Forum down

[Caras pet]

Is it just me?


# 504 Gateway Timeout ERROR

## The request could not be satisfied.

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We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. 
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. 

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Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) HTTP3 Server
Request ID: ...


I get this on a regular basis, the forum is unreachable for hours when this happens.

[teanndaorsa]

Hmm, I'll take a look at the logs, but it does suggest the server is getting itself into a state and then fixing itself after a while. Thanks for letting me know; I'd be interested how many other folks are seeing this.

[bentbliss]

I've seen this message early and there have been a few times over the past week where it wasn't accessible and had a Cloudflare message. That one happened with another site as well.

[teanndaorsa]

I suspect the other site is just a coincidence.

I've just watched the Plaza (or at least the dynamic parts of it) be down for an hour or two. It doesn't appear to be the server being overloaded, or even properly offline, it just gets itself into a state where PHP requests take too long and the CDN that sits in front of the site gives up waiting. So I suspect either a misconfiguration on my part, or sporadic attacks that hog all of the connections to the PHP part without actually making it work hard. I say attacks because I've enabled some more detailed analysis that breaks down the traffic by country, and it's showing Brazil and Iraq as generating four times as much traffic between them as the US does, when I know that typically the US is our biggest visitors by far. And even with the basic monitoring looking back I can see this is something that has crept up in frequency since January.

I'm afraid there's no quick fix here though, because I don't want to just block those two countries, and there isn't an easy configuration change (that I know of) that I can make that will address the root cause. I've something I can try which may make the site more efficient and less vulnerable to the problem, but I won't have the time to test it properly until the weekend or some time next week. So you'll have to bear with it for now, sorry.