Slow posting - notifications related?

[jair101]

My 3.4.x installation was happily ticking until the last couple of weeks when I have started noticing delay when post submitting and liking content. 

- Loading and reading - no problems

- Editing - no problems

- Submitting in new threads - usually fast

- Submitting and liking in old threads - slow

I felt that it is somehow related to notifications, because otherwise I do not understand why submitting is slow, but edit is fast. I assumed it is because submitting needs to send a notification to all thread subscribers and thats a lot of people, especially in the large topics. I tried to limit the stored amount of notifications, but it didn't help. Tried locking large topics, didn't help either. Occasionally I get double posting too, signal that things aren't running smoothly.  The only configuration change I made recently was switching from Mandrill to Sparkpost, no new plugins, no anything.

Configuration is Apache/Mysql, around 150k posts and 50 members + 150 guests online on average. The community is running on 2GB, 2xcore VPS and it is the only website on this vps. Any ideas?

[Rhett]

Check your email config in the acp, if it's using smtp and is performing slow, it could be related.

 

[EricT]

I have the same issue since a few days. I am using sparkpost

EDIT : lol here too (about 4 seconds to post this reply)

(and a few milliseconds to add content to this reply, next)

[Marc]

Seems a bit odd that you are seeing this in more than one place. This would point more to it being on your side rather than that of the server. Have not seen any issues on the site here whilst I have been posting. Is this something you experienced just the one on this site, or something you are experiencing consistantly?

[EricT]

I am not experiencing it consistantly.

What I am sure : since a few days (at work or at home), sometimes when I post some content on forum, the "Submit Reply" goes to "Saving" button and stay saving during a few seconds. I didn't noticed that in past.

I will ask my community users to see if they have the same problem.

[ABGenc]

I have had the same problem for a few days. Thanks to  @RevengeFNF's advice on taking a look at SMTP config as @Rhett suggested .

I have found out that for those topics which have several followers posting a new reply would mean almost 10 seconds or even more waiting.

You can check how fast you can send Test Mail on ACP to yourself. If that takes a lot of time too than you have the same problem as I did.

You can choose to disable email notificaiton for following cases so that posting on old threads become easier.

New content for things I follow

Someone comments on something I follow

Than check your email logs and SPAM config. There might be a bottleneck or an option slowing SMTP connections down..

[EricT]

7 hours ago, EricT said:

I will ask my community users to see if they have the same problem.

So, some of my members community have the same problem
 

7 hours ago, ABGenc said:

You can check how fast you can send Test Mail on ACP to yourself. If that takes a lot of time too than you have the same problem as I did.

It doesn't take a lot of time for me.. So it is another problem

[jair101]

7 hours ago, ABGenc said:

You can choose to disable email notificaiton for following cases so that posting on old threads become easier.

New content for things I follow

Someone comments on something I follow

Than check your email logs and SPAM config. There might be a bottleneck or an option slowing SMTP connections down..

How can I do that globally? I thought this is per user setting. I will sign up for sendgrid tonight, just as a test to see if it solves the issue. 

[ABGenc]

58 minutes ago, jair101 said:

How can I do that globally? I thought this is per user setting. I will sign up for sendgrid tonight, just as a test to see if it solves the issue. 

That can be set globally ;

ACP -> Members -> Notifications. Uncheck email for settings I have mentioned above.

You may need to set Member can edit setting to disable

[jair101]

9 hours ago, ABGenc said:

That can be set globally ;

ACP -> Members -> Notifications. Uncheck email for settings I have mentioned above.

You may need to set Member can edit setting to disable

Yeah, but I believe the setting stays the same for all members before the change, so I won't be able to see the results immediately. 

Anyway, I switched to Sendgrid from Sparkpost and can confirm that there is a notable improvement. I am waiting 24h and more reports from my members to confirm, but I believe this was the issue. 

[ABGenc]

28 minutes ago, jair101 said:

Yeah, but I believe the setting stays the same for all members before the change, so I won't be able to see the results immediately. 

Anyway, I switched to Sendgrid from Sparkpost and can confirm that there is a notable improvement. I am waiting 24h and more reports from my members to confirm, but I believe this was the issue. 

There are two way you can disable the setting.

1. You can uncheck email and set "Member can edit?" option to disable 
2. You can check email for "Disabled Notification method" 

Both disable email notification globally

[jair101]

I can confirm that at least in my case it was Sparkpost causing the problems. There is a slight lag with sendgrid too, but at most a second, while with sparkpost delay was often up to 10 seconds. Apparently this is an inefficiency of the SMTP relay model and if using Sparkpost as integrated in 4.0 it might be better, YMMV. 

[Summit360]

Thread Necromancer - Thanks for this... The one bit I could not easily test before migrating was email. Of course I did the migration, all went well enough... massive posting delays.

The only difference I'm using Amazon SES, so smtp. The upgrade must of jiggled a few settings, or rather made them work better  Got it sussed and this helped eliminate the last gremlins.. not ideal. People will want there email notifications.

[AlexWebsites]

I'm noticing the same and have sparkpost enabled. In one of my topics i tested I have 57 followers and it took 12 seconds to post the reply. If that's the cause, It would be better to load the reply and in the background send the notifications.

Tested by switching to php mail and posted in 5 secs same topic with 57 followers and immediately with another topic that only has 2 followers. has to be the 3rd party email causing slowness.