UESP Forums

Is anything going to be done about the Wiki/Forum "connection timeout" problems? They seem to have vastly increased in frequency over the past few weeks, from maybe one or two "hiccups" a day (sometimes not at all) to almost every request having a response time varying from a fraction of a second to wait almost a minute then "connection to the server has timed out" and manually click the retry button.

UESP has become very slow to respond and in many cases near impossible to navigate due to the almost constant slow responses or timeouts. In some cases, it's SO bad that I have to leave off posting until the next day to see if it's cleared. Usually, no such luck. It's just as "hit and miss" the next day.

I know the site uses PHPBB3 forum software which is tied to an SQL database containing Wiki articles, member accounts, forum topics and posts. The problems seem to be SQL Query related, i.e. accessing a Wiki article, list of forums, list of topics in a forum, list of posts in a topic, and even creating a new topic or creating/editing/previewing a post.

Other sites that use phpBB3/SQL are prefectly OK from my end. It's only UESP I'm suffering frequent "connection timeouts" with. Web Browser doesn't matter. I have Firefox 8 and Internet Explorer 9. It's happening with both of them. I've been registered since March 2009 and timeouts have always been a minor problem. They've just vastly increased in frequency lately to the point where it's become a frustrating major problem.

It's taken multiple timeouts and retries just to get this topic/post created, for example.

Anyone else having similar timeout problems?

Yep. I can see why due to Skyrim but something needs to be done...

Yes. We are all having the same issue. There is a thread about this but I can’t even direct you there because I’ve had to spend 20 minutes just posting this.

I have been almost completely unable to log in, as have several dozen other members. When I am finally in, nothing can be done. I believe our advice from Ratwar was to “sit tight.” I quote:


This site is an integral part of the TES community and we have all known for quite some time that there would be a surge in traffic. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone was adequately prepared. I don’t pretend to know anything about SQL or servers, so I will leave that to you technical people. But I’m not very happy about it myself.

And I would like to thank everyone for being patient. We moderators are having a very, very difficult time doing our jobs, the same as you are having a hard time getting around the site. If there are any pressing concerns please contact me on Skype (nosoundcomes) or shoot me an e-mail (same username @live.com).

I've been running TWO instances of Firefox 8 for the past couple of hours, one for UESP to keep repeatedly waiting/retrying and the other to Google for Skyrim-related info (mainly glitches/bugs to compile a definitive helpful list of them with workarounds if possible), and watch glitch/bug videos on YouTube. Occasionally UESP access is almost instant as normal, but some 95% of the time it's just timing out repeatedly. Meanwhile, accessing other websites is fine and dandy whichever Firefox instance I use. Clearly affecting UESP only, so it's obviously a server-side problem. Extremely frustrating.

It has all the hallmarks of a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack, only this time it's an innocent cause. We're just being mobbed by the crowd of Skyrim enthusiasts, is all, and the sheer number of UESP Wiki/Forum users is exceeding the Squid server's incoming request bandwidth limit or simultaneous number of requests limit. It may be queuing requests for so long that our web browsers are simply timing out due to no response.

I hope "sit tight" means they're having meetings to discuss increasing the limits to cope (which would mean paying more for higher bandwidth, etc). Fingers crossed, eh?

I'll cease retrying and leave till tomorrow, as it will help to ease the congestion. One less raindrop in the ocean makes no difference in the "perfect storm", but at least it's a start.

Way I see it, we've just blown through an entire month's worth of bandwith in the span of 48 hours, and now the mods and editors have resorted to dancing atop tables in order to pay for every terabyte of information dribbling out of the servers for the rest of November.

Be kind. Tip with fives.

Thought I would just throw this out there. Currently, the forums are running fine for me. Its about 2:30 AM GMT -5. I have to assume it's just because of how all the other time zones stack up, but there seem to be a lot less users online. Or is there something else server side going on at this time that improves the speed. This is the second night at this time its been responsive.

I thought everyone would like to know that I embarked on a diplomatic mission and spoke to the legend of legends themselves, the admins of the forums and wiki, and they are working on fixing the issue. It seems to be server side. I hope you will all sit tight as they work through it and thank them for looking into it!

To those who are curious, just glance at the latest news story on the front page for an update on this.

The speed of the forums is back to normal, so thank you to Ratwar and his team for fixing the issue. Kudos to you guys!