Why has this site been going so slow?

[Luciddd]

Recently it has loaded very slow these past few days.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

I wish it was, it's my Wireless provider that's been crap. I live in a rural area temporarily and the internet is just crap, I ain't even getting my promised speeds.

[halfawake]

I'm having this problem too.  Got a database error as well the other day when I tried to post a reply.

[MiningBuddy]

Was just going to post about this very same thing, yes the database seems to be very slow at random times. 

[nottm28]

noticed the slowness too

[dwdoc]

Very sluggish.  Last time this happened site crashed for a short time.

[Mooshire]

You're not the only ones...

[dwdoc]

Seems better now. Must be an intermittent server or internet connection issue at their end.

[pedrog]

I'm also having difficulty accessing BitcoinTalk, very slow and frequent database errors.

[KWH]

Pretty sluggish here as well.

[btcton]

It's actually starting to feel faster than usual if you ask me.

[Arros]

I also feel it's been quite slow recently. May be it's time for the admins to manufacture some hero status accounts for sale to fund server upgrades. 

[cryptopi]

Super slow on my end as well

[Pale Phoenix]

Still very slow...

[Kouye]

It isn't really slow. It's more like erratic.
2 clicks out of 10 result in a lightning fast render.
But 8 clicks out of 10 end up with a timeout, or a really long loading time (>=5 seconds).

[theymos]

I think that the site becomes slow every 90 seconds when the modSettings cache expires and every visitor then needs to do an expensive query. Does this seem to match your observations?

SMF handles modSettings really badly.

[dree12]

I think that the site becomes slow every 90 seconds when the modSettings cache expires and every visitor then needs to do an expensive query. Does this seem to match your observations?

SMF handles modSettings really badly.

Based on a grep of SMF source, it seems the modSettings contains only forum-wide settings. If it's global, can't the cache be set to indefinite, and manually cleared when needed?

[theymos]

That's how modSettings should work, but it's actually also used for things like a timestamp of the last ban added, so it changes pretty frequently.

[Mooshire]

So, where's that new forum software? You've only got a fraction of a million dollars sitting in theymos' pocket.

[nottm28]

I think that the site becomes slow every 90 seconds when the modSettings cache expires and every visitor then needs to do an expensive query. Does this seem to match your observations?

SMF handles modSettings really badly.

Yes that sort of matches for me - I can be clicking with sub 0.5 page loads times then suddenly 10+ second page load on the next click. When a page does load slow it's always over 10 seconds for me - I'm not seeing any variation like some pages loading 5 or 6 seconds etc. It's either really fast or 10+ seconds. Now you mention the 90 secs cache expiry I will look for that.