VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION Forum Questions Chat Slowdown?

I'm still not having any problems...Hmmm

8:40 AM PDT, Chat is moving very slow.

6:45 PM PDT.....Chevy Chatter would not load, and the problem remained until 7:23 PM PDT.

Today is the third day in a row to have access problems in the evening. Sorry that I didn't write down the time or ping the site link.

Yeh, it doesn't help much without a PING and a TRACERT.

I've been here off and on for the past 6 hours and haven't seen any problems at all.

Let me re-post what people need to do when they observe an issue. Give me a few minutes to write it.

INSTRUCTIONS ON WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU OBSERVE A PROBLEM:
H-E-R-E

--Bill

I know I was bad by not tracing or pinging. Expected it was just a momentary glitch and not a bigger longer lasting problem. I'll take my lashes.

That is "generally" true....

But in JYD's case, he is on a dial-up line, and appears to observe slowdowns that other folks don't see. So in his case it would be useful to run ALL checks. Just saying....

Hum.....okay, that makes sense since I am on a dial-up.

Seems like Chipper has had more problems in the past couple of days than I have but I don't think that he is on a dial-up.

No dial up here. 4G LTE instead. Guess it depends on when you try to log on or make a post. Also a check to see that other URLs are accessible is necessary to determine the problem is with Chat and not internet access.

When I have issues, the problem is definitely Chat and not Internet access. When Chat is slow or I can't get to the site at all, I check all of the other sites that I frequent and I never have a problem with those other sites. The only site I have issues with during the Chat slow down is Chevy Chatter.

Another thing that I do when I see a slowdown (or outage) and then all of a sudden I find that I'm able to get in to Chat ---

I immediately go to WHO'S ONLINE and click on the title. Then I look at the Timestamps of all of the people in order to see who was activc during the time that I was unable to get on.

Try it. See for yourself whether you can see that other people were online during your observed outage.

I haven't had an actual outage since I upgraded to a newly refurbished computer and installed some new security and malware software that monitors my computer back in August. I have observed some slowdowns at my local IP. Also Chatter is sometimes slow to load, other times it is an instant on situation. I think that the faster connections push the slower systems to the back of the line, "cyberspace bullying"
One of the mysteries of cyberspace is ...Who is to blame for slowdowns, "It certainly isn't us!" (a standard answer to a query)Our society is reluctant to actually tell the truth or take the blame..."It wasn't me Daddy!"

Could not access Chat from approx 10 pm CDT until 10:25 CDT. Ping to vcca.org resulted in 100-200 ns it would only show on screen for a short time so couldn't get all the information. Ping to vccachat.org/ failed.

Being from the great state of Texas... do you think that it had anything to do with the outcome of the Houston game today?

Sorry.

If the ping doesn't find the site (vcca.org), then it's either a network issue, or the HOST datacenter is unavailable.

The ping found the vcca.org site but not the vccachat.org/ site. Could not access either during the slowdown. Only tried the vcca.org site a couple of times but forum about 10 times.

Same here.......I couldn't access Chevy Chatter tonight either.

I could not get on today 12.30 to 13.15 AEST .

Haven't been able to get to Chevy Chatter off and on for most of the day. Tonight it took over two hours for Chevy Chatter to load and it still never completely loaded.

In the past two days I have had issues with getting on Chevy Chatter about 8 times.

I had the same problem starting approx 8:50 pm CDT.

Results of testing:
Attempt to refresh connection resulted in following error message

Response Error.
Technical description:
502 Bad Gateway - Response Error, a bad response was received from another proxy server or the destination origin server.


Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:>ping vcca.org

Pinging vcca.org [64.6.242.76] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.6.242.76: bytes=32 time=1989ms TTL=44
Reply from 64.6.242.76: bytes=32 time=103ms TTL=44
Reply from 64.6.242.76: bytes=32 time=118ms TTL=44
Reply from 64.6.242.76: bytes=32 time=117ms TTL=44

Ping statistics for 64.6.242.76:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 103ms, Maximum = 1989ms, Average = 581ms

C:>tracert vcca.org

Tracing route to vcca.org [64.6.242.76]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.42.129
2 220 ms 269 ms 300 ms 172.26.241.113
3 1893 ms 89 ms * 172.26.236.2
4 * 1886 ms 109 ms 172.26.96.11
5 * 240 ms 279 ms 172.26.96.193
6 1799 ms 109 ms 96 ms 172.16.78.113
7 1972 ms 133 ms 95 ms 12.249.2.1
8 * 1746 ms 85 ms 12.83.179.194
9 * 2123 ms 46 ms gar22.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.85.65]
10 105 ms 81 ms 77 ms 12.249.185.6
11 256 ms 309 ms 359 ms ind1-ar3-ge-0-0-0-0.us.twtelecom.net [206.222.12
0.222]
12 258 ms 310 ms 309 ms 64.132.193.174
13 358 ms 358 ms 369 ms te1-1.4045.cr2.701hn.iplsin.expedient.com [216.3
7.2.26]
14 337 ms 519 ms 349 ms te1-2.4042.cr1.701hn.iplsin.e-xpedient.com [216.
130.11.141]
15 317 ms 380 ms 359 ms te2-7-4.4043.upa-core.expedient.com [66.11.0.29]

16 266 ms 399 ms 319 ms myhostcenter-gw-primary.cust.e-xpedient.com [66.
11.1.179]
17 287 ms 330 ms 349 ms s34.n230.n6.n64.static.myhostcenter.com [64.6.23
0.34]
18 288 ms 339 ms 359 ms s76.n242.n6.n64.static.myhostcenter.com [64.6.24
2.76]

Trace complete.

After that continued to receive the error message below until was able to reconnect with Chat after 10 pm CDT

Service Unavailable.
Technical description:
504 Gateway Time-out - The web server is not responding

Thanks to the guys who told me in "real time" that the site was having problems. I also received two phone calls while I was driving on the freeway. I immediately headed home and discussed the problem with Harry Jensen in the membership office.

The pings and tracerts that people sent were useful. They helped us narrow down the issue to our server. No network issue, no domain recognition issue, and "for the first time", no server unavailability issue. The server was in fact available, just not "accessible".... ?!?!?

Here's what happened. We have become very successful. As a result we are a prime target for crawlers, spiders and bots. (ie, robots). There are literally a few thousand of them that now crawl the Chat and VCCA pages every day, and every minute. Yesterday, so many of them connected to us, that the server closed down it's web connection.

The membership office and myself could still access all of the data, and make changes, but anyone coming in via a web connection was being refused.

So 2 minutes after I opened a Trouble Ticket, the Host Company restarted our web services and we were back up and running.

Now, to be clear, this actually happened twice yesterday. Once around 1:30 pm and again in the evening around 7:30 pm.

So -- the good news (if I can call it that) is that we know EXACTLY what caused THIS problem. And now we can take steps to fix it. I'm working on that this morning. And I'm suspending my analysis of a new host (which I started yesterday) since we've now concluded that this would have occurred no matter WHO was hosting us.

On a different topic, have you noticed that we've succeeded in keeping the Spammers away for the past two weeks? (except for ONE person from SFO who manually logged in.) Hopefully that will hold for 6 to 12 months.

I'll post again when I've activated a vaccine for preventing the bot-attacks. Sorry for the disruption.

No problem! We know that each new "attack" means more time spend doing patch work and fence erection and less time enjoying life and old Chevys. We appreciate what you fellas do to keep this site up and running as effectively as possible.

It is nice to know that we are so valuable that others feel a need to monitor what we post. Just hope that the VCCA BOD fully understands the value to VCCA members and the Chevy world as a hole.

I couldn't log on 6-6.30 am or 12.30 to 13.50 pm AEDST yesterday during these attacks.

The site was not reachable from ~ 9 pm CDT to after 10:30 pm (went to bed).

The site was not available for me from 7:30 PM PDT until I went to bed five hours later. I understand that the site was still not available until the wee hours of the morning.

I also had problems yesterday morning for a few minutes as well. Seems like we have had these issues for many months now.