[Meta] Is AskLibO slowing to a crawl?

[dajare]

I have enjoyed participating on this site for quite a while now, and it has been invaluable as LibO is the only office suite I use on a regular basis.

However, it seems to me as if Askbot is struggling to cope now. The response times from the site are very slow. Searches sometimes (even frequently) return with “Service unavailable”. Generally the responses from the site are sluggish when editing. I continue to regret that LibO opted for Askbot in preference to attempting to establish a site in the Stack Exchange network.

My “meta” questions are two:

1. What can be done to improve the response times and performance of this site?
2. If the response to #1 is, “Not much”, or “When the developer gets around to it”, then what are the possibilities of looking at a Stack Exchange launch?

(P.s. As I try to tag this post, the spinner just keeps spinning without any autocomplete on the tags I’ve chosen! Case in point…)

[Lupp]

Had (and still have) also many “Service unavailable” results and delayed actions/responses since, at least, half a year. In addition: There were some issues with otheer services in the libreofice.org domain. This possibly one of the reasons for moving the bugzilla service (which was also hosted by libreoffice.org) to documentfoundation.org? An accelerating effect of this move on ‘ask’ I did, however, not observe.

[Lupp]

Saving the above comment was a matter of 2minutes. After it was done, I was not able to edit it (rectifying a misspelled word).

[dajare]

@Lupp - I’m surprised my question was even saved - after five minutes, I got a “service unavailable” notice (again!), so I’m glad it survived. This frustratingly slow responsiveness is one of the reasons contributing to my own decreased participation on the site. (And now we’ll see how long it takes for this comment to be saved!)

[dajare]

Plus, see from the Askbot support forum: “This site takes about 45 seconds to post a new question. Why?”

[oweng]

Been unusably slow for me also in recent weeks. I can access my inbox for first time today so it seems improved now.

[AlexKemp]

“What can be done to improve the response times and performance of this site?”

In large part, that depends on the system resources devoted to ask.lo.

A month ago I began to experience similar delays to those reported by the OP. I sent an email to the address on the page in each case. The emails were responded to by the Executive Director. We had a short exchange across a period of days.

Eventually s/he copied messages to other LO workers and, eventually, more cpu was devoted to ask.lo & there has been almost no repeat of those problems (apart from a South Korean spam-attack) (plus, recently, it has repeated a little).

If you get a “Service Unavailable” or other page with an address to report the problem, then do so. Be polite, try to be helpful. Nobody can know everything, and especially if no-one speaks up.

If this helps then please tick the answer ()

…and/or show you like it with an uptick (∧)

[dajare]

Thanks for this - very hepful. Oddly enough, I did think that posting something (reasonably) temperate here was “speaking up”. Would have been good to have a reply or some input from whoever is responsible for this site.

[ROSt53]

@dajare - I get the mail from Website Team and can assure you that they are working always hard when there is a site problem. Why does the problem happen in the first case? I don’t know and consider that the team in charge know what needs to be done.

Maybe you subscribe to these mail to see what is going on when there is a problem.

[Lupp]

I don’t know any details. But obviously the forum software is supporting a lot of wiki features like version history, detailed activity tracking … and in addition the “karma” and “badges” features.

As I (nearly) always proof-read my posts and edit them for rectifications, enhancements … there are lots of intermediary versions in my case. - And we are approaching 50000 topics! The hardware will have to meet demands as the software has!