General instability, 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable nginx

[qubodup]

From time to time Freesound is slow or unreachable. Sometimes for a day. This affects usability and 'moderationability'.

For example there have been 4 mailing list threads mentioning '503' in 2025.

Tools like https://www.uptrends.com/tools/uptime can be used to point-check current status internationally:

(Two minutes ago I got 503, one minutes ago all was green and I was able to load a ticket page instantly, sending a message lead to 503 again. The page does not load right now for me.)

[alastair]

This is a long-term issue that we're aware of. We get notifications every time it happens. I'm a bit surprised that it's only been complained about 4 times! We've been slowly making changes to try and improve reliability and speed, but we are aware that we are constrained by our infrastructure (provided for free by https://www.upf.edu/). We have some plans for this coming year to try and make things better.

[alastair]

I just released a major change today that is more aggressive when searches are slow and will show an error to the user instead of trying to continue and load the results. Now if a search takes longer than 5s the user will get a result.

We had a suspicion that one of the causes of outages is because search gets too slow, so this should reduce the chance of it happening. We'll keep an eye on the site for the next few days and see if we have similar outages - if they still occur then we know that this isn't the reason!