XF 2.1 Forum keeps going offline

[Scott Brooke]

Small forum hosted in Azure. Over the last several months I've had problems with the forum going offline/inactive. The forum is still up but requires an admin (me) to go in and make it active again. Any idea what's causing this? I'm up to date on patches.

Edit: I had the thought that I might still be getting throttled by Azure. If that's the case, is there a way to make the forum a little more resilient to that?

 

[jmurrayhead]

Small forum hosted in Azure. Over the last several months I've had problems with the forum going offline/inactive. The forum is still up but requires an admin (me) to go in and make it active again. Any idea what's causing this? I'm up to date on patches.

Edit: I had the thought that I might still be getting throttled by Azure. If that's the case, is there a way to make the forum a little more resilient to that?

What is your setup in Azure? Are you using an AppService plan?

 

[Scott Brooke]

What is your setup in Azure? Are you using an AppService plan?

Just a compute instance. I don't recall what size, but that could be part of my problem. I can look into sizing, but I'd like to confirm the behavior I'm seeing is likely due to the throttling.

 

[jmurrayhead]

Just a compute instance. I don't recall what size, but that could be part of my problem. I can look into sizing, but I'd like to confirm the behavior I'm seeing is likely due to the throttling.

Ah ok. The reason I ask is that if you're using AppService/AzureWebsites, this could be the problem: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13544238/why-do-my-azure-sites-keep-going-down

Since it seems you have a VM stood up, have you tried checking the logs for possible solutions? Is your database on the same server or are you using Azure Database for mySQL?

 

[Scott Brooke]

DB is on the same server. I run the Media Gallery, for what it's worth. The behavior is the forum goes into admin lockdown mode. It's still online and running, just everyone sees the locked message. I then have to go into the admin control panel and turn the forum back on.

This is part of why I'm wondering about the shared instance/load question in Azure. Does Xenforo go into this mode if it can't get a response from the DB? Don't know, just making guesses.

 

[jmurrayhead]

I think XenForo just gives an error if it is unable to connect to the database. In your case, it seems like something is setting the board inactive option back. I don't think this would be anything specific to Azure in this case. How often does this happen? Are there other Administrators who would have access to do this?

 

[Scott Brooke]

It's intermittent but has been happening about once every 1-2 weeks. There is one other admin. I'm confident he's not doing this.

 

[jmurrayhead]

Maybe @Chris D has some ideas. I really don't think this would have anything to do with Azure, particularly since you're running a VM instance instead of a PaaS solution where a consumption plan may temporarily shut down the instance until it's needed again.

If I'm not mistaken, the board active option is stored in the database - someone isn't restoring the database from a backup where it it's still inactive are they?

 

[Chris D]

The only thing that would affect the boardActive option is an admin manually switching it on or off.

There is nothing in the software that ever attempts to set this automatically.

If it happens again, you may want to look at the Admin log in the Admin CP to see if there’s anything there that suggests it was done intentionally.

Failing that the only thing that would change it is some add-on code or some manual database manipulation.

 

[Scott Brooke]

The only thing that would affect the boardActive option is an admin manually switching it on or off.

There is nothing in the software that ever attempts to set this automatically.

If it happens again, you may want to look at the Admin log in the Admin CP to see if there’s anything there that suggests it was done intentionally.

Failing that the only thing that would change it is some add-on code or some manual database manipulation.

Only 3 admins in the system and one of them is not a person. I'm the "admin" and the other admin doesn't do anything because he doesn't really know anything beyond a few basic settings. Nothing in the admin logs about any activity that is related to the inactive board. The logs go back far enough to cover several times this has happened. I respect the request to check if this being done intentionally, but I'm very confident that's not the case.

The only add-ons I have are the media gallery and the 8WR Database Backup. I just disabled the backup in case it's doing something. No one has DB access, or CLI, except for me.

If/when it happens again I'll let you know. Thanks for continuing to work through ideas!

 

[Scott Brooke]

Only 3 admins in the system and one of them is not a person. I'm the "admin" and the other admin doesn't do anything because he doesn't really know anything beyond a few basic settings. Nothing in the admin logs about any activity that is related to the inactive board. The logs go back far enough to cover several times this has happened. I respect the request to check if this being done intentionally, but I'm very confident that's not the case.

The only add-ons I have are the media gallery and the 8WR Database Backup. I just disabled the backup in case it's doing something. No one has DB access, or CLI, except for me.

If/when it happens again I'll let you know. Thanks for continuing to work through ideas!

Looking at the backup, it puts the board into inactive mode when it runs. I wonder if it's failing to complete....

 

[Chris D]

I would continue diagnosing this with the author of that add-on as that would most likely seem to be responsible.