Frequent unresponsiveness of this site

JonB

I am frequent user of this site. I am getting disappointed with/tired of the frequent "go slows" on this site. It is often the case that you have to wait 5/10/20+ seconds for any interaction: viewing the lists of posts, viewing a particular post, waiting after making a post (scary, because you think your post has been lost), dropping down a combobox of populated choices etc. etc. It doesn't matter what the action is, nor what browser one uses, and I am in the UK so not some "weird country thing". It is the evident lack of timely response at the web server.

This has always happened from time to time on this site, but lately it has become more common. Let's say every day or every few days, at least at some time. It has just happened again right now, hence it has spurred me to type this in. It has nothing to do with any "work" the admins may or may not be performing on the site.

I would have hoped that for a site like this, to help Qt users, someone would/could ensure we have better responsiveness. The slow downs are too frequent and irritating.

P.S.
In trying to post this message I got

Application error
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command
heroku logs --tail

and then site was "down" for another half-hour odd. After which actions are just as "unresponsive" as they were before. Lucky I copied my whole post before risking posting for just this possibility! Please don't say this was a "one-off" or related to work having perhaps been done on the site yesterday/today. It happens fairly often.

P.P.S.
Then trying to update this post as above has delivered further "Application Error".....

jsulm

I can confirm this issue, especially today it is often very slow or does not load at all...

J.Hilk

It would be THE opportunity to replace the forum with a wasm Qt "app" in my honest opinion :D

JonB

@J-Hilk
ROFL....

I tried WASM when it first came out. The generated "pages" were "black-box" non-HTML. The visuals were "weird", I think it was "refreshing" all the time. Fine for an "application", maybe, but quite unsuitable as a replacement for something like website pages which were HTML. It might have changed since then(?), but it was the first and last time I looked at WASM...

Nhan Nguyen

Hello, I'm Nhan and I am currently working on solving the performance issue with Qt Forum. We are aware of the incidents and are upgrading the infrastructure to fulfill the spike increase in database searches. It seems that the issue is temporarily fixed but I need to keep monitoring the Forum behavior in the upcoming days. Sorry for the inconvenient!

Nhan Nguyen

I have found the root causes for the Qt forum performance and they have already been fixed.
The search function response time has dramatically reduced from 50 minutes for some queries to seconds (even milliseconds).

The Forum situation will continuously be monitored but please inform me of any issue via this topic, or send me a DM here or via my work email nhan.nguyen@qt.io

JonB

@Nhan-Nguyen said in Frequent unresponsiveness of this site:

The search function response time has dramatically reduced from 50 minutes

Might be a good idea to have a timeout on the search function ;-)

The slowness has nothing to do with searching, it's just the response time from the server for everything/anything. Though if it was doing loads of searches for other people that might slow it down.

Thank you for looking into it. We will see how it goes, it's not hard to tell when it does happen.

Nhan Nguyen

@JonB said in Frequent unresponsiveness of this site:

Might be a good idea to have a timeout on the search function ;-)

Yes, indeed. We don't even know that the search timeout has not been properly configured in the database.
Anyway, I've monitored the database and forum response time for 5 hours and it seems to work flawlessly.

Thank you again for your report! Hope you will do it again if we have further issues :D

Nhan Nguyen

@JonB said in Frequent unresponsiveness of this site:

The slowness has nothing to do with searching, it's just the response time from the server for everything/anything. Though if it was doing loads of searches for other people that might slow it down.

Yeah, because the database was overloaded/busy with processing search requests so all other read and write actions got affected

SimonSchroeder

@JonB said in Frequent unresponsiveness of this site:

heroku

Oh well, I remember that one! About two or three weeks ago I had trouble opening the webpage at all on two different days. It just wouldn't load. I used different websites to check if it was just down for me and the majority of those pages claimed that the Qt forum was up an running. Pinging forum.qt.io would would send a response from heroku. Didn't have any problems recently (no slow downs, no unresponsive/unreachable webpage).