Is Fluther acting funny peculiar today?

I am having problems too. I’ve restarted both servers but the symptoms haven’t gone away for me yet. I’ll keep poking around.

Same here. A page will load about 5% of the time I click.

Lots of 500 Internal server error messages.

Sending this reply to the clipboard before I click the answer button and it vanishes.

getting lots of those 500 Internal Server Error messages

(reloading and reloading just to get in and read things)

Been going on since middle of the day, still happening at 8:52 pm PDT

It is slower than Molasses in the Winter.

Yes, I was getting the 500’s also most of the day.

Death throes, don’t worry, it will be over soon.

[Mod say] We’ve let Ben know. Hang in there, everyone.

@longgone I’m still waiting…

Problems last night and still now this morning (Tuesday morning).

It was very naughty today. I kept getting 500 internal server messages too. Sometimes it wouldn’t load, then it would. This evening it seems better, although quite slow.

Still a bit slow for me this morning but SO much better than last night. Thanks for contacting Ben, it was over my head.

Let’s not immediately jump to doomsaying whenever there’s an issue. There are still people taking care of this site who love it, and tech problems happen to all websites.

I’ve been trying to thank everyone BUT it the “blue funk” continues. It took three minutes for my last “Thank You”.

@Mariah keep up the good work.

Did Ben mention what the problem was or how he fixed it? I’d like to be able to help if something like this happens again.

Yes.
Internal server errors.

6.14.18
8:00 a.m.
No improvement.

Yeah the 500’s came back for me. When I first got up it seemed like the site was slow but not erroring out anymore. Probably Ben hasn’t had time to take a look yet. If I knew where the error logs were stored on the server I might be able to figure out what’s causing this but there are so many damn files and I can’t find the error logs.

The virtualhosts file should list the location of the error logs. Something like this.

/etc/apache2/sites-available/fluther.com.conf

Hopefully there is a line with ErrorLog with the path to the error log.

Sweet thanks @johnpowell, found the logs with your help. Now let’s see if there’s anything in here that I can understand and fix.

Still many errors and still very slow as of 6/14/16 12:25 pm EST.

Well from the logs I can see that we have high traffic volume because we’re currently being crawled by Baidu Spider and Bingbot. I don’t know if that’s unusual or the cause of this though.

You might want to try blocking them in http://www.fluther.com/robots.txt and see if that helps at all. Note that might take about 24 hours for the change to get picked up.

Or just block them in .htaccess since that would kick in immediately.

Yes, getting 500 internal error message as well. But I’m able to access the mobile version just fine.

I’m not having a problem accessing Fluther on my phone either.

Seems like there’s some improvement right now.
...
I take back what I said. Still seeing the 505 error. I’m using the mobile version.

<crossing fingers and hitting enter>

still can’t offer GA or GQ

<sad>

Update: It looks like we’re under some sort of attack. Ben has tried to restart the servers but so far, nothing helps. It may be a while. Sit tight.

@longgone I’m not surprised. Anything with “Baidu” has never been a good sign in my experience.

@longgone, Okay, I will sit tight and wait until this problem is resolved.

There’s another, more current version of this question asked by @janbb, too.
FYI
My desktop access seems to be marginally better the past ½ hour or so, BTW, unless it’s just the consequence of traffic here, generally.

Is Fluther wonky for anyone else?

Does everyone know that if you hover near the “Flag as” symbol you get the time stamp?

http://i.fluther.com/

Thanks, @Stinley

checking the i.fluther version out

I’m using it, @BellaB, and it’s a small adjustment, IMO.

I’ve found that without the preview box crutch, I’m much better at editing my posts!

not loving the mobile version but access is access eh

I’ve disabled indexing of Fluther by all search engines/crawlers/robots for now. Like John says it’ll be some 24 hours before we see the effects. I hope it helps, but I don’t know if this is the root cause of our problems.

Try using both versions at the same time, @BellaB.
It takes very few error messages to take the stink off the mobile version!

thanks for your work and updates @Mariah .

I don’t have any complaints about the mobile version. It’s fine. I prefer to use my laptop, but that’s about my better typing than texting ability.

I am fairly convinced the problem is related to server load. A CPU constraint and not RAM. If it was RAM apache generally just gives up. But since it intermittently fails my hunch is CPU. So sudo htop (sudo apt-get install htop) should provide some insight.

How is everyone? My desktop mode is running faster, but it still takes time to post an answer.

That may be temporary, @Mimishu1995.
I opened 5 questions before I got the error on my desktop, then it was dead in the water.

@ibstubro right. I’ve just got the error again. But this time reloading sometimes resolves the problem.

Fluther is still acting funny generally. One minute it looks like everything has been back to normal then another minute I get all the errors.

I think this is a function of load. As folks are giving up checking the site it loads better. So things aren’t fixed. People are just using it less so you get the illusion of things being better.

^ This is very similar to “A Brief History of the Dead”. I hope that book has a happy ending.

Cannot ask a question. Continue button does not work. But, I notice others have asked questions. Maybe it’s just me.

Thanks for the mods and Fluther gods.

Thank you all that answered and commented on this thread.I’ve been on the road and away from my computer since Tuesday the 14th so have not “thanked” all.

Another update: Things are still far from perfect. We may actually be completely down again soon, the techies are tweaking some things. However, some good news for a change: Ben is looking into some real changes, so when things get better, they should get much better.

Yay! Maybe Ben can give us a plug on his new venture!

Ha. Yeah! Jelly would be lucky to have jellies on board.