Site Errors (Slow pages, slow posting, connection reset, uploads failing)

[#1]

I find these forums are actually more likely to load reliably than some over bloated web 2.0 buzzword compliant complex webpage that has to fetch content from a dozen different places and relies on masses of javascript. That's probably due to the old fashioned relative simplicity of these forums.
If having to retry to fetch one of these forum pages is the worst problem your broadband has got, consider yourself fortunate to have what is presumably a pretty much perfect line. It's hardly the end of the world. A bit embarrassing for Plusnet that they haven't fixed it for so long, but perhaps they were happy to just ignore it until the right people complain, or perhaps they are just incompetent.
My experiment of using SeaMonkey set to HTTP 1.0 as a workaround was abandoned because these forums failing to load occur so infrequently for me anyway that I'll be unable to definitively determine if any particular failure was due to the forum servers, load balancers etc. or something else entirely like my ADSL connection. Therefore I won't really be able to tell if anything I try actually makes any difference.

[#2]

Ejs,
Cannot disagree with the principles of what you say - nearly let's get a life, which is my reaction when I read of whining gamers! 
I think here though, there are known issues for which resolutions have been tried, seen to be successful, albeit with highly undesirable  side effects.  What's disappointing is that the observed side effect has taken so very long to progress with the vendors and is possibly systematic of PN's supplier management practices - things only get addressed when someone squeals.
For people who post here a lot to help others on some days the forum can be near unusable due to the known issues, which have apparently been known about / understood for a long time, impact other services too but have never been progressed to resolution.
Given the suggestion that the load balancers impact the IMAP servers one wonders just how much more responsive email would be (including web mail performance complaints) if this issues could be resolved sooner rather than later?

[#3]

I've now decreased firefox's network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server from 6 to 3 (I had decreased network.http.max-connections some time ago, and disabled a lot of the new junk that keeps getting added). At best it would be a workaround, the settings affect all sites, and there's a different setting if you use a proxy. Since I don't frequently experience issues with these forums, I won't know if it makes the slightest bit of difference. However, I'll make sure I post a screenshot of any error message I ever get from these forums.

[#4]

Instead of changing maximum values for Firefox, check the configuration.
Especially the bit where Firefox (by default) chooses your default disk cache size.
It can be rather large if you have a lot of memory.
Change it to "user-controlled" and use a value of 64MB (or less) for cache size.

[#5]

It's already set to a fixed maximum size of 256MB, not that I think the Firefox cache size has much to do with these forums issues which I hardly ever experience.

[#6]

Have I missed the point somewhere ?
I can see that an IMAP client will regularly poll the IMAP servers, so random packet failures will be masked, as subsequent polls are likely to succeed and emails will be synchronized sooner or later.
I can also see that DNS lookup failures will also be masked, because most configurations have a minimum of two DNS servers, so if the first lookup fails, then the secondary DNS server will be tried and is likely to succeed as the error rate is low.
I can also see why the Plusnet speedtester gives inaccurate results, because if a percentage of packets are misdirected, then the result is going to be wrong.
I don't see how fiddling with browser settings is going to reduce the effects of incorrectly sent packets from Plusnet's network.
I could imagine that fiddling with firewall SPI and/or NAT might be able to reduce the effect - but then why should we IT'S A PLUSNET FAULT.

[#7]

Well, with the default setting, firefox seems to open 6 connections to community.plus.net, so they'll be six connections where the final closing acks get sent wrong. If firefox only opens 3 connections, they'll be half the number of packets cluttering up the firewall log if nothing else. I don't really see the point in opening numerous connections to the same server in some misguided attempt to make it go faster anyway. People probably think of bittorrent and using more connections must make things faster, but too many connections can just increase the overhead of opening (and closing) all those connections, or spreads the bandwidth too thinly (I'd rather have 10 things finished and 10 to start rather than 20 things each half finished), or it just increases the load on the server.
I also saw that there's a different network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy setting if you're using a proxy, so I was wondering if you were particularly badly hit due to your proxy server setup using a greater number of simultaneous open tcp connections compared to just using a browser directly.
The packets that show up in the firewall logs seem to appear shortly after browsing the forums, while the tcp connections are being closed.
Also, regarding DNS, I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the system seems to have changed somewhat. As I repeatedly send a DNS query to 212.159.6.9, I no longer get bounced around different DNS servers, many of which will have to repeat the slow external lookup. Instead, as I repeat the query, I get a neatly counting down TTL for the cached DNS answer. So I guess the DNS load balancers are pretty much fixed (or have been removed entirely).

[#8]

Quote from: ejs

I was wondering if you were particularly badly hit due to your proxy server setup using a greater number of simultaneous open tcp connections compared to just using a browser directly.

I suppose that is possible on the first visit to a website,  however the fact that it is a caching proxy server should mean that there are far fewer simultaneous open tcp connections compared to just using a browser directly,  as the majority of the page content will be sourced from the cache rather than fetched from the website.

[#9]

That's a maximum of 6 etc.
You will only 6 fails sent if all your ip requests fail.
Run wireshark to see if you get lots of fails.
BTW Expect lots of requests to resend on a poor wireless connection.
What does the BBC iPlayer think of your connection?

[#10]

@vilefoxdemonofdoom
I opened a single tab to the forums - netstat showed 6 open connections all to 212.159.9.110. I was talking about the packets sent from the wrong IP address which show up in the router firewall log. Not page loading failures. As I have now repeatedly stated, I don't see many connection resets by peer or timeouts when browsing these forums. I do see a lot of packets cluttering up my firewall log which can make it difficult to spot anything else in there. The packets that show up in my router firewall log will not, of course, be seen by wireshark running on my computer. They never reach my computer. They are sent from an IP address that doesn't match any outgoing connection, the router can't know where to NAT them to.
Perhaps the people complaining about the forum issues should be the ones running wireshark? What's the point of me running wireshark when I don't even experience all these unbearable database errors, connections reset by peer etc.?
I thought trying to find a workaround might be better than just waiting a few more months for this to get fixed, but obviously I was mistaken about this.
@purleigh
The HTML pages of these forums won't cache very well, they keep changing as people keep posting. Each board and thread has "Cache-Control: private", "Pragma: no-cache", and "Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT" in the HTTP headers. It may also depend on if the caching proxy server opens a connection to check if the content has changed (still saving bandwidth, but using a similar number of connections), or if it relies on the expiry date.
Anyway, presumably plusnet have passed the buck to the unnamed vendor of the load balancer. That means Plusnet's work is done - they have found someone else to blame.

[#11]

@'Kelly' - have you chased your load-balancer supplier today to see when a solution will be provided ? 

[#12]

When clicking a link in an email to go to a forum page I have sometimes been greeted with a blank white screen. Sometimes it eventually goes to the forum page but often I have to cancel the page and restart. This has happened a few times this afternoon.

[#13]

really crawling at present

[#14]

... what ? - is the forum responsiveness slow,  or any replies from the staff when asked when something is going to be done about it ?

[#15]

Half tempted to set up a forum run by the community for the community, but that's what they want so they can retire this site entirely.