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Problem With Images

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Thanks Malins, it's reassuring to a modest extent to know that similar things are happening to you, some of the oddities only involve things that are in the staff system, but those partial seize-ups do seem to be a general problem. As you say, it's better than a total site-crash, but piss-offing, and not, I'd suppose, directly related to the restriction on bandwidth that's likely to be interfering with image uploads etc?
 
Nyghtfall3D said:
That sounds js-related. The admin should probably open a ticket with XF support.
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Could you translate, please?

PS okay, I've found some info about XF Support - we'll make sure ImageMaker's aware of it, and other staff more tech savvy than me may know more about it.
 
malins said:
js-related = Javascript related. (same guess I made)
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Yes I guessed that, and XF, it was rather 'open a ticket' that baffles me - still does a bit, though I see there is (possibly more than one) XF-support site online.
 
Eulalia said:
Yes I guessed that, and XF, it was rather 'open a ticket' that baffles me - still does a bit, though I see there is (possibly more than one) XF-support site online.
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It's a software jargon. It means reporting an issue or sending a feature request, using a dedicated software (often with a web browser) like Jira or Trac. Most of the open source projects and some proprietary ones offer public access to such a functionality.
 
Eulalia said:
and not, I'd suppose, directly related to the restriction on bandwidth that's likely to be interfering with image uploads etc?
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I think it is the same thing.

For instance I just nuked my browser cache, reloaded, and had a look at the Network inspector.

I get "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" headers from nginx for a number of images.
Instead of the requested resource (which would be say Type PNG and some bytes) what is transferred is just always 374 bytes of HTML which is simply the "Error 503" page.

But additionally I also get 503 errors for this Javascript resource

http://www.cruxforums.com/xf/js/xf/attachment_manager-compiled.js

that is a piece of JavaScript (js) from the XenForo framework (XF) which deals with "managing attachments".

Failing to load this leads to the image upload problems I described.

Which resources fail to load is pretty random for each page request. So sometimes this JS will be there and sometimes not. Depending on that we see the failures in handling the system or not. Just like we sometimes get avatars and thumbnails or not.

Screenshot 2020-06-18 00.59.40.png
 
malins said:
Well a thing I have is when I click 'Like' is I get transferred to a separate screen that asks me to confirm whether I want to carry out the operation "Like" and then I will be allowed to return to the original screen.
Similar things sometimes happen uploading images - a separate screen opens and you can upload ony one image at a time and then have to return to the post you're composing and reload it to see the attachment.

The reply box is often blank and can't be typed in until after several page reloads.

What is probably happening in those situations, is that just like images sometimes don't transfer, a piece of Javascript from the Xenforo framework is missing. And so instead of using snazzy inline XHR requests the system has to fall back on separate screens for each interaction. (This is actually good because it means there is a 'graceful degradation' implementation in the framework, when things go wrong it doesn't just collapse into a heap of ash but instead delivers reduced but still bare-bones sufficient functionality)
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My problems seem so minor compared to the rest. No slowness with quotes, though posting a large story episode may take five seconds to complete. The only thing regularly is images not appearing (showing as attachments) and that seems mostly on threads I visit rarely. On ones that I frequent, it really happens.
And emojis come up slowly and some never do.
 
Eulalia said:
some of the oddities only involve things that are in the staff system
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I would guess here, ... while you are logged in as staff/admin, obviously you have some additional capabilities.

These will be reflected in additional Javascript libraries loaded in the browser.

Since there can be many more different user roles and capabilites when managing a system's backend than when visiting the frontend (where pretty much everyone has the same capabilities) all of these features will likely be loaded as separate components instead of being packed and compiled in a single very large one size fits all piece of code.

So there will be many more possible points of failures in staff mode vs. general visitor, if we assume that any individual HTTP request has some percentage chance of getting hit with a 503 response.
 
Nyghtfall3D said:
Incidentally, their community forum includes a section for Troubleshooting and problems but only @ImageMaker is allowed to use it.
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One thing to consider...
what's causing all the problems, when you look in Network Inspector, is 503 errors on the HTTP requests. (see my screenshot)

It's nginx (the server software) not Xenforo (the application) pushing out those errors.

The end result is that the client ends up with missing files.
If those missing files are images, the page looks 'not right' ... you have to reload.
If those missing files are Javascripts, the client can't talk properly to the application. The forum features degrade or break.

And most likely there's nothing wrong with the nginx installation either, it may just be operating outside of spec.
 
malins said:
One thing to consider...
what's causing all the problems, when you look in Network Inspector, is 503 errors on the HTTP requests. (see my screenshot)

It's nginx (the server software) not Xenforo (the application) pushing out those errors.

The end result is that the client ends up with missing files.
If those missing files are images, the page looks 'not right' ... you have to reload.
If those missing files are Javascripts, the client can't talk properly to the application. The forum features degrade or break.

And most likely there's nothing wrong with the nginx installation either, it may just be operating outside of spec.
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Thanks for all you posted, Malins. I’ve learned from it.
 
Another recurring features is that, sometimes, pictures cannot be viewed in series, but open (and must be closed with a confirmation request)individually in a separate window.
 
For background,

this is what's going on in my opinion, "the server has throttled itself by rejecting a portion of incoming requests".
Diagnosing a 503 Service Unavailable Error

As mentioned, a 503 Service Unavailable Error indicates that the server (typically the actual web server on which your application is running) is temporarily unavailable. This is usually due to the server being “down” for scheduled maintenance, or due to a heavy load of traffic that is preventing it from properly serving all incoming requests. ...

In the ... scenario where the server is rejecting the request due to overload, this usually means there is an unexpected onslaught of traffic/incoming requests. In order to maintain some semblance of normal behavior for a portion of the requests, the server has effectively throttled itself by rejecting a portion of all incoming requests and returning a 503 Service Unavailable Error. If the application/server was configured correctly, the request can usually be completed by waiting a little while and retrying a few times, hopefully enough for the traffic spike to die down and let you in.
 
As we are speaking about technical stuffs now, I have to wonder if we can try using a CDN to (hopefully) mitigate the problem. I don't know XenForo well, but it's highly likely that such a popular commercial forum software would offer a some form of integration option with CDN providers.

In non-technical terms, CDN is a caching service for resources like images or javascripts and it usually runs multiple servers across the globe to automatically select the one closest to each user's location.

It can not only make loading a website much faster, but also can reduce the traffic to the original server significantly, because only non-cached resources will be pulled from the origin.

CDN usually costs money, but as it can potentially reduce the traffic by a significant margin, it can save the cost paid for the bandwidth.

Along with the HTTPS support (and HTTP compression, to a lesser degree), it's something that I'd like to see applied to our website.
 
malins said:
One thing to consider...
what's causing all the problems, when you look in Network Inspector, is 503 errors on the HTTP requests. (see my screenshot)

It's nginx (the server software) not Xenforo (the application) pushing out those errors.
Click to expand...

I stand corrected.
 
From all of this, it appears these problems lie with Xenforo, not with Cruxforums. Xenforo is the service that hosts our site. We have little control over what they do or how they operate, as I understand it. If they are throttling back due to user demand (covid related?), we may just have to limp along until the situation improves.
 
Barbaria1 said:
From all of this, it appears these problems lie with Xenforo, not with Cruxforums. Xenforo is the service that hosts our site. We have little control over what they do or how they operate, as I understand it. If they are throttling back due to user demand (covid related?), we may just have to limp along until the situation improves.
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Sorry to be picky :), but Xenforo is just a software, and unless they also provide a hosting service, the server could be controlled by a different company.

Normally, users of such a hosting service have a control over at what capacity their website begins to fail or throttle the requests. It's just that it costs more to get a high capacity service plan.

Using a CDN, on the other hand, will reduce the amount of requests directed to the hosting service, because they will be first served by a CDN server closer to each user's location.
 
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Barbaria1 said:
From all of this, it appears these problems lie with Xenforo, not with Cruxforums. Xenforo is the service that hosts our site. We have little control over what they do or how they operate, as I understand it. If they are throttling back due to user demand (covid related?), we may just have to limp along until the situation improves.
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Xenforo?!? Oh, no! Fortunately, I have a picture of him, so we can track him down!

AUAwPlC.jpg
 
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