Strange, random performance issues on our Forum

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The XboxEra.com forum is experiencing strange, random performance issues. The forum, hosted on a Digital Ocean server (4 GB Memory / 2 Intel vCPUs / 80 GB Disk), becomes sluggish and unresponsive at random times, with CPU usage spiking to 60% user side and a significant increase in outbound bandwidth. Despite having over 2000 members, the issues persist even when not all members are online.

Sikamikanico has checked Google Adsense and analytics for errors but found nothing notable. Falco suggested checking for bad bots in the Admin > Reports > Web Crawler User Agents report, which Sikamikanico provided. pfaffman inquired about Digital Ocean backups, but Sikamikanico confirmed that backups are regular and did not occur during the recent performance issues.

1

Hey folks, hoping to get some assistance here - as a mere amateur, I’m encountering issues with our Discourse setup over on XboxEra.com - (https://forum.xboxera.com)

It’s running on a Digital Ocean server - 4 GB Memory / 2 Intel vCPUs / 80 GB Disk

We have over 2000 members, and obviously not all of them are ever on at once. At random points in the day, we see the forums become sluggish and unresponsive, with CPU usage shooting up to 60% user side, and a huge jump in outbound bandwidth.

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The forum displays the “some features have been disabled” message automatically, with comments taking up to a minute to save, and users even being logged out.

I’ve checked Google Adsense and analytics to check for issues or errors, and can see nothing that stands out. However, I’m admittedly not an expert - anyone have any bright ideas?

Thanks in advance!

I can’t seem to determine why - has anyone encountered an issue like this before?

2

That network IO going up while disk IO goes down is interesting.

Any bad bots standing out in the Admin > Reports > Web Crawler User Agents report?

3

Here’s our top 10.

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4

Are you having digital ocean run backups of your droplet?

5

Yeah, it backs up once a week, but it’s regular and known. No back up occurred today for example, but we experienced huge perf issues regardless.