Someone is causing the server spikes

As y'all may have noticed, there's been some major server slowdowns sporadically recently. Near as I can tell, someone, a particular someone, is the cause. Unfortunately, I don't know who. I doubt it's intentional. I thought it was my web browser for a while, and then I thought it was caused by my web browser failing to connect and leaving a zombie process on the server. But then I saw it fluctuating today in a way that looked to be independent of what I was doing. So if you notice severe slowdowns, do me a favor and make note of who's online, and paste the list in this thread, and we'll see if we can't find a common thread... er... poster.

Thanks.

Addendum - that means just the list of people at the bottom of the front page - don't need the whole "who's online"

What, on a user's end, could cause this? Please use layman's terms.

Serious slow-down starting at 1910 CDST.

Users online at the time:

[action=The Listkeeper]expresses the shock he always feels at finding someone has him on their buddies list.[/action]

Could it be use of the search function?

I marked the end of the slow-down at 1934 CDST.

Here are the users that were online at the time:

ancharbro, Dayton3, greywolf00, Lethesoda, MayDayAli, MoulinRouge, NAHTMMM, Scorponock, The Commadaunt, and Tuttle are the users who left during the slow-down.

It'd be good to know who's doing what when the slowdowns happen....

By the way, if we determine that it's intentional, the user is toast. That is all.

[action=Bulldog]is glad his name is not on the list [/action]

We host our own avatars, so it's unlikely to be that . . . or does anyone have a linked av instead of one hosted here? After that, those clever little widgets some folks have put in there signature blocks would be my next guess. Someone might be infected with spyware or something.

Well, I see that I'm a suspect.

Would it help to tell you that I noticed it both while I was at work, and while I was at home?

i.e. two different computers on two different servers.

The only one with a link hosted off-site in their sig or avatar is Lethesoda:

http://www.jinx.com/images/products/404bgBlack.jpg

I don't know how to tell if there is a problem or not though.

Just throwing this out there...

The YouTube thingy? This started happening after they really became popular. Hell, there's one in almost every thread now.

I was wondering that too.

I can barely post right now...sometimes it's taking 3-5 minutes for a post to get posted.

Okay. I've also started to notice some other, possibly unrelated weirdness. Threads I know I've read, aren't being shown as read. The proper number of replies aren't showing. For instance, in one thread, Forbin is shown as the last poster in the thread, but if you click on it, my post is clearly the last.

^Elwood: Nick changed a setting that was doing some other weird things, and I changed it back after consulting with him about it. Clear your cache.

I very much doubt it's intentional. If I had to guess, someone's either leaving their web browser open for days at a time and that's causing it to do funky things with the connection (why I initially suspected I might be at fault - I leave OmniWeb open for quite a long time), or they have a beta of a web browser that's using the TCP/IP stack on their computer improperly.

It's odd - according to the server, most of the CPU time is being spent in iowait - something must be absolutely thrashing the disk. But a couple days ago, it was the web server software that was taking so much CPU.

But it is on our end? We're causing it?

We gotta find out what it is. I do not want to get kicked off of this host.

If we need to go public, that's what we'll have to do.

I'm going to try turning off a feature at a time, in case it's something we've got installed. I'm also going to disable gzip compression completely, so clear caches.

Couldn't it also be some of the "guests" visiting? who knows what they might be using.

Frack. Bad news. It wasn't just one person. It was anyone using the Gallery, and the more they used, the more load went up. I turned it off and CPU usage cut by a factor of 50. No wonder I thought it was one person... how many people use the gallery at once? Not many, I'd imagine.

I noticed a significant speed-up a few minutes ago.

Good call. I'm sure you'll do the best you can. I have faith.

Argh... not the gallery, or at least not directly... is there a thread with a shitload of pictures on one page?

The Picture Threads in The Green Room.

Yo, O2C, I don't know if it helps, but here's a whole forum's worth of threads with tons of pictures.

No, it'd be one page that's being accessed relatively often. Lots of attachments and gallery images, not linked images...

Or maybe someone's got their posts/page set to whatever the max is?

Going back to the one user assumption, it's not: Order2Chaos, Archangel, CaptainChewbacca, Diacanu, Elwood, marathon, MoulinRouge, Packard, phantomofthenet, Quas, Rincewiend, Soma, Storm, Talkahuano, The Listkeeper, Timmy