Permabanned
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- 9 Aug 2008
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How many did you count?
Forums slow on a product launch day... again?
- Thread starter randal
- Start date
How many did you count?
Soldato
- Joined
- 21 Oct 2011
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- ST4
For a computing and tech site this is embarrassing.
Soldato
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- 23 Dec 2009
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- 3,280
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- Earth
Ugh, had nothing to read at work today
Same here, OCUK forums is my social media
And the graphics and CPU wah wah threads.
That was over an hour ago - I can't remember that far back - something like 4 lights and six trains but that's a guess
I thought that myself. The 3080 launch killed the site for 8 hours or so. Scalable solutions only cost more when you need the power, surely it would cost less than 8 hours of lost sales.
I would hope they have a load balancer up front that can direct traffic to /forums to the forum server and / to the shop server.
I'm pretty sure CloudFlare lets you do this at their level as well.
For a multi million pound company they must be doing this, right? It's good for security as well given a bug in the shop or forums could expose the other.
Is there enough stock to "lose" sales? These type of launches are purchasing a place in a queue anyway...
I was being slightly facetious
Visiting both the forums and main site returns a "server-id" in the HTTP headers (developer tools > network tab in your browser); I've seen this range from Alpha, Beta... Gamma on both so I guess they have at least seven servers. They could be running all seven on different physical machines but it's also quite common and more likely to run them all on the same server to improve performance and just balance incoming requests between them.
There is always one which juuuust creeps into the next box so you dont know whether to count it or not.
Soldato
- Joined
- 3 Jun 2005
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- 3,286
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- The South
I think (from the previous thread) they still have an estate, just that now the original "forums" hardware and forum is now apart of that estate where as previously the forum was segregated and no doubt idling on the hardware.
Understandable why it was done and arguably it's all "first world problems" but still annoying nonetheless.
Yes, no, maybe. You'd think but then again, flinging stuff into AWS, Azure and Co isn't always the cheapest solution and perhaps it couldn't be justified for the few days (doubt it's even that) of "downtime" each year.
I'm sure someone did the sums and tried getting out the budget begging bowl.
Not entirely sure but isn't that Cloudflare's doing rather than from OcUK estate?
Is it in the box, or isn't it? The struggle is real.
Annoying as it inevitably is, at least CF uses hcaptcha not Google (better from a privacy perspective).
Yeah but people would be on the site buying stuff unrelated to the launch. A couple of these orders and you've paid for the hosting, plus the goodwill from the launch users
Soldato
- Joined
- 10 May 2004
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- 12,981
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- Sunny Stafford
"...waiting for cloudflare.com"
"...waiting for maxcdn"
"...waiting for googleapis"
Since people here have mentioned Cloudflare, there is also Maxcdn and Googleapis. I might have asked this before and I can't remember the answer, but I get these a lot in the browser's status bar where a web site hangs because it's waiting on one of the 3 above servers. It's only been happening for the last 2 years. Is there a way around these servers so that I can get a direct connection to the intended site like I did a few years ago? I find that it hinders me otherwise. Sometimes, I get an error saying that my browser is working ok, but there is a broken link between Cloudflare etc and the site that I'm trying to get to. It's not the standard "404 not found" or "403 forbidden" error.
The other hindrance I get is "waiting for facebook.com / twitter.com" when I'm browsing other sites. I guess FB / Twitter (and I'm not even on Twitter!) harvests my data no matter where I am on the net. It would be nice to know if there is a way of breaking the associations of FB / Twitter off from the sites that I visit to speed browsing up a bit?
As for product launches, it will be because of the PS5 and the Xbone X.
Thankfully, I have a Nintendo Switch and I'm not interested in anything else!
"...waiting for maxcdn"
"...waiting for googleapis"
Since people here have mentioned Cloudflare, there is also Maxcdn and Googleapis. I might have asked this before and I can't remember the answer, but I get these a lot in the browser's status bar where a web site hangs because it's waiting on one of the 3 above servers. It's only been happening for the last 2 years. Is there a way around these servers so that I can get a direct connection to the intended site like I did a few years ago? I find that it hinders me otherwise. Sometimes, I get an error saying that my browser is working ok, but there is a broken link between Cloudflare etc and the site that I'm trying to get to. It's not the standard "404 not found" or "403 forbidden" error.
The other hindrance I get is "waiting for facebook.com / twitter.com" when I'm browsing other sites. I guess FB / Twitter (and I'm not even on Twitter!) harvests my data no matter where I am on the net. It would be nice to know if there is a way of breaking the associations of FB / Twitter off from the sites that I visit to speed browsing up a bit?
As for product launches, it will be because of the PS5 and the Xbone X.
Thankfully, I have a Nintendo Switch and I'm not interested in anything else!
Soldato
- Joined
- 25 Sep 2009
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- 10,022
- Location
- Billericay, UK
The sad reality is a lot of people don't have £650 to spend it seems a lot people are buying on finance.
What's your browser? Install LocalCDN [Firefox] [Chrome(ium)] and uBlock Origin [Firefox] [Chrome(ium)].
LocalCDN is a modernised and more updated fork of Decentraleyes, which basically stops your browser going to CDNs (MaxCDN, Google, CF, etc) for javascript and other libraries and fonts. It bundles a known safe version of all supported fonts and libraries in the browser, so that when a site (like this forum) tells you to load 'resource.at.cdn.com' the addon just injects it instantly from the local cache instead. It's faster *and* more private. Win.
Click its settings cog, go to Advanced, and then generate rules for your adblocker. Select uBlock Origin and copy and paste the resulting list into the 'My Rules' pane in uBO's settings dashboard. Done.
With uBO, unless you're very experienced then Medium Mode with a global deny rule (turn the box red on the left side) for facebook.com facebook.net twitter.com and threadloom.com will protect you and speed things up a lot. Just add a noop/override rule (grey box on the right/local side) for them as required on a per-site basis.
I run uBO in 'Hard Mode' but it doesn't really block much more stuff, practically speaking, than Medium Mode.
You'll find sites load *way* faster, as uBO doesn't just stop things showing up on the page after it's rendered (a la old fashioned ad blocker). Rather it's a network firewall for your browser, and actually stops the requests being made over the network in the first place. Page load times are massively improved overall as a result.
You'll occasionally need to tweak settings for sites. If you're in Medium Mode then generally that means turning the 'Third party scripts' and 'Third party frames' boxes grey to allow (for example) embedded Twitter stuff, some videos etc. If you get stuck then even running it in Easy Mode (i.e. default out of the box) will be 10x better than not having it.
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