No worries, thanks for taking a look!
Only had it happen a couple times in the last week…once past the logon stage all seemed fine, just took an long time to authenticate.
Take a look at the user count at the bottom of the home page if you (anyone) experience a delay:
Most Online Today: 184. Most Online Ever: 3,951 (August 14, 2019, 00:20:07)
I think that there might be some tweaking that could be done.
This HTTPS URL:
HTTPS://weather-watch.com
redirects to:
HTTP://weather-watch.com/smf/
notice it is doing a redirect to non HTTPS. (sorry had to put those links in code notation because the forum was appending extra HTTP in front of my text. Eventually it settles on HTTPS but it doesn’t happen as it should initially.
Then the other problem could be a number of 404 (page not found) errors in regards to Tapatalk mobile app support
…even when you go to the proper HTTPS with /smf/ path added there is still a redirect to non-HTTPS and I think there is a problem fetching 3 files from non-HTTPS URL.
webkit.ccs
script.js
tapatalkdetect.js
I think it eventually times out or redirect to fetching the same files over HTTPS including two more files: index.ccs and theme.js and these take a long time too. The tapatalkdetect.js over HTTPS fails after a long wait this next time over HTTPS because it can’t find it.
It tries to load tapatalkdetect.js two more times but the subsequent times it is over quickly but also with a 404 error (not found).
Attached are results for two separate requests described above for (I just think they are different because it was cached)…still shows same delay issues in retrieving these files:
HTTPS://weather-watch.com/smf/
By the way those delays that I showed tested are showing upwards of almost 5 seconds. That feels like an eternity. Then when the website is more busy I’ve seen those test last up to 20 or 30 seconds. I should have kept those long delay results but I didn’t think of it back then a few days ago. But the results were the same back then with it showing problems in those first file connections at the top of the graphs I attached…they were just longer. Then the ending parts are quick and short and load up fine.
The redirect was added a long time ago for people who went to the weather-watch.com domain name rather than directly to SMF via a bookmark or finding a link via a search engine. I wasn’t really expecting this to be used often and probably only on the first time visiting the forum so hopefully most people wouldn’t normally see any delay associated with this. Thanks for spotting it and it’s fixed now.
I’ve removed Tapatalk support. I don’t think many people ever used it. I certainly only dabbled with it once or twice before choosing to go direct to the forum. I think the 404 errors might be because at some version between the one I had installed and now they’ve changed the way their HTTPS support works. Apparently you now have to use their DNS if you want to use Tapatalk. I choose the DNS I want and I don’t wanted to be dictated to by a seldom used app. I suspect that the 404 errors were from Tapatalk files that weren’t accessible when using my own DNS.
Sorry if you were a Tapatalk user and now it doesn’t work.
Whilst the HTTPS stuff would have made some difference I think the bigger issue is that it’s likely to have been much slower on the days where there have been thousands of users online in a day. The logs suggest that this is traffic from China. As there have never been many (any?) legitimate Chinese users of the forum I think it’s unlikely that there’s a sudden massive increase in the number of attempts to access the forum from China just in the last month. I’ll put my InfoSec hat on sometime soon and try to work out what they’re trying to get at…probably a flaw in some forum based scripts…but it’s getting late now and I need my beauty sleep 
Chris just to add my perspective as the OP. This has been happening to me every day for several a while before I opened this thread on first access after booting my PC and only happens on first access, once I am on I can do things like post etc or read threads with no more than normally expected access times. This morning I decided to access it via Chromium (I normally use Waterfox and this is always Linux), no difference to the initial access delay I have been seeing but now I’m in it responds normally. I use the proper https protocol ending in /smf and always have done for ages now.
Anyway thanks for taking the trouble to look at this, much appreciated.
Stuart
PS as a test I am doing this update from Waterfox after closing Chromium and still Waterfox had an initial delay in accessing the site, so for me it is the initial access by the browser which is seeing this issue.
There is still a small problem…
It is now working much better that the non-HTTPS links and tapatalk references have been removed BUT… I think there may be a bottle neck in dealing with the LetsEncrypt SSL certificate. That is still a bottleneck on initial page load. No problems once you are in the site…it is just that initial load and hangs on getting that certificate worked out. I don’t think the issue is with LetsEncrypt…I think the issue is in how the certificate is configured. One evidence is that sometimes the browser still says that there is content that is not secure.
I’m also seeing that domain only URL www.weather-watch.com works better than with the /smf/
Couldn’t log in at all at first this morning. . . 2000 users? Even now 450 guests 8O
Yep 1600 guests at this time here. At the same time that other weather forum has only 50 guests and they get way more traffic day in and day out. Something is up with either SMF or Apache missing security updates or something. It is causing a DDOS.
Many of these “guests” are shown as using Chrome on Android with a lot of them viewing the board Weather Products/Services - Suppliers.
Good catch Martyn. I have temporarily blocked guest access to those boards. Won’t do anything to current guests but may reduce the bandwidth of any new ones :dontknow:
797 of them now viewing this chatter board.
Oh well, it was an idea :roll:
Will banning guests from ALL boards for a while help?
Or by the years old specific OS or browser they use?
I think at this point it may be warranted to contact Hetzner tech support since you are paying them for hosting. They should be able to identify the problem.
Chris runs his own server. This excessive guest issue may only be solved by adding some IP ranges and spider signature types to .htaccess to prevent the servers PHP processes from being overloaded. That’s something that Chris would have to do as we mods don’t have that capability.
BTW… ‘banning’ still invokes the SMF PHP scripts for processing, so can’t handle the reduction in the overload… only the .htaccess can prevent PHP from being invoked in the first place and having Apache (or NGNIX) discard the request before PHP is activated.
Yeah, I realized that after I had done it :oops: I thought it would send them to a 403 but it only redirects them to the login page #-o