Features / Usability

Posted by Peter 06 May 2006 05:41 GMT-0000 posts: 55

How many registered users do you have?

Are you allowing anonymous users to read your pages?

We currently have about 90 registered users (max 10 online at the same time) but are about to have an influx of about another 100 users.

What guidelines to people have for numbers of registered users, and concurrent users?

PeterE

> Normally my site has from 0 to 10 users.
> It is a new site, about last weekend, this happened for the first time. I turned the site off for maintenance, and within 1 min. the users where down to 1 (me as admin). Then I turned it on again, and again the number of users climbed dramatically within 30 sec. to about 190 users again.
>
> I turned access to the site off for 7 hours, and when I turned it on again the next day, it again climbed quickly.
>
> Then, later that day it went down by itself, and has stayed down for about 7 days. Then tonight while working on some wiki pages it started again. I see it come to about 190, then it slows down so much that I cant even enter it myself.
>
> Am I being attacked, or is it a problem with my code/pages?
>
> What do I do?
>
> any help is much appreciated,

Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee 06 May 2006 10:18 GMT-0000 posts: 4664

> Normally my site has from 0 to 10 users.
> It is a new site, about last weekend, this happened for the first time. I turned the site off for maintenance, and within 1 min. the users where down to 1 (me as admin). Then I turned it on again, and again the number of users climbed dramatically within 30 sec. to about 190 users again.
>
> ....
>
> Am I being attacked, or is it a problem with my code/pages?

When the online users number spikes like that, it's most likely due to a search site's bots indexing your site. This is "normal." It's unlikely that these are individual browsers hitting your site all at the same time unless there's some reason for your site to be big news all of a sudden.

Why don't you take a look at your site's access logs (not in Tiki's admin pages) but in your domain's control panel or other way to see Apache logs, etc.? You can see exactly what agents/browsers/spiders are accessing your site.

-- Gary - zukakakina.com

Posted by KaiiaK 06 May 2006 12:25 GMT-0000 posts: 82

thanks chiaguy & evens-pj

this is the next day, and it has fallen down to about 50, and responsiveness is ok (not great)

I am sure there are no 50 or 190 real people. I looked at last visitors, and it is not showing any abnormality, I will look at the raw access logs this eve (in Norway) and see what I find there.

My site is gilb.com
It seems to have a pattern similar to last week, first huge number of users (190+) next day calmed down to about 50, (and last week after about another day it went down to real numbers (0 to 10).

Again thanks for help, I will post back later about latest development.

Posted by KaiiaK 07 May 2006 02:04 GMT-0000 posts: 82

I might be speaking to soon, but iI think I have found the source of the problem.

I unanalyzed my raw access files, and found that I had rss feeds from two trackers that each had more than 5000 requests per day.

I had made some RSS modules that refreshed every 1 min. I turned all my RSS modules to refresh every 120 min. +, and now the problem has disappeared.

Chibaguy, you had me worried for a little while there saying my situation was 'normal', cause if it was I would have had to redo my site with some other tool. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of analyzing my access files.

lesson: if number of online users gets so high it kills your site, and you know they are not there, check the refresh rate of RSS modules, and check your raw access files.

Kai