Discourse double posts and server availability

I’ve noticed the forum frequently gets unresponsive for me when I’m using a mobile device to access it. It will just hang on the spinning wait wheel when I try to navigate. A few minutes later I can click “Retry” on the network error page (looks like a page produced by Discourse, not by the browser) and it will be fine. And sometimes if this happens when I submit a post, sometimes it will double post on me. This really only seems to happen when using a mobile device (iOS, Safari or Chrome).

It’s not that big of a deal and I’m not asking for anyone to spend time “fixing it”. Just throwing it out there to see if anyone else is experiencing it and if I’m doing something dumb that I could stop doing. I would say I probably almost always have the forum open on about 4 devices at any given time though various devices may be in sleep mode. :slight_smile:

I use this forum quite often through mobile, but have not had any of the problems such as you describe. I’m on Android (not a huge fan of iOS) though. What you are describing doesn’t sound like a server issue, but rather an issue introduced by the client. It could be the cell coverage in the area (if you aren’t on wifi, but could also be your wi-fi coverage). If your i device is using any of the cloud relay methods to conserve data, it could be swallowing what it sees as multiple identical requests, which leaves discourse hanging, etc. It could also just be your cell phone provider, possibly trying to conserve data on your behalf.

Then again, a problem such as this can have some many different problems contributing, it’s like trying to fix a car engine through the phone. If I was guessing though, it’s either your OS, cell coverage, or cell provider. (Pretty broad brush there, but I digress.)

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Thanks for the thoughts. Agree, it could very well be anything downstream from the discourse server - that’s why I asked.

The devices are on wi-fi, and I don’t really have the same strangeness using the same wi-fi network to access the forum with a PC. Pretty sure I don’t have any data conservation settings turned on. Maybe I just have too many devices on my network and am connected to the O|D forums with too many of them.

FWIW, the iOS devices don’t seem to have trouble with other sites/forums, though this is the only discourse forum I frequent. Maybe I’ll try with an Android and see if I get the same different results.

FWIW I agree with @2disbetter - it’s likely to be one of those things and there’s little we can do about it from the server end.

Might be worth a scoot round the meta discourse forum to see if it’s a known issue, but I don’t have time for that at the moment.

I often browse with my phone, and haven’t had any issues yet here in Japan. This forum is hosted by Digital Ocean at one of their NYC server farms. You can speed test it here:

http://speedtest-nyc3.digitalocean.com/

My Phone over WiFi
ping: 230ms
download: 7.4Mb/s
upload: 6.1Mb/s

My PC over Ethernet
ping: 184ms
download: 32.4Mb/s
upload: 35.8Mb/s

My Phone over WiFi
ping: 61ms
download: 147.5Mb/s
upload: 5.8Mb/s

My PC over Ethernet
ping: 47ms
download: 130.4Mb/s
upload: 12.6Mb/s

I don’t think I’m having any network speed or stability issues. The way it’s behaving I almost wonder if it’s an issue with NAT and/or multiple simultaneous connections for a single account.

I started this reply on my PC. I then opened the post on my iPhone to get the link to test the speed there, and my draft reply was moved seamlessly over to the phone. It’s very smart software. I may just be doing something to confuse it…

Does it only happen on your home network? If so then the nat is probably the problem and it might be ddos protection on the server farm dropping requests as well. If so not much you can do about that.

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I don’t access the forum enough away from my home network to really have a good sense. Like I say it only seems to happen on the mobile devices, not PCs.

Thanks for the thoughts - was just curious if anyone else experienced this. Sounds like no. It’s really no biggie. I may refrain from posting from my iPhone, since that seems to be creating double posts sometimes lately. No big deal, there is always a PC within a short walk.

I’ve noticed on iOS (on my iPhone 6) - when i enter my username or password, it goes weird fullscreen and I cant see what I’m typing.

Not a big deal though, as I know how to spell my name :slight_smile:

Hmm., I never type my username and password. Guess I told it to keep me logged in.

Weird, no issues here using iPhone or Mac w/ Safari and various connections.