SERIOUS ISSUE!! MUST READ!

We all want our sites to grow fast. Right?  Some of us will advertise heavily somewhere to get people fast. Right?  Well… it will not happen with Dolphin script because It will NOT work correctly when you get more than 20-30 members signing up at the same time. Seriously, it would be a waste of money if you did heavy advertising.

If you get that many members signing up at once or during 5 mins, they will see white/blank on the join page… nothing else so you lose members.  Don't you think this is a little serious?  I think it's extremely serious and this needs to be fixed as soon as possible!

I know I'm not the only one here having this issue. I've seen some complaints somewhere here before and they were ignored.

(IMAGE BELOW) When this happens, you see all recently joined members are offline. They should be online because they just joined!!  Something isn't right.

Boonex needs to fix this otherwise my plan and money will be wasted.

don't be offended... are you on a shared host? Lots of resources being used for those joins, mySQL for one..

I think dedicated server would not do this.

It's okay. i'm using a dedicated server with 12 GB of ram and it does this.  I don't think it has anyting to do with the server.. i think it's how it writes in dolphin.  I think somewhere there is poor or isn't fast enough to write.  Im pretty sure it's on dolphin's side

Yea this is a very serious problem. I've been expiriencing also.. Usually i get low users joining, but I've experienced this bug 2 times when a larger amount join quickly.. I run 2 servers dedicated, quad core with 12gb ram, so its not a overload issue.

I talked to deano, he also experienced this with single user join...

And even more strange part, most of the times the "bug" fixes it self... :s

I think its possibly some sort of cache rewrite issue. Hence the reason it's always recommended to clear cache after all changes to the coding. Think it may be something that needs to be tweaked in Dolphin as well. Maybe it is having the trouble of caching all the sessions joining at once and knowing whether one is connected or not while others are joining.

No expert and new to dolphin...but sounds a little logical to my newbie mind.

I'm just curious if this issue started with 7.05, or if you noticed it with previous versions as well. It might help lead to the culprit that is causing it.

someone complained about this before so i'm pretty it has been like this for a while.. not just 7.0.5

It's possible..... hmmm but it's not good

I run 7.04, and I remember I had it on 7.0.3 also..

I have gotten this issue from 7.0.1 on up, and its not just with member joins. Users are frequently greeted with blank pages when trying to join, opening inbox or browsing to a member profile.

I am also running a dedicated host with plenty of resources, very interested to know what is going on here...

I cannot test this theory. I don't have enough members joining at the same time to test it.

But i suspect a caching issue. I have suspected caching for a number of different small issues but have never been able to prove it.

But if anyone is willing to turn off all caching to see what happens. Go for it. Don't recommend it unless you have a dedicated server. Once caching is off, the server will have to work harder.

deano.. i checked and all the caching are turned off.  Hmmm so it doesn't really matter if they're on or off. :s

ALL my cache is off, since my servers are kick ass big for my site. I still get the problem :(

Ok, so that shoots that theory out the door.

I wish you were right.  I would like to get this fixed before i advertise like crazy.  man, I don't like this. :(

I wouldn't necessarily rule out the possibility of caching being an issue. Just because we have turned off caching doesn't mean it still isn't used. The software still has to store the session data somewhere...and that comes between it and the browser. The cache we turn off in the software is for the stylesheets...images...etc.

I would look into it more and see if we can truly rule it out.

guys this looks like very serious issue render dolphion unusable for  really Professional site - I can overlook hepas of small errors and malfunctions dolphin have but this one is a really very serious and its not worth to advertise site as we loose members - you right guys. Was the problem of this issue clearlly identified yet ?

Unfortunately, we haven't found anything yet. :/

thanks for info Patrick - I believe this is most serious issue which should have a top priority !!! this issue render dolpin basicly unusable for real use. Im scared that we have not reply an boonex staff reply on this..

yeah...tell me about it!!  They don't respond over weekends so hopefully they will on monday.

That's the thing about dolphin. It always gets better and worse at the same time

I support the caching theory.  Although I've never experienced this problem (and I've used Dolphin since Dolphin 5.6), it sounds it could be a couple of minor things.  I'm wondering if upon registration, a session variable for being online is not being properly registered

Anywhoo, this probably should not require an entire different version release to fix.  It sounds like a quick file patch, but hey, that's just my educated guess.

Wow I hope this issues is resloved soon while it has not happen to me we are set to advertise and promote  our site this coming week

and this would really be some bad news

I feel like a dumb dog chasing its tail

I'm currently setting 5.0.7 up to migrate 8000 members from a 5.x version that's pretty broken and crapped out now. The last thing I want is for the new one to crap out too! Imagine what's going to happen when I send out that mass email telling them all about the new updates. Well, there's no way I can send a mass email to do that is there? Hopefully this issue can be fixed soon!

I've gone through 10 different releases of Dolphin and the one the pleased me the most was 6.12.  7.0 brought a wealth of new features such as the modularity, the wall, the albums and the categories, but it also brought with it a whole new set of coachroaches.  I actuallly made a of $ with 6.12.  That version even had an affiliate program built into it and handled my 3000 members pretty well.  It had to be fixed and massaged but I got it to work.  If I had to do it all over again, I would have stuck with 6.12 and all of the mods that I purchased and created my own caching.

Crap, this is not good. Too much invested already into this software. What the .......no comments from anyone at Boonex. Wonder what's going on.

i cant follow this, please explain:

1/ how you know the people get to see a blank join page? you must know when 30 people are all signing up at one to test this right?

2/ the image you posted, is this not because the system has them logged in to upload a pic? so they have not really logged in themselves right?

3/ how on earth does this image make Dolphin unusable?

the Drama in the post title made me laugh at least. good god, the end of the world is nigh

Hi Sammie,

I will respond to your questions as clearly as I can, based on my experiences.

1) I have experienced this problem a few times, and know the symptoms. They are quite easy to spot, basically a new member that JUST register should be online, which he also is normally, but when you suddenly start to get 4-5 users within 5min who registered and are offline you know something is wrong. I always test it, and from that point, I get either a blank page, or NOTHING happens, meaning it dosent move forward after I press register. However the user IS in the database as a new member, but he / she cant really get thru.

2) No.

3) It makes it unstable because we don't know whats causing this. I have tried it a few times, I think 3 in total, 2 of the times it was while many people are registering, and the last time was with 1 user. I also talked to an other dolphin user and he has also had problems even on single registrations.

As far as your drama comment, there are a few of us who wish to run a professional site, and have invested quite a lot of time AND money to make it happen. How do you think we feel after spending so much money, and even advertise to find out users can't join because of an unknown bug? The fact that you can laugh on other peoples expense shows just how serious you are about ur own website :)

Lets try this again.

1/ how you know the people get to see a blank join page? you must know when 30 people are all signing up at once to test this right?

to quote you "However the user IS in the database as a new member"

you even capitolised "IS"

So i'll ask again

how you know the people get to see a blank join page when clearly 30 people have joined and are in the database as you claim they are?

This is why i made my Drama comment, because you claim that 30 people join, but 25 of them only see a blank sign-up page because its after 5 people signing up at the same time that causes the blank page for the rest,

how so if there are 30 people in the database?

well even if one, two or three of that 25 people cant login properly is really bad and issue which causeing this have to be clearly identified and fixed.

Perhaps you should read the comments again.

First of all, its NOT CLEAR how / why / when this error happens. Some people experience it on single join, some experience it when "large" amounts join quickly.

How do I know? I've already explained this to you, if you would just read you would understand. I won't bother saying it again, but rather referre to my statement "I always test it, and from that point, I get either a blank page, or NOTHING happens, meaning it dosent move forward after I press register."

And AGAIN you make an error, because I didn't say that out of 30, 25 see a blank page. To help you out, I will type it in small keyword sentences.

Step 1: You advertise, meaning you promote your website.

Step 2: People see it, and go to ur website to check it out

Step 3: In my case, around 30 people joined within 5 minutes.

Step 4: I then noticed, within a few minutes, that suddenly the next 5 members were offline right away.

Step 5: I recognized the bug from before, and tried to make a test user my self, and as before, i either got a blank page, OR nothing happens.

If you STILL don't understand it, please don't respond anymore, because it's starting to piss me off. Ur laughing on other hard working peoples expense! We are not making this thread because we are bored and don't know what to do.

Agreed.

@sammie

How do I know?  One of the members told me so of course i went and checked it out (while people were busy signing up).  I went to the join page.. i could see the join form.. filled them out.. then hit the "register"  button.  Nothing. I couldn't do anything because the page was all white.. nothing.  When it's calm, it goes back to normal. It tells me that dolphin can't handle that many ppl signing up in a short time. I guessing 20-30 or more at the same time is a huge problem.  emcct and i have the exact same situation. I hope this is clear?

yes it is real problem. If somebody really pay a big money for a massive campaign, have nice looking template etc...its possible that even more than 30 people will be signing in one time easily 50-60 people with a massive ad campaign. If we invest money to a campaign we all of course expect that all peoiple who are interested in joining our site will be able to signin without problem as every that kind of problem can most probably lead to possibly loose that customer and so we loosing our invested money to ad campaign. People who just play around prolly dont mind that but for us who are really serious about dolphin and want use it for a real professional site there is really a big investment to custom coding , commercial mods, server etc... so we cant afford loose our customers - dolphin have to handle signups of more people in same time without any problem - if not - this issue than and have to be really identified and fixed. Im really concerned that boonex not reply here. Im abit scared about boonex at all as from time 7.0.5 was released I expected some big blog from andrew announcing what gonna happen now but basicly nothing is happening, no word from boonex regarding such a big update as 7.1 so boonex inactivity in forum and blogs makes me a bit think whats going on now.

@freakpower

well said. i'd be pissed if we had to wait til 7.1 comes out.

Let me jump in here for a moment and say something...I will tell you that I really feel its caching that is causing this. Why? Because it's not remembering the sessions....reason being? Majority of the people signing up are using IE to surf the web. With IE cramming updates down everyone who deals with Microsoft and proprietary software throats...and since the release of IE 8, there has been issues. IE 8 blocks all cookies by default causing no session to be able to be stored thus causing people to sign up...info enter into the database...but not logging them into the session.

Now...if you want them to be able to still use IE and be successful in joining and logging in, you will need to go to the security and check off both boxes to Allow Third Party Cookies in IE. I have already experienced this and that fixed it for me. Try it out yourselves and see what I mean. Hope this tidbit helps.

ok have any of you enabled facebook connect? and can you see if any that are not being logged in are joining in via facebook?

I ask because i had issues when i enabled facebook connect, when i tried to make a new account on the site i would fill in the join page and click join after filling in all the info, and the page froze, it stopped freezing once i cleared all of dolphins caches

oh and i have used dolphin since 5.6 been a member for over 4 years and spent over £20,000  ($30,000USD) as a webmaster in the last 10 years so yes i love having a giggle at drama.

Please check the following:

1) let me know if you can reproduce the problem on http://www.boonex.us/ site

2) if you are fan of cache theory try to turn off templates cache: Settings -> Advanced settings -> Template -> Enable cache for HTML files

3) server related issue, by default most of the servers (especially dedicated and VPS) are not configured to handle many connections, OS or some software developers don't know on which hardware the soft will be installed and the limits are pretty low, so they are sure that server will not be overloaded. I'm rising many limits all the time when I have to configure new server. Most obvious limits are the following:

- max_connections in MySQL (in most configurations it is 151 by default, it is extremely low if you have MySQL persistent connections enabled)

- MaxClients in Apache (in most configurations it is 150 by default, which is extremely low especially if KeepAlive is on and high Timeout and KeepAlive values, I believe that with such settings you can not have more than 20-50 online users)

Also symptoms are very similar, like server just stop responding when limits are reached.

It is just very general recommendations and there are many more such settings(in Apache, MySQL and OS), and many of them are dependent on each other, so consult your hosting support for more information.

If you have some server monitoring software (I recommend munin) it can help a lot to see when and where your server reach limits.

patrick81

If you can get Boonex to help you fix this whether promised or not,  you are a lucky person. I have had the software 2 months and they cant figure out    how to help me get the Boonex Branding off of my page.. GOOD LICK MAN, I THINK ALL of our money has been wasted on Dolphin / Boonex.

1. How can we test it on boonex.us?  we need to have over 20-30 members to sign up at the same time

2. all the caching were off.  I don't thtink that was it

3. I will check that soon. I'm not sure what my configurations are.

AlexT - We will be setting up a Boonex site for a client with 5,000+ members and those members would be signing up within 1 week - what would be the best server configuration to handle that level of traffic?

As I said, it is very dependent on other settings and server configurations and hardware.
But just for an example these are settings for 2 x 2GHz CPU & 8G RAM hardware and 50 online logged in users, this is one site on one server:

APACHE in prefork MPM (default setting) and mod_php:
MaxSpareServers      40
ServerLimit         512
MaxClients          512

MySQL with persistent links:
max_connections        = 600

These are limits settings only for the settings to improve your server performance please refer to this tutorial:

http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/wiki/HostingServerSetupRecommendations

I don´t know if this helps anything, I also have experienced these problems you guys are talking about. So far I have found out, If I use FaceBook plugin (JanRain) or Boonexs´s I get these errors, If I don´t I get no errors.

We can do one thing.. any one here make a blog post and decide a time when we all can try to join boonex.us simultaneously and try to reproduce the problem and so we can prove or reject any theory. what say?

I have HostforWeb VPS-4

Dolphin 7.0.6

I have Clicktale on my site. So no one has to tell me anything. I can actually see videos of what my users are doing.

I noticed a number of users sign up and instead of seeing the next page they end up in login page.
In other words, they just signed up but are logged out in the next page.

I get about 400 new users visiting the site everyday from ad campaigns.

I have Litespeed and Cloudflare Pro.