Timeouts all the time for past 7-10 days

[rawTOP]

5 hours ago, viking8x6 said:

It occurs to me that one difference between BZ and all those other sites that seem to work fine is that it uses one of the "expanded" top-level domains. That suggests it could be a DNS issue. I know the ISP I use for mail and web services does not provide them, for example. And I have observed in the past that when my internet gets wonky, it's just as often a DNS problem as it is one of actual connectivity.

Maybe if the issue resurfaces, those who are experiencing it could try the experiment of hitting some other sites in the expanded top-level space to see whether they also exhibit the problem.

They're called gTLDs (generic top level domains). I highly doubt that's the problem.

For those that are technical, if you experience the problem you can right click (on a computer, not a mobile device) and choose "Inspect…" from the contextual menu. That will bring up another window. Go to the "Network" tab in that window and then reload the page. There will then be a line for each element of the page that's loaded with bars that show how long it took to load. When you click on a bar there will be a way to tell what caused the delay with that particular element (different browsers display it differently). It's useful to know which line (page element) is causing the delay and what the browser says the cause of the delay was. Here's an example (using Firefox). This is what you'd see when you click on a line, then click on "Timings"…

What that's saying is that something (not quite sure what) blocked the loading of the page for ~1/10th of a second (95ms). DNS resolution was instantaneous (because it was already cached). It took 1/20th of a second to connect to the server, another 1/20th of a second to negotiate encryption. Sending the request took no time, and then it had to wait 1/7th of a second to get a response.

But again, for most of you none of that will make much of any sense. But if it does make sense to any of you, and you can do that when you encounter a problem it would be hugely helpful to know what you see in that debug window.

[fskn]

I suspect it's related to the ever-improving protections in Apple's Safari Web browser and/or third-party ad blockers like AdGuard (if installed).

Try going to Website Settings and turning Use Content Blockers off.

To rule out hidden blocking by your Internet Service Provider, also try cellular data. (If you have a VPN, turning that off, or trying different endpoints, might also help.)

In addition to slow or failed initial page loads in the last few weeks, I've found that login sessions sometimes don't stick as I navigate between pages on Breeding Zone, that reactions sometime aren't saved successfully, and that I can never save an edited post unless I turn off content blockers.

One variable that changes constantly, without action by site owners or users, is the current code in JavaScript libraries downloaded from third-party sites. Modern Web sites, Breeding Zone included, depend on these libraries. The code runs inside your Web browser, and can slow things down in different ways, for example, by looking up, or making requests to, Web services that are blocked by Safari or by content blockers (if installed).

I temporarily disable content blockers when I use features of Breeding Zone (and other sites) that aren't compatible, and then I re-enable the protections afterward.  To access some sites, I temporarily disable my VPN. If you want to balance security/privacy against Web site functionality, toggling is better than permanently whitelisting sites or permanently disabling protections for all sites.

[ejaculaTe]

The Gods of the Internet must have heard our cries of woe and despair. Thursday night, using Firefox for iOS and the cell phone on 4G, page requests timed out a third of the time. Friday evening and yesterday (Saturday), however, I had no problem (using Safari or Chrome). Go figure....

[Guest WelshBBCigarFuck]

I’ve also noticed the timeout problem seems to have gone away. I updated to the latest revision of iOS but the problem persisted. Since the weekend however pages are loading fine and no timeouts.

[rawTOP]

Glad to hear the problems have gone away. I changed nothing, so the problems weren't on my end.

One possibility was that somehow you triggered the DDOS protection that's in place and got temporarily blocked from the site (my server is on a DDOS-protected network but I'm not exactly sure what would trigger a block).

Anyway, good that things are back to normal.

[Guest WelshBBCigarFuck]

7 hours ago, rawTOP said:

Glad to hear the problems have gone away. I changed nothing, so the problems weren't on my end.

One possibility was that somehow you triggered the DDOS protection that's in place and got temporarily blocked from the site (my server is on a DDOS-protected network but I'm not exactly sure what would trigger a block).

Anyway, good that things are back to normal.

I don’t anticipate standard user browsing would trigger a DDOS detection event (based on what I do in my day job), in my case simply going to the site and clicking on a topic in the forum would cause the browser to show it trying to load the page and then it would timeout after a while. Similarly after reading a topic, if I clicked to leave a like it would sometimes work or sometimes come back saying it couldn’t be saved. I had similar issues trying to reply to a message and having to click back and try sending it again. There was no obvious pattern for it working or not working but In each case it was a single browser session to the site and me clicking on an item, so we are talking minor traffic from a single source rather than tens of thousands of packets from a single source. I wasn’t on VPN either so it wouldn’t be multiple connections to the site from the same common IP. Theoretically it could have been an ISP issue, but I am in the U.K. and I know a few others weren’t, so it would have to have been a common problem with multiple ISP’s which were geographically separate.
If your server is on a DDOS protected network, it’s potentially possible that there was something going on with the DDOS provider, but whether they would have an explanation is another thing. 
As the problem has gone away, there isn’t much point trying to perform in depth analysis or further investigation, let’s just hope it doesn’t come back.

[BootmanLA]

I would note that everyone who reported a problem seemed to have it on an Apple product. I did not have any issues using Chrome, Waterfox, or Edge on Windows during that period. When n=1, obviously not a lot of conclusions can be drawn, but it's interesting to note nobody else seemed to be reporting an Android or Windows version of the problem, at least not here.