So I’m having this issue both at home and at my work computer… the forums are taking an incredibly long time for me to load from late last week onwards. When I get in to a thread and try to reply, the post gets ‘stuck’ in my preview window, even after I’ve posted it, and will follow me around the forums until I cancel the post. Anyone else having this issue?
I’m having the same problem, too.
Me too 
don’t konw why.
likewise… i had assumed it was my internet connection at home (i didnt notice it until this past weekend), but its performing this way at work as well…
hopefully @system, @system, or @system can chime in, in the event something is happening on the backend…
Yup, I can confirm I have the same issue here.
I have been noticing similar problems and was going to post about it myself. My guess is that these forums are getting more popular and we are maxing out the bandwidth of their connection. If you consider how much bandwidth 100 or so people reading these forums could generate, especially with all these hosted Qubicle animated gif’s. I know it is a little more tedious to host your images on a 3rd party site and link them here but perhaps they should go back to no uploads if it means better performance.
Ah, yep! Four instances of the thin backend is too many for the 2GB of memory on the server and it’s hammering swap. Adjusting now by dropping down to two… should help out a lot without much impact.
thank you good sir… that appears to have done the trick… 
so, the forums are now only sharing an instance with one other member? and between us, its 2GB of shared memory? wow, this must be a pretty efficient application… 
Some statistics:
In the 25d8h the server’s been up, it’s transmitted 64130198995 total bytes (59GB) (that’s not web traffic, that’s EVERYTHING).
That works out to 234kbps assuming constant even load. That of course is an insane assumption, so pulling a multiplier number out of the air (20% duty cycle) gives us “peak” 1172kbps (just over 1Mbps).
The server connection is gigabit so it’ll handle a thousand times that, and I’d estimate total monthly traffic at 71GB out of your provisioned 3TB.
MORE IMAGES! MORE I SAY!
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Woo, glad that got fixed (and so quickly, too). Thanks @system!
The suggested configuration is nginx acting as a reverse proxy (load balancer) in front of the thin server.
Each thin server takes up a largish chunk of memory (1.5GB) and while some of that can be swapped out, “most” needs to stay resident.
Actually, going back and checking shows about 400MB resident for each thin, but virtual size is 1.5GB, swap usage is 900MB… that doesn’t add up. GAH memory is hard. 
Anyways, you’re good!
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therein lies my favorite response from anyone in infrastructure… and seeing as i use that phrase liberally, i feel much better now… 
edit: i meant sparingly! hahaha… oh good grief… 
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Well you mentioned nginx… and this is about something that has been bugging me for quite some time.
I really hope you agree to me picking your brain and give me an answer to this question.
Oh - before I ask - any answer will do, it must not be an answer backed by facts, it can be as opinionated as you want to give it.
So the question that is bothering me since a while:
“Should I look into switching from the Apache http server to nginx?”
Its bothering me because I am hesitant to spend so much time on rewriting and testing all sites on the server in question - on the other hand its a virtual server that is already weak as it is and slowly reaches the point of overload. Sadly renting a better server is not possible.
i know you werent looking for my opinion, but as im so keen on providing it…
while i havent migrated from Apache to nginx, i can tell you that one of my PHP web apps, hosted on a shared nginx instance, performed admirably under some decent strain… i didnt have any issues with configuration or maintenance in the two years i worked on the application…
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Oh I am keen on each and any opinion around this, as I really need some pushing in either direction - deciding for oneself is such a scary thing!
So - Thanks! 
Of course!
Not that I’ve done a huge amount with nginx, but it’s certainly nice and quick.
Apache does everything… but it does everything. As we say, your load is your load, you may find that it performs much better on nginx or you may not find much different. Try it out! Benchmark it!
i was going to bump this, to get the attention of the stellar folks at discourse… but the performance seems to have rectified itself this evening…
anyone else still seeing issues with the forums?
Gah! It took me a couple of times to refresh the page just so it would load!
Stupid internet traffic.
yes, it occasionally won’t load for several minutes at a time.
Like 14 hours ago the forum was not available for me at all… error message 502 or something was shown and the forum did not load for a while. I experience some frequent performance issues.