Cfquery Errors

June 2, 2003 10:31 AM

It's getting to the point where metafilter is unusable due to all the cfquery errors. It's almost as if there's a 50/50 chance the query will time out and bomb.
posted by crunchland to Bugs at 10:31 AM (37 comments total)

For the record, I've not run into this problem to this extent. I see the occasional cfquery timeout, but it's much more like one time out of 100, not one time out of two...
posted by jonson at 11:36 AM on June 2, 2003

If I sort by recent comments, the crash rate approaches 80%. But just sorting by date, it's stable as all hell.

For me, anyway.
posted by COBRA! at 11:43 AM on June 2, 2003

I get cfquery errors at about the same frequency as Jonson does. What are you doing to the poor server, Crunchland?

On preview: Hmm, I never sort by recent comments - always by my comments or by date. Maybe that has something to do with it.
posted by Johnny Assay at 11:45 AM on June 2, 2003

crunchland, I didn't make a big deal about it when you mentioned it before because I don't have nearly the same error rate you are finding.

I'm user 1, with the most data in the db, and I would guess that queries on my account would be the harshest in terms of processing, but I've gotten four or five cfquery timeouts in the past few months total.

What pages are you looking at when you get errors and what are you doing when they happen? Is it just viewing comment pages or is it on the home page when doing special sorts.

The home page is optimized for the default date sort, the other sorts require a bit more processing and I could see why they would time out. Since I never sort the home page, I haven't noticed this, but there are things I can do to streamline and cache those queries, hopefully lessening the amount of errors.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:55 AM on June 2, 2003

I'm user 1

We know. You don't have to boast.
posted by timeistight at 12:11 PM on June 2, 2003

This is the same problem I described here a couple of weeks ago.

I would say that I, too, get the cfquery errors more often than not if I sort by recent comments. If I sort by date, the error rate drops significantly but still isn't zero.
posted by briank at 12:14 PM on June 2, 2003

I sort by date and hardly ever have this problem.
posted by languagehat at 12:16 PM on June 2, 2003

(I don't think I was the one who whined about this last time, but...) Yeah, I guess it is the sorting by recent comments thing.
posted by crunchland at 12:20 PM on June 2, 2003

Here's another vote for "almost always times out when sorting by recent comments". I think we may have identified the problem, Watson.
posted by yhbc at 12:22 PM on June 2, 2003

And the following may just nail it - presented for your enjoyment, my most recent error:

The request has exceeded the allowable time limit Tag: CFQUERY


The error occurred in C:\metafilter sites\www.metafilter.com\front.mefi: line 101
Called from C:\metafilter sites\www.metafilter.com\front.mefi: line 290
Called from C:\metafilter sites\www.metafilter.com\index.cfm: line 28

99 :
100 : cfelseif (IsDefined("url.sortby") and url.sortby EQ "recentcomments" OR IsDefined("cookie.sortby") and cookie.sortby EQ "recentcomments")
101 : CFQUERY NAME="weblog" DATASOURCE="mf"
102 : SELECT TOP 20 users.user_name, L.link_ID, .link_url,
103 : L.link_urldescription, L.hide, L.link_day, L.link_date, L.user_ID,
posted by yhbc at 12:32 PM on June 2, 2003

I no geek, but I've been getting cfquery errors with increasing frequency in the last few days. I just got one while posting a comment in the McSweeney's DVD commentary thread. I have no idea what I'm doing, in context of sorting posts, as I just use whatever the default is.
posted by elwoodwiles at 1:30 PM on June 2, 2003

I was just in the Christian Terrorist thread and got this error in the comments:

Error Occurred While Processing Request
The request has exceeded the allowable time limit Tag: cfoutput

The error occurred in C:\metafilter sites\www.metafilter.com\comments.mefi: line 119

117 :
118 : <span class="whitesmallcopy" style="font-size:11px;">
119 : <cfoutput query="back">
120 : <cfset "backurl"=REReplace(#back.link_urldescription#, "< [^>]*>", "", "All")>
121 : <cfset "backdesc"=REReplace(#back.link_description#, "< [^>]*>", "", "All")>
posted by elwoodwiles at 1:50 PM on June 2, 2003

I suspect non-geeks are not immune, elwoodwiles. I still get screwy graphics in Mozilla that seem to be due to the Google Ads but I didn't want to mention it in a separate post. I've also got the database error messages but I can't say what I was sorting by because I tend to use all of the sort options.
posted by jamespake at 1:53 PM on June 2, 2003

It might be good if the error messages were less verbose - it's not obvious what's gone wrong - I've just got several tonight and they all look like YHBC's example above, which means nothing to me.
posted by jamespake at 2:27 PM on June 2, 2003

I used to get a lot of errors, until changing to a broadband connection a couple of months ago. From then on, I got one every week or so. When our connection was upgraded from 512Kb/s to 1.5Mb/s the errors stopped almost completely.

The error message themselves don't mean much to me, English being my only language, but the common theme in my experience is the "The request has exceeded the allowable time limit " part, which I had assumed was because of my previous slow connection (28.8).

Could the user's connection speed be contributing to the problem, or would it perhaps be that certain users are making their queries at peak server load times? is there any pattern to the times that the errors occur?
posted by dg at 2:54 PM on June 2, 2003

English being my only language

you and me both, mate, you and me both.
posted by dash_slot- at 3:45 PM on June 2, 2003

I get them all the time, probably 3-4x per day. I sort by recent comments and I reload the site a lot. Maybe I need to cut down... but I never experienced this problem in the past.
posted by cell divide at 3:50 PM on June 2, 2003

The request has exceeded the allowable time limit " part, which I had assumed was because of my previous slow connection (28.8).

That's not due to anything on your end, as these are all server side errors. Scripts are allowed to run for up to 30 seconds before throwing an error, and at some points of the day when traffic is high on the server, things time out.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 4:11 PM on June 2, 2003

That's not due to anything on your end, as these are all server side errors
Thought that may be the case, but wondered if it was too much of a coincidence that the errors appeared to reflect the connection speed. It could also be that, because I can reload the page about a million times faster, the errors don't seem so bad.
posted by dg at 4:16 PM on June 2, 2003

I get an error once in about every 20 page loads.
posted by Hildago at 4:34 PM on June 2, 2003

It seems ontopic, so how goes the java rewrite?

(but then, kicking CF when it's down, doesn't seem sporting, so feel free to disregard this, d00d)
posted by holloway at 5:23 PM on June 2, 2003

Java rewrite? Have I missed something?
posted by timeistight at 6:45 PM on June 2, 2003

It was mentioned on irc a few times months ago. I don't know any more than that.
posted by holloway at 7:06 PM on June 2, 2003

java rewrite? are you mad?

The new version of CF is based on java servlets, so maybe that's where the confusion came from. I must have been talking about how the CF server was rewritten in java by Macromedia, not my code itself.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:31 PM on June 2, 2003

Ah, nevermind-I thought it was official but I've just been told that the renegade was working on it for the last few months.

That person can step in any time here... prove I'm not imagining things... yep, any time...
posted by holloway at 5:24 AM on June 3, 2003

Hey, did you hear about that new bubblegum flavour mathowie? Sirhc Gnimylrut.
posted by holloway at 5:57 AM on June 3, 2003

Time to lay off the booze, holloway.
posted by crunchland at 6:13 AM on June 3, 2003

True dat.
posted by holloway at 6:18 AM on June 3, 2003

Another vote for lots and lots of timeouts. I use recent comments. I would say I get a timeout at least 50% of the times I hit the front page. Got one the first time I tried the page this morning. Other times, I get an incomplete page -- i.e., the top of the page but no posts.

I will switch to sortbydate.
posted by Mid at 7:51 AM on June 3, 2003

I've also been getting timeouts for, of all things, the text ads.
posted by crunchland at 9:46 AM on June 3, 2003

I blame the newbies.
posted by NortonDC at 10:11 AM on June 3, 2003

It kinda bugs me that the comment input box down to the bottom of the GoogleAds on posts with no/few short comments on them (at least in WinIE6 they do).
That, and I still don't have a pony.
posted by me3dia at 1:36 PM on June 3, 2003

another voice just weighing in - mefi has totally sucked all day today. slower than mike tyson on quaaludes. errors and timeouts all over the place.
posted by quonsar at 1:58 PM on June 3, 2003

I recoded the way recent comments was being done so things should be much, much better now.

When I took out the time check to only go back as many days as in your profile, I forgot to put any upper bound on that. So to calculate the recent comments, the code was checking all half-million comments to see if they were new, instead of just the previous month's comments.

It was a big screwup but now that it is fixed, it should speed things up all around.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:38 PM on June 4, 2003

thanks, matt.
posted by crunchland at 4:54 PM on June 4, 2003

Yay!

Now, about the pony...
posted by briank at 7:18 PM on June 4, 2003

Thanks, Matt.
posted by yhbc at 7:58 PM on June 4, 2003