Summary of recent problems with the USS forums
Posted: Sat May 06, 2017 7:06 pm
I wanted to document here what happened a few days ago with the USS forums, bringing anyone up to speed who wasn't aware of the issues, and for future reference.
Beginning roughly on April 28, 2017, users started noticing that they were receiving 'stale' pages when they viewed the forums. This manifested itself by time stamps in the past (current time as shown in upper right corner of all pages), and sometimes they'd be shown as logged in as other users.
After repeated communication with the hosting provider, it was determined that the site was generating a lot of traffic and that a product they use called Varnish Cache was serving up the 'stale' pages in an attempt to speed up response times. I argued that this would be fine for a site that was mostly static pages, but not appropriate for a PHPBB forum (or a wordpress blog, etc) An elevated support person told me that only by using an upgraded hosting product called 'cloud services' would I then be able to turn off this caching feature.
I upgraded and after a approximately 18 hour period, the site was migrated. I was then able to log in to my hosting account and turn off the caching feature.
Since then, the problem has not cropped up again, and to me the site feels faster.
If you have anything to add or other observations, please post in this thread.
Beginning roughly on April 28, 2017, users started noticing that they were receiving 'stale' pages when they viewed the forums. This manifested itself by time stamps in the past (current time as shown in upper right corner of all pages), and sometimes they'd be shown as logged in as other users.
After repeated communication with the hosting provider, it was determined that the site was generating a lot of traffic and that a product they use called Varnish Cache was serving up the 'stale' pages in an attempt to speed up response times. I argued that this would be fine for a site that was mostly static pages, but not appropriate for a PHPBB forum (or a wordpress blog, etc) An elevated support person told me that only by using an upgraded hosting product called 'cloud services' would I then be able to turn off this caching feature.
I upgraded and after a approximately 18 hour period, the site was migrated. I was then able to log in to my hosting account and turn off the caching feature.
Since then, the problem has not cropped up again, and to me the site feels faster.
If you have anything to add or other observations, please post in this thread.