Laura, What's wrong with Cruise Critic?? Problems!

[Guest Host Tink]

Dear Cruise Critic Members,

 

We share your frustration with the recent message board performance issues. We are keenly aware of the situation and are doing our best to work through them. As you may be aware, our message board usage has grown exponentially over the past few years. Unfortunately the recent problems started while upgrading our servers in an attempt to address growth issues so that we would not have performance issues. We are working with our hosting company and outside consultants to find and fix the problem as quickly as possible.

 

We appreciate your patience in the meantime and apologize for any inconvenience.

 

Cruise Critic Staff

[LMKohler]

Host Tink -- while I appreciate your reply to the other posts in an attempt to keep us informed -- merely posting the same reply on a different day will probably not go over very well. Unless this is a mistake caused by the problems on the boards.

 

Lucy

[tuggers]

Lucy,

 

I guess until I saw that repeat post I thought someone had actually seen our thread and taken the time to reply. Now I realize it's just a canned response probably put on all the boards. Kinda makes you feel bad that they really don't care!

 

I've been asking Laura to reply to us, but I guess if this kind of answer is all we have to look forward to, why bother? The smart thing to have done would have been to take a little extra time and personalize the posts!:rolleyes:

:rolleyes:

[DeltaOne]

We might be able to help the situation a little.

If you remove the checkmark from the "show signature box",

it may reduce the loading time for pages.

I turned off "show signatures" months ago and not only do pages load faster but there's less "clutter" to weed through. It's a nice change.

 

I don't need to know how many cruises the poster as been on, nor do I need to know how many days before their next cruise...

[teegeezfun]

there are so many fancy animated avitars used by posters that certainly bogs things down. when the system tries to load all of those animations it's just too much for it sometimes and it crashes.

[LMKohler]

Gail -- I have to agree with you. It just seems so strange to me -- because in the past the Hosts and Laura seemed to be so responsive. It's almost the same as the criticism of cruise lines not being responsive to emails, phone calls, etc. -- who would have thought :(

 

Lucy

[Kitycaty]

So what boards is everyone posting on? (Just in case) lol... :confused:

Barb

[HeatherInFlorida]

I shut everything down as well for awhile and it made no difference. So it could be it's just better in Maryland. We've been told that the avatars and signatures have nothing to do with the problem. There's another thread about this and Host Walt and other techno-people posted a lot of information there ... can't remember the name, but it's on the HAL boards. I think it's call "Would you pay more for CC for better service?". There's a lot of info about this subject on there.

 

But I have to say that this duplicate response by Host Tink is actually insulting. Better to say nothing at all than same old same old.

[debjac]

I too would like to know another board to visit when this one is acting up. Not that I would ever abandon Cruise Critic - the people and info here is amazing. But when I go to a restaurant that doesn't have Coke, I'll settle for Pepsi :rolleyes:

[canderson]

There's another thread about this and Host Walt and other techno-people posted a lot of information there ... can't remember the name, but it's on the HAL boards. I think it's call "Would you pay more for CC for better service?". There's a lot of info about this subject on there.

Some of us do pay -- I subscribe to their hardcopy version as a way of tossing some support bucks into the kitty (there's not much in it that we don't eventually see either in the email newsletter or here online), and perhaps as a result, have justification for somewhat higher expectations.

 

I note that it's just now that consultants are being called in to establish the nature of the problem -- a problem that's been reported here and worsened for some time. One can only assume that the advertisers who, with a few of the rest of us, support this system, have started to raise the necessary level of fuss to require that something be done.

[HeatherInFlorida]

I actually gave the wrong name of the thread which was more like "[i]Would you be willing to pay for CC if you'd get better service[/i]?". I was just giving the name of the thread because it had some expertise about what might be the cause of the problem.

The suggestion was that if CC were a "subscription service" as opposed to a free service, would it be any better. Canderson pays for a hard copy, but for the most part no fees are derived by CC from the members of this board.

There are several other cruise boards out there. I'm not going to post the ones I know, but they're pretty easy to find when you do a search. I've looked at several, but I have to say none of them really offer as much as CC does (IMHO:) ).

[tuggers]

I also have subscribed to the print newsletter even though, like canderson says, everything is in these boards. However, with no info forth coming from the Hosts (except canned posts to everyone) and nothing from Laura, I canceled that subscription this week. It was just to give them income and now I don't feel that loyalty is reciprocal. So I canceled. I recommend it.

[mafig]

Do you think the advertisers know what's going on?


I would think if they knew they would be asking for a credit for the CC down time, don't you.?

As far as paying....can you imagine how mad we would be if we [i]were[/i]
paying and having to put up with this.:mad:

[LuAnn]

Please..this is such a great resource....why won't the "powers that be" take the time/money to fix it....it is just a case of too much traffic...easy to fix I would think!!!

[HeatherInFlorida]

There must be very little traffic today ... I've had literally no problem at all the entire day. Of course, this post will jinx that:o .

[Richard Stein]

I cannot open any of the board prior to 5 PM edt. Prior the that I get a blank screen and it says done in the corner like I see now.

[Desertbelle]

If the boards continue to act like this they won't have an issue of too many people online....people will just stop coming by. :(

[sunpsyche]

I dont want to start celebrating prematurely, but I've actually been able to access the boards last night and this morning. I can move around from thread to thread too! Prior to last nite that was impossible. Seems to be progress...lets hope it continues to improve.

[Kitycaty]

Everything's been working fine for me today too, all of a sudden. Will wonders never cease! :D
Barb

[cjmayes51]

I've never had problems getting on Cruise Critic from home via Roadrunner, but at work, during lunch, it's worse that any dialup ever was. Not sure if that was becuase of the time of day or all the security they have at my place of work, weekends and at night have always been releatively smooth. Of course high speed digital Roadrunner may help. I also have looked at the other crusie boards, this site has 50x more info than any other, hopefully everyones problems will get worked out soon

[BEAV]

I doubt we'll have too much of an access problem on weekends. Seems the problem is more Monday-Friday during normal "business hours" when the majority of people are at work. Tomorrow (Labor Day) will be a good test. My guess is you won't have access problems during the day compared to a "normal" Monday.....

[Andym]

Daft question but could this be anything to do with the version of software you use. At work I have IE5, never any problem. At home IE6, no performance on Cruise critic at all.

[canderson]

[quote name='Andym']Daft question but could this be anything to do with the version of software you use. At work I have IE5, never any problem. At home IE6, no performance on Cruise critic at all.[/QUOTE]Even Firefox has the same problems, and I've had no luck with either IE5 or IE6. A friend running Mozilla on his Mac hasn't had any better luck, either.

When CC's PHP servers are having an attitude problem, it seems to effect everything.

[hermang]

[quote name='canderson']Even Firefox has the same problems, and I've had no luck with either IE5 or IE6. A friend running Mozilla on his Mac hasn't had any better luck, either.

When CC's PHP servers are having an attitude problem, it seems to effect everything.[/QUOTE]
It is not your Internet Service Provider folks nor which browser you are using.
As the man says - when the PHP server is having an attitude problem NO ONE gets served. -

If I had to guess - there is either a database issue or there are not enough threads being allowed to service all requests - because not only the Celebrity forum is affected but every forum. I'd suspect maybe not enough memory on the servers or maybe not enough cache - which is also a memory function.
I doubt that it is a server horsepower issue. Could also be a technical issue with the "code" used to retrieve and display the threads

[canderson]

[quote name='hermang']It is not your Internet Service Provider folks nor which browser you are using.
As the man says - when the PHP server is having an attitude problem NO ONE gets served. -

If I had to guess - there is either a database issue or there are not enough threads being allowed to service all requests - because not only the Celebrity forum is affected but every forum. I'd suspect maybe not enough memory on the servers or maybe not enough cache - which is also a memory function.
I doubt that it is a server horsepower issue. Could also be a technical issue with the "code" used to retrieve and display the threads[/QUOTE]The architecture [u]appears[/u] to be one server front-ending for the PHP server. If the PHP server is unable to respond in some preset period of time, the front-end server assumes that the request will not be fulfilled, and "times out". Previously, that produced the "something wrong with the database" screen, which subsequently has simply been replaced with a blank screen. That may be because if the result was really those email messages to the techs that the "something wrong with the database" screen claimed were being sent, they were being flooded with these -- and dropped that information and function from the front-end server.

I don't know what's causing what -- none of us can from out here -- but I can certainly gauge the consequences of the current application vs. other possible approaches to delivering content. I'm still skeptical that it's really a resource issue since problems would occur even during what we used to know (we used to be able to see the total on-line user count) were very light periods of use -- but for the moment I'll defer and take CC at its word that they're having problems with demand.

Being a bulletin board junkie from back in the early 80's as they were becoming popular, I can only look with amazement at the concept of using a PHP server to handle this sort of work. I think what many fail to realize is that the PHP actually has to build a page on the fly that is customized for the specific user and current context for that user. Navigation into the thread lists and into the threads themselves is causing large amounts of custom HTML data to be generated for the user. Even with the incredible increases in horsepower that we've had over the years, it seems to me to be a less efficient means for accomplishing this than we had employed in the "old days" - primarily due to the overhead of HTML in creating the data to be displayed. While it is possible to create all manner of wild and wonderful graphics and ad displays and a cute user interface, it comes at a price in terms of required horsepower (be it in terms of memory, raw CPU power, disk access, etc.). For example - as a user, I'd be happier having snappier access without the availability of 21 different fonts with bold, italic and underscore, indents (heck, it kills the formatting of anything fancy like columnar data anyway), etc. We don't need Unicode since we're all operating with a standard English alphabet as far as I can tell. In short, an application that dealt in a simple one-byte-per-character ASCII format would save a ton of resource, would convey the information, and would unquestionably improve performance.

The trade-off with this software is cute/performance, and if CC wishes to continue with cute into the indefinite future, it's going to be necessary to sort out how to keep the system performance moving up the curve along with the demand for resource. Should that prove to be cost prohibitive, an application that didn't tax the available resource so heavily would be a better alternative than continuing in this mode. Guess I'm still one who believes that the timely access to information trumps the sexiness of the display of the information (something I'd like to say to a few web designers, too!)