Problems with VSX?

I keep getting problems accessing VSX over the last few days. The connections time out with “503 Service Unavailable” suggesting that the server is being hammered.

I tried connecting through different networks and different devices with the same result (just to check it is not me, although i can’t see how 503 could be) so it looks like either VSX is being used a lot recently or someone is either attacking it or not using it very efficiently…

Could someone please provide some details on what is going on?

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I’m getting the same 503 message when trying to download a chart.

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It has been like this for a while and i’ve seen it happening on and off quite a few times over the last few days.

I just wonder if this is an attack on the servers or if someone has decided to download the whole database through the API one star at the time :smiley: … in parallel :laughing:

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Yes I’m seeing 503 after a long wait as well:

Service Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.


Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu) Server at www.aavso.org Port 443

I note that VSX REST APIs are also impacted. I suppose this could be related to planned work. There’s no planned outage event in the event calendar though: AAVSO Programs & Events | aavso

Greetings,

After reading the forum posts here I spent most of my evening diagnosing the issue. I’ve tracked the issue down to a series of five queries that are overwhelming the database server. I’ve implemented a patch to the most expensive query that improves its performance by approximately 40x. I have a general idea where the other queries are located in code, but it will take me a while to track those down.

I’ve asked Aru to pull my code, test it, and deploy it when he wakes up tomorrow morning.

Brian Kloppenborg
Executive Director, AAVSO

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Nice. Thanks Brian! :slight_smile:

Strong work Brian. We appreciate it.

Greetings,

I think we’ve got everything sorted. I’ve provided a detailed reply regarding what we found out on a different thread.

I’m going to close this thread, so please direct any further questions over there.

Thanks,
Brian

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