Stories of Tie Up Games

Hi

Not sure if it is just me, but, site speed seems to be really poor on this site at the moment, seemingly since the ip denial Chadmc90 did the other day.

Is anyone else finding this?

I’m also experiencing this

Me too. I thought it was because I used my smart phone for access a lot

Chad is aware.

Much coolness

I hope chadmc finds a solution soon. A couple of my friends and I have given up on chat here and have started exchanging emails or are chatting on FetLife.

It improved at the moment, still not what it used to be, but more usable than earlier today.

I know site admins are often forgotten, everybody always assume the system just runs and does not need maintenance, but keeping a site up running well takes lots of effort, time and money (I know, I run several myself). So thank you to all the people behind the scenes! Thank you for providing us with a place to talk about our fantasies.

Yes, I found it much easier to log onto now. Thank you Admins!

slackywacky wrote: ↑4 years ago It improved at the moment, still not what it used to be, but more usable than earlier today.

I know site admins are often forgotten, everybody always assume the system just runs and does not need maintenance, but keeping a site up running well takes lots of effort, time and money (I know, I run several myself). So thank you to all the people behind the scenes! Thank you for providing us with a place to talk about our fantasies.

I echo your sentiment. Thank you to all of the admin team and everyone involved, for the continued use of this wonderful site.

The IP blocking could cause a tiny amount of lag, but I thought the tradeoff would still be positive compared to having 100s of bots creeping on our site.

Another likely possibility, given that the number of guests have dropped significantly since the IP block, is probably our webhost, once again. We are still on shared hosting, which means we share server space with other websites. If any of those orher websites are experiencing heavy CPU usage, then our site is going to suffer as well. I will look into private hosting, but I doubt the prices will be in our sites budget.

wolfman wrote: ↑4 years ago

slackywacky wrote: ↑4 years ago It improved at the moment, still not what it used to be, but more usable than earlier today.

I know site admins are often forgotten, everybody always assume the system just runs and does not need maintenance, but keeping a site up running well takes lots of effort, time and money (I know, I run several myself). So thank you to all the people behind the scenes! Thank you for providing us with a place to talk about our fantasies.

I echo your sentiment. Thank you to all of the admin team and everyone involved, for the continued use of this wonderful site.

I want to support it! Very much! Thanx al lot!

When posting the last 2 days, maybe because my story updates are a little larger, the site throws a 302 Service unavailable at me. Refreshing the screen helps. It only happened with the updates to Hitchhiker, which are like I said longer, not with any other reply or post, but it happened 2 days in a row.

It legitimately seems worse than ever at times for me. There was a point the other day that it took me probably 5-10 minutes just to log in and reply to a short piece of feedback.

This morning for a while, the site would not load pages with stories.
The menu worked fine, but when you clicked on a link for a story, it threw an error.
Error message: "net/http: timeout awaiting response headers"

I just logged on stats showed 5 users and 101 guests. Clearly there seems to be a huge bot, tracker or scanner problem.

I'm not sure if it can be done but if you can make it members only and go straight to the log in page. Guests could then be directed to a register page automatically that should keep them away from the main site. Once the trackers or bots realize they cant get onto the site they should stop trolling it.

I'm not sure what access you have to the server folders directly but also a 'robots' file can be used to block off many web crawlers.

Another option, but cumbersome perhaps for members, is to password every sub forum, which could of course be the same for each one and even a simple one 'tug' for example, again that would block of the crawlers, bots etc.

Just some possible ideas.... May or may not work but perhaps worth considering.

The side speed does seem to have slowed to a downright silly degree. Opening the page and posting this message alone already took 10 minutes. If I try to open a pm it can take up to three minutes at best and up to five at worst. Its rather irritating.

Is it possible that the site's IP providers are deliberately throttling the bandwidth to this site in order to provide additional bandwidth to another client?

We need to refer that question to Chadmc90.

As Chad mentioned we are aware of the issue and actively looking into solutions. We are considering all possible options but the biggest issue is cost. As Chad mentioned we currently are on a shared server and switching to a dedicated server would likely mean costs upwards of $80 a month.

The speed also comes in goes in waves, currently I’m accessing the site at what I would say are acceptable speeds though maybe slightly on the low side (less than 2 seconds to load a page), other times I do experience much longer load times.

It’s possible that the hosting service is for some reason throttling our bandwidth but I do find that highly unlikely.

The other issue is that not all of the unregistered guests are bots, we are assuming a large number of them are actually people. There are talks of possibly switching over to a member only system that requires you to sign up.

We appreciate you guys bearing with us as we try to figure out a solution that best fits our board.

That 80 dollars is usually a promotional price, which would likely double after the promotional period ends, depending on the webhost.

As I said earlier, its a mix of bots constantly bombarding the site and other websites in our neighborhood experiencing high traffic, which would also affect us. Remember also that we are in a pandemic, where much of the world is under stay at home orders, and internet traffic is very high now.

I know this is frustrating, as I am upset too. I could upgrade the package once again, giving us access to more CPUs for processing requests, but it still the same situation in that we are sharing those CPUs with other websites. We'd be paying more out of pocket cost for what could be little gain.

Johnsnow wrote: ↑4 years ago We are considering all possible options but the biggest issue is cost.

Unless you are hosting on a private server, cost is always an issue. But even shared hosting is contractual obligated to investigate if your system speed goes down to the levels we have experienced. I run enough websites to have to do that occasionally. It is a 2 way game. You can expect a certain speed and you are not allowed to put such a load on the system that you kill the host (especially with GoDaddy). Obviously somebody on the server is doing that last thing and that should be reported.

Asking to be moved to another server within the farm might help. There are several options available to stop bots from getting on the site (I saw another post explaining some of them). The system has been running fine, before this slowness started (to the levels experienced now). It is definitely come and go, as it is decent now.

I can't remember seeing a donation button somewhere (probably overlooked it), but if you point me to it...

Good point. I've just looked and I can't find it either!

I'll ask Chad

Here's the link to to the donations page: Link: gf.me/u/x2rhv4

Thanks for asking.

The upgrade seems to have improved site performance so far. Let's hope it remain fast.

Still slow... 89 seconds to open this text editor window to type this reply.

It seems to vary, sometimes it is better, but definitely not fast.