Posts appearing out of order ...

[stranlaw]

I could really use some help. The last week on my vbulletin board, the posts sometimes appear out of order. It even sometimes looks like the person who started the thread is replying to it.

I really need help troubleshooting this!


I contacted my host...and here is what I said:

I have a vbulletin message board on one of my subdomains...

petsocietychatandtrade.com

Some of the times on the posts are out of order...people appear to be posting in the future.

According to some vbulletin posts I've found, "If the times are wrong then this is a server issue. As bromyaur stated this could be caused by a bad CMOS. You will need to contact your host about this."

Could someone help me with this?

Thanks in advance!!
Stacey

My host replied:

Stacey,

Thank you for your inquiry:

As most of the nodes within your grid cluster are not more than several seconds off, I must ask how is vBulletin time stamping posts? Are they being stamped via localtime client-side? Is it referencing NTP?

We have been monitoring your services and the issue you recently reported can not be reproduced by the (mt) customer support staff. We have tested your hosting services and all its components are working to specification.

Please continue to update us, using this inquiry number, if you experience and further difficulties regarding this subject.

[James Birkett]

I believe (feel free to correct me) that posts are stamped according to the time on the servers (network time), and not local time.

[stranlaw]

How could the time of posts get out of order though? Can you help me tell my host so they can troubleshoot it?

[Steve Machol]

The server time was off while these posts were being made. Unfortunately there is no easy way to fix this. Of course, you need to fix the server time first. Then you would need to go into phpMyAdmin and modify the dateline column in the affected post and thread tables and enter the unixtimestamp that you want. You can use this online tool to convert dates and times to Unix
Timestamps:

http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm

Just remember to enter in the GMT values for the date and not the date and time in your specific timezone.

[stranlaw]

The server time was off while these posts were being made. Unfortunately there is no easy way to fix this. Of course, you need to fix the server time first. Then you would need to go into phpMyAdmin and modify the dateline column in the affected post and thread tables and enter the unixtimestamp that you want. You can use this online tool to convert dates and times to Unix
Timestamps:

http://www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm

Just remember to enter in the GMT values for the date and not the date and time in your specific timezone.

Steve...I have a couple questions...thanks for your help! You are all over this board helping people...it amazes me!

Anyway, when you say "fix the server time first" is that something I can do or something the host would need to do?

When you were saying to change the time stamps...is that just to fix the posts that are already messed up or to prevent it in the future? I may not care about fixing the old ones as it has only happened about 20 times so far.

[stranlaw]

I just spoke to my host. I have gotten several vbulletin error emails that say that I have reached the max user connections.

The host tech support said that could be the problem...if a mysql request goes slowly and someone replies quickly and their query goes through they could be out of order.

Does that sound right to you? I just increased the mysql limits through my host and they said this should help solve the problem.

[Steve Machol]

The host has to fix the server time. And those instructions are to fix the current posts with the bad time. Assuming the server time stays correct this should not be a problem in the future.

And the 'max user connections' error really would not affect this. That problem is caused by the server time.

[stranlaw]

I am still having this timestamp issue and my host posted to me the following:

I wrote some code to add the date and time down to the hundredth of a second to a MySQL database. Each time you access the script, it adds a row to the database with the time. I accessed the page very quickly over 100 times, 4 pages at a time (a few per second). Looking at the database you can see the sequence of each record added and the exact time on the servers when the request was made:

http://img.skitch.com/20090922-xf29e3fixuf71iqybbemtj7t47.jpg

That shows about 28 database writes and as you can see they are all in order by time. Because I can't find a problem with writing to the database very quickly outside of vBulleting, it leads me to believe it's a problem with vBulletin itself. You're free to show the program I used and the results to the vBulletin support members if you wish in case that helps.

Here's the script I wrote to test it:

#!/usr/bin/python

import datetime
import cgi
import MySQLdb

conn = MySQLdb.connect (host = "internal-db.sNNNNN.gridserver.com",
user = "dbNNNNN",
passwd = "YOUR_PASSWORD",
db = "dbNNNN_test")

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"
utime = str(datetime.datetime.now())
cursor = conn.cursor()
#cursor.execute ("DROP TABLE IF EXISTS sequence")
#cursor.execute ("""
# CREATE TABLE sequence
# (
# id INT PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
# ascdate CHAR(40)
# )
cursor.execute ("""
INSERT INTO sequence (ascdate)
VALUES
('%s')

""" % utime )

print """<html> <head><title>Test of sequence</title></head> <body> """
print "<br>Done"
print """</body></html>"""

If you have any further questions regarding your (mt) Media Temple services, please feel free to contact us at any time.

[icarusforde]

This happens to us, and we are also on mediatemple. I dont suppose you work on their gridservice hosting?

We've found the easiest thing to do is just to wait it out, it normally only happens for a few minutes.

[stranlaw]

This happens to us, and we are also on mediatemple. I dont suppose you work on their gridservice hosting?

We've found the easiest thing to do is just to wait it out, it normally only happens for a few minutes.

Wow...I am on their grid service too. They keep saying it's not them...but, this issue is driving our members CRAZY...and me too! I really want to figure out what is causing it. Ugh...thanks for your reply!! Please post here if you figure out a solution (you may want to subscribe to this thread!)

[icarusforde]

Wow...I am on their grid service too. They keep saying it's not them...but, this issue is driving our members CRAZY...and me too! I really want to figure out what is causing it. Ugh...thanks for your reply!! Please post here if you figure out a solution (you may want to subscribe to this thread!)

I am subscribed.

But yeah, they have said it's not them as well, but to get two people on the same service having the same problem has to be them.