Recent Website Reliability Problems

[admin]

Recently CJO has been throwing an error on and off for those trying to access the site. The error is pictured below. I have been in contact with the web site hosting provider on two occasions already and we have tried some fixes. Hopefully the last one will be the final fix.

If you see this error, you can email me at "admin@conradjohnsonowners.com" or leave a message here when the board is up.

When the site goes down, it typically will come back up in 1/2 to 1 hour automatically so you can just come back and there is a good chance it will be working.

[admin]

Unfortunately, the error continued today. I was on with the hosting tech support and we tried something different this time. Hopefully this help,.. but we'll see.

Again, if you get the above error, waiting a half an hour and trying to reach the site again usually will allow you to see the website again.

[Joe Appierto]

I don't know if this'll help or just muddy the waters because it's irrelevant but between December 22nd to just after the New Year I wasn't able to log onto the site. My laptop would continue clocking until finally it'd give the message "Hmm...can't reach this page." I cleared the cache repeatedly with no luck.

Finally, I received a Private Message from Paolo who had experienced the same problem but was now able to log on. It worked for me as well at that point. Now, sporadically, but not today I will get the SQL error you see currently as well.

Just thought it might help to tell you what I'd experienced.

[admin]

Thank you for the update. I was trying to do some investigation and there was a massive increase in bandwidth usage of the site around Christmas day. There was also a day where the hosting servers did go down (not just my site but I think a large portion of their hosting), but that was for like half a day. The load on the site also significantly increased this past week. I think it is from a spambot but the daily download load on the server increased by 10-20x what it usually is, and it seems like it was coming all from one ip address which I think is a spambot. I think the excess queries are exceeding the maximum allowed to the database and then above error is triggered. There is only a maximum allowed which I think resets every hour. That is why if you just wait a little (less than an hour) the site will be back up again.

Regardless, I am monitoring the situation. I've been in contact with the hosting company and CJO is not going anywhere!

If there are any new/different events, please try to update this topic.

[Paolo]

Dear Mr. Admin,
Thanks for your diligence and even bigger thanks for starting CJO in the first place. I've learned much here and have made a few long-distance audio pals in the process. Your efforts are greatly appreciated by many.

Should I encounter further issues when trying to visit CJO I surely will let you know.

[admin]

Good news. I think my latest efforts worked. I don't want to jinx it, but looking at the server logs from yesterday the total bandwidth used yesterday was about 1/30th of the day before. I didn't encounter any errors yesterday despite logging on multiple times.

So hopefully that solved the problem....

[Joe Appierto]

Excellent news! No problems here as well despite multiple refreshes (I stay logged in all the time) during the day. Thanks for your efforts.

[Big Dog RJ]

Ah! So that was the problem...

I thought it was our ISP or mobile phone provider, so I started barking at them. Now I know. Anyway, seems to be ok because so far no error messages.
In any case, I'll still shout at them because they're both pretty useless companies. One of their CEO's just resigned, they faced a massive national out-age, and prior to that a data breach, where all our personal data was stolen. I had to get new bank cards and drivers licence. She didn't even care one bit, so she left and got a $2m payout! No apology nothing! The other one is hanging by a thread... useless corporates, all full of greed!

Cheers Admin, good to know what you're on top of it. Perhaps these corporate idiots down unda can learn a few things when it comes to true customer service.
Woof! RJ

[Paolo]

@Admin
YAY! And thanks again for all your efforts.

@RJ
Corporate idiots know no boundaries. CON-cast in the States is among the worst evah.

[admin]

I've been monitoring the website access load this past week and I think we are good. Since making the recent change total bandwidth is now back to normal (about 1/20th of what it was during the downtime period) and number of page reads is back to normal as well (about 1/200th of what it was during the down time periods).

I'm going to remove the warning from the main index page. If anybody encounters any further issues, just post here or let me know directly.

Thanks for your patience.

[Paolo]

Three cheers for Mr. Admin!

[admin]

There were some reports of of another error popping up periodically and I had experienced this as well. Made some setting changes with the help of the hosting provider and hopefully this is fixed as well.

error screenshot.jpg (53.72 KiB) Viewed 461 times

If you do get this error, you can usually clear it by just reloading the page but let me know if it's still happening.

[Joe Appierto]

For the past week I had been getting that error on my laptop PC/Win 11/Edge browser but I didn't know if it were me or the website. As you said hitting the refresh button cleared the problem.

I just navigated to about a half dozen threads with no issues. Perhaps the problem was fixed but if it reappears I'll let you know.

[Joe Appierto]

Just tried navigating to AJ's most recent posting on the Audio Research thread and got the Internal Server Error so it looks like it's still a minor issue. It cleared with a refresh.

[admin]

Thank you for the reporting. I got one this morning as well, but it seems to be happening less often. But obviously not "fixed." I'm going to monitor for now and reach out to the hosting company again if it continues.

As a reminder, if the error happens, a simple reload of the page seems to fix it. I also noticed that if you were writing a post, the post does seem to go through even with the error.

[admin]

The errors have unfortunately continued. I tried changing some server settings but it has not resolved the problem. I'm working with our web hosting provider so hopefully this can be fixed.

In the meantime, if you do encounter this "Internal Server Error", just manually reload the page in your web browser and it should load properly.

I know this is very frustrating and I apologize for the inconvenience.

PS- If you are writing a post I know it can be disconcerting to have this error after hitting the "Submit" button and risking your work being lost. The good news is that it looks like the submitted post does go through even if the page errors out. Nonetheless, you can do a quick "CTRL+A" then "CTRL+C" to select and copy your text into your local clipboard so it is not lost in case of any posting error.

[AnotherJohnson]

I think this explains the dearth of posts this past week. Not a word from RJ, for example.

[admin]

The hosting site has elevated the issue to their higher tear tech support team as the baseline tech could not find the underlying problem. It of course is the weekend so I'm sure that delays things but hopefully this will get resolved in short order.

Again, apologize about the inconvenience.

[AnotherJohnson]

The hosting site has elevated the issue to their higher tear tech support team as the baseline tech could not find the underlying problem. It of course is the weekend so I'm sure that delays things but hopefully this will get resolved in short order.

Again, apologize about the inconvenience.

Certainly not your fault. Your generous hospitality is well recognized and appreciated.

As you know, some of us would gladly help with costs.

[admin]

Received another update from the hosting company. The issue is being elevated to an even higher support staff member as the "higher tech support" member could not figure out what is causing the error.

I appreciate everybody's understanding, patience, and support. We'll get CJO back to tip top condition soon!