enough…answer…

I think it’s cause the servers go down, but I’m not sure. I don’t even know what it means for a server to go down but mods say that’s why whenever a Jelly reports that Fluther is slow.