Housekeeping - This forum - performance, etc

[tahanson43206]

Well! I just "signed" a non-disclosure agreement with Cloudflare. This came about because I wrote them about my mistake in not entering the IP addresses in full, when I set up our connection to their service. I suggested they provide a service for the site administrator to test the full suite of IP addresses against the target site, and they popped up an invitation to provide more information. It appears that I can't say anything about what happens from here, nor will they ever say anything regardless of whether they adopt the idea or not.

I suppose it is a boilerplate non-disclosure agreement.

In any case, I will have to be generic in reporting on this initiative.

the agreement period is one year.

All members are invited to test the new-mars.org/phpBB3/ site to see if performance has improved.

Please give the system a chance to settle.

My experience with the first test system was 4 (four) seconds for the first query, and sub-second responses after that.

Your reports will inform ** my ** reports to Cloudflare, assuming they actually contact me.

(th)

[tahanson43206]

All 15 IP addresses for Cloudflare were added to the Azure rules today, and performance improved.

Please test new-mars.org/phpBB3/ and let us know if you see an improvement.

I'll wait a day for feedback before writing our members again using email.

I got four seconds the first time I tried the connection on one of the machines here, and then got sub-second responses after that.

***
Cloudflare wrote to ask about our experience with their service, and I'll take the opportunity to request a connection test.

That would be a service that would test all the IP addresses that Cloudflare uses and report any timeout events.

Such a service would (presumably) only apply to site administrators, but it sure would have helped me!

(th)

[tahanson43206]

The new IP's have been added to the Azure rule.

I had manually added 8 originally, and the full list is 15.

Hopefully performance will improve.

(th)

[tahanson43206]

When this forum was created on Azure, access was via IP address since no domain name was available at the time, nor was one needed for testing.

Now that the forum is is use as an active backup for newmars.com/forums, we have enrolled with Cloudflare as a customer for secure access.

Initial configuration of access via Cloudflare required entry of a long list of IP addresses into an Azure access rule, and since the entries were done manually, only about half of the IP addresses were entered.

The site is working, but there are delays in delivery of packets, and the delays may be due to the lack of all the required IP addresses. Cloudflare may be trying IP addresses until it finds one that works, and each try introduces a delay.

My plan for today (Wednesday, 2026/03/25) is to add the missing IP addresses to the Azure rule.

My experience has been that average delay is about 18 seconds, but other members have reported not gaining access at all.

Those members with direct IP access are reporting normal response times.

(th)