Too much downtime and long loading time: CSL forums almost dead

[boformer 3,169]

Hello,

It seems like there is less and less activity on the CSL parts of the forums.

Simtropolis is my favorite city builder community, so it hurts to see that.

I've heard a few members of the modding community talking about Simtropolis. Many of them left the site because it is too slow and unreliable.

I can understand their reasons. Loading times and reliability have been bugging me for a while (location: Germany, high speed Internet, Firefox). To give you some examples: Loading a page often takes more than 10 seconds. Likes are often not transmitted to the server if you leave a page too early. when I hit Reply, the editor often does not appear. On many days, it is not fun to use the site.

I understand that downtime cannot always be avoided, but maybe there is a way to improve the performance of the forums.

Activity in the CSL community is definitely there, but it concentrates on other platforms. With Steam Workshop statistics and SteamSpy, we were able to determine that the player counts are constantly increasing.

I've thought about adding a little Simtropolis promo to my mods (some kind of popup that leads them to this site to view the changelog or to take a look at upcoming mods), but currently Simtropolis is just too unreliable for that.

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

Hi @boformer, thanks for sharing your concerns.

When downtime or poor reliability is prevalent, as admins it's frustrating for us too. We appreciate how this may impede on the ability to contribute around the site, and can understand those who feel inadequate performance hinders enough to be a discouragement. It's not fair this is happening.

As you may recall, starting back in late September through October last year, there was a significant outage for days due to database and server issues. This took weeks to restore and get the site back running again to acceptable levels. To say it could've been much worse too would be an understatement. Following on from then and with smaller occasional outages since, it saddens us to know if there are people who've decided enough is enough. Like all of you, we want Simtropolis to be the best it can be and keep trending upwards. Downtimes aren't nice, and when things are only working reliably on an intermittent basis, it can give false expectations.

Some users have also observed issues with the editor not opening, and there's an info topic with speculation on the causes and possible workarounds. This remains a bit of a mystery and seems likely to be at the CDN level. Although there haven't been new reports, and those it was affecting have been posting around the site since, it is concerning should this still be ongoing for certain users on and off. It seems geolocation is a decisive factor in this, and possibly with loading times in general.

For me personally, I've observed the past few weeks to be more consistent with reliability. This counts for nothing though. If even a smaller proportion of active users are affected by server degradation issues, whether that's attributable to external factors like Cloudflare or not, it's far from acceptable.

One thing we've got planned is a big site update to the IPS 4.4.x series. Our Webmaster @Dirktator has previously stated his intentions to update the board software, which promises new features including performance improvements designed to "turbo charge" loading speeds.

What's been holding us back is due to incompatibility with site addons including the Discord integration. Even still, software optimisations themselves can only do so much to help ensure consistent dependable performance. I personally believe most of the slowdowns aren't even due to an inadequate server, but instead the need for additional database tuning following the issues last October. We have a dedicated setup which is more than capable, and the specs are on par if not better than our previous host. It's also seemingly been a busy few months for Dirk, and so progress on this front has been slow going. I will inform him of your concerns.

With any persistent technical issue, I often believe the experience of one person usually coincides with that of many. The fact you're not alone in noticing downtime and slowdowns proves the issues are even more widespread too. So please be assured this is something we don't take lightly. We'll do everything within our power to rectify these problems, and sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused. The voice of yours (and others) is very much heard.

[CorinaMarie 29,875]

This turned out to be an odd coincidence.

The site suddenly got sluggish tonight and we had to take it offline for a couple of hours to allow a bunch of backed up processes to complete. And somehow all the linkys for avatars, STEX images, attachments and such got reset to the wrong default location.

CB fixed things up and we are back online now. The site seems to be running well for me. Btw, @boformer, when you notice the severe slowdowns is that the entire CSL forums or just the dedicated City Journals section?

[boformer 3,169]

@CorinaMarie Right now the site runs pretty well, but it's not always like that.

When it is slow, it does not seem to be related to a specific section of the forums. Of course screenshot-heavy threads take a bit longer to load, but I guess that's normal.

[boformer 3,169]

Maybe this will help a bit. Is there a way to display the giveaway on the front page?

 

[CorinaMarie 29,875]

21 minutes ago, boformer said:

Is there a way to display the giveaway on the front page?

Indeed there is. You can submit it to be featured in the carousel.

[boformer 3,169]

Submitted

 

[CorinaMarie 29,875]

5 minutes ago, boformer said:

Submitted

Cool. I got the beep letting me know it's in the pending queue.

We generally like to give the first slot 24 hours display time before revealing the next one so the approval for yours will prolly be about 10 hours from now. (If there are a bunch of pending feature submissions we do drop the 1st slot time frame as low as 6 hours.)

[CorinaMarie 29,875]

I did just add the orange star to your topic so that makes it show in the Featured topics list on the front right now.

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

@boformer

A small request...

For your homepage feature, I notice how it appears quite blurry due to the image being smaller than the display area. It's currently 580x215 and gets stretched to the full width of 995x540 there. If you could edit your feature to upload a new image that'd be great.

I notice there's a banner on the Paradox Plaza homepage, so maybe this would be suitable to use?

I've captured and scaled it accordingly as 995x540 to fit:

Spoiler

Should this be fine, just go to your feature and click the Edit function. Then delete the old image, upload the replacement, and click Save to save.

 

[boformer 3,169]

Done. I was on mobile so it was kind of hard to find a better picture.

Looks like I need to order more rock station keys 😀

[Cyclone Boom 17,031]

Thanks!

To help with maximum exposure, I've frozen your feature in the queue. That way it'll appear in the top slot for the duration the giveaway is running.