Lags and downtimes recently

Hi guys. What’s up with LingQ these last few days? The website works terribly slow most of the time (it sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to create a new lingq), and it’s not an issue of my internet connection. It really starts to bother me, as I’m pretty active in my Swedish learning.

Cheers,
S.

@Sorror - Hi! We are very sorry for the inconvenience. Our site has been under attack of a malicious spammer who brought the site down for a few days. Our team is working hard to protect the site and prevent future attacks. It still may go down for a few seconds but we do our best to get the server to its normal. Thank you for your understanding!

Cool, I’m glad you’re on top of it. And I like the term ‘malicious spammer’, sounds so much more appropriate than ‘hacker’, considering the overall stupidity of the person in question (tempering with educational website). Take care!

@Sorror - Thanks for your support. The worst seems to be behind us now, but we’re still working behind the scenes to tighten things up to make sure we’re better defended against future attacks.

Is this the explanation for slow load times when creating links, accessing dictionaries and resources, and loading lessons? I just linked up a brief lesson and it took crazy amounts of time for links to be realized, usually 10-20 seconds. Sometimes I can speed things up by closing the window and relaunching LingQ, but of course that too is tedious and time consuming, and sometimes it doesn’t even help. This kind of user experience has persisted now for a full week. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?

1 Like

@edthird - Yes, the problems you are describing are related to the attacks and subsequent actions we had to take. We are working on a proper solution now and hope to significantly improve the performance over the next week or so. Thank you for your patience.

I appreciate your efforts, Mark. It wouldn’t be so frustrating if I didn’t think LingQ was such a magnificent resource. I hope you find a solution soon. For what it’s worth, I enjoyed rapid fire load times tonight, which was very encouraging.

Quite frankly, LingQ is unusable at the moment. I was about to go through some transcripts and create lingqs, but it takes forever.

Guys, if you’re still experiencing the same problems as before, perhaps it would be a good idea to hire a dedicated, professional server/system administrator? Especially since it wouldn’t have to be an in-house position. Or change the current one. As someone from the Internet industry I can tell you, patching things up shouldn’t take this long for a project of the size of LingQ. Or perhaps it’s an internal issue? Based on LingQ’s web interface one could guess it’s not perfectly optimized for performance (a lot of queries, not ideal technology, and some others).

And as edthird said above, the only reason I’m writing this is because LingQ is such a great tool and my language learning suffers a lot without it. Oh, and maybe also because I’m paying for it, too :slight_smile:

2 Likes

I am getting countless 505 errors, server time outs, and i just got a “content host is offline” error.

Its horrible. I really hope they fix this soon.

@Sorror - Absolutely, we’re determined to get any performance issues behind us and it has been our top priority over the past few weeks. We’re exploring some different options, though unfortunately these aren’t overnight switches so we want to make sure we do our due diligence before switching over to another host or making significant changes to our infrastructure.

We hope to have everything back to normal for all our users very soon!

@chumnutzly - I’m really sorry to hear you’re still having these issues. I’ve passed this along to our development team and we’ll be sure to investigate further!