With my forum at startrekuk.com i keep getting a lot of cgi time-outs. Could this by my server or the bbs software?

It is difficult, if not completely impossible to properly diagnose most UBB problems without knowing which version of the UBB you are using, as well as the FULL URL to your ultimatebb.cgi file, (NOT a link to your webpage). Please provide this information. Thanks.

Oops

http://www.startrekuk.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

Thanks for your answer.

I am also using UBB 6 - hence why I added the bug report in this forum.

Moving to UBB6 PIT for further followups.

Your board isn't terribly large, there's no reason for any sort of timeout.

When do the timeouts usually occur? During a particular time of day? When performing certain functions?

The forum seems to time out alot and only half of each page load every now and again! I've been trying to post a reply in one of the topics but it is hard as I can't read the last post in full.

It seems to do this at different times of the day also. I spoke with the server hosts (fasthosts) and they say there is too much stuff in the cgi folder - which i couldn't understand.

Could you paste in their exact response?

It was a telephone conversation but they basically said that they had looked at the cgi folder and apparently there is too much information in that folder. Their idea was to split the forums up and to have their own cgi folders to make the processing of posts etc quicker.

They say that the amount of space they give for a cgi-bin folder is up to the Microsoft standards and that this is apparently the same as you would get anywhere else.

Obviously, I don't want to have to start changing the forum too much now that it's been set up and being used.

That has to be one of the most incredibly funny comments I've ever heard from a web host.

My advice to you is simple - go find another host. Your existing one seems to lack both common sense and good technical support.

So you have no idea why the forums keep getting the cgi time-out then?

This is another error message i get:

HTTP/1.1 502 Gateway Error Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 17:57:27 GMT Connection: close Content-Length: 186 Content-Type: text/html
CGI Timeout
The specified CGI application exceeded the allowed time for processing. The server has deleted the process.

Any ideas with this one?

I've used fasthosts in the past - they have a 10 second CGI Timeout set on their servers. Ugrading to 6.1 may help - anything you can do to reduce processing time.

And do send them an email telling them to increase the timeout

What do you suggest having the 10 second time-out increased to?

20 to 30 in extreme cases.

Your board is not an extreme case. It should have no problems whatsoever on that server, unless the server is very overloaded. That appears to be the case.

Fasthosts say that they have cleared the cache of the cgi bin but will not change the time out from 10 seconds. Is it possible to move the cgi-bin to another folder and then change the settings for the board by pointing it to the new url location?

Do you care to explain what they meant by "clearing the cgi-bin cache"? Is this something they said, or is this something that you are paraphrasing? Their direct quotes would be a great help.

The guy just said that he would clear the cache of the cgi-bin. I presumed this was the same practice as the function within the ubb control centre where you can clear the cache?

Thanks,
Neil.

Not nessecarially.

Can you copy & paste the exact statement he made (i.e. from the email)

It was a telephone conversation that went a little like this:

I asked: "Is it possible to increase the cgi-bin timeout from 10 seconds to 20 or 30 seconds?"

He replied: "No, is the answer to that. The timeout limit complies with microsoft standards....."

He then said: "What I can do though is clear the cgi-bin cache, which 'may' speed things up a bit."

Does this help? Probably not

Microsoft standards?

Oh ye gods.

Okay... I don't know for a fact that there isn't such a thing as a "cgi-bin cache" in IIS, nor do I have the resources to find out.

Either way, this sounds way more than fishy.

Dare I say it, but your hosting provider does NOT sound very competent with perl nor UBB... who are these guys anyway?

Come on CC, the cgi-bin cache is right there next to the perl overclocker limiter



Maybe they have their caching for their servers setup to also cache cgi files... There is a MS "Internet Security and Acceleration Server" used by some providors and one of the functions is a cache server. The "MS Standards" could also be their recommendations for the time-out settings.

Funny, one would think that caching output of a script would make it faster, not time out.

The host providers are....


wait for it.. FASTHOSTS

The servers are Windows 2000 ones - does this make any difference?

mebbe... we run on win2k at UBBDev and have scripts time out at the default 30 seconds, but then again only have a few sites on the server, plus I know what's installed on each so I'm not afraid of one taking them all down. As a web host you have no idea what sites might have inferior forum scripts installed

If they are running that internet accelerator server, it could very well be at a default of 10 seconds.