Question Can my browser cause return of the same page over and over again ?

[hw_user]

My experience this morning. I live in Markham Canada. I tried to register my grand kids on a swimming program. Markham uses a EZReg site (https://econnect.markham.ca/) for online registration. But I received an error page" Sorry, EZReg is currently busy. The maximum number of concurrent users has been reached. As clients complete their registrations, connections will become available."
At first, this sounds reasonable because I can understand that many people are doing the registration. But I continue to get the same error reply page after 2 hours of retrying every few minutes. I called my son who is at work and he was able to complete the registration right away. This makes me think that there may be a problem with my computer since my son and me are both going after the same site. I am a technical guy and always want to find the root cause of problems. This is more for my learning purpose. I can think of 4 points

1. I thought that it may be the browser. I have 3 browsers on my PC (windows 11), Chrome, Microsoft edge and Firefox. They all give me the same error page.
2. I thought that it may the Browser Cache. I clear the Cache and try (mostly using Chrome), but no luck (same error page).
3. Even me and my son are going after the same page, I was hitting a busy front end server and my son was hitting a different front end server which is not busy. But I was under the impression that most setup today are using load balancer to resolve this kind f issue.
4. I may have retried too many times and my IP address was marked as "spam" by the server and was presented the same error page over and over again.

Points 1 and 2 are related to my browser and hence the title of my post. If this is the possible cause, I would like to know what should I do to avoid the problem next time.
Points 3 and 4 are out of my control. But is #4 possible? Will a request from the same IP every few minutes resulted in being marked as "spam" ?

What other possibilities can cause the issue ? It will be greatly appreciated if anyone can share their thoughts.

 

[Ralston18]

I clicked the link from a US mid-Atlantic location. Likewise:

Sorry, EZReg is currently busy.

The maximum number of concurrent users has been reached. As clients complete their registrations, connections will become available. Please wait for a few minutes before you try again. Thank you. ​

Click here to go back to EZReg

I would not expect that #4 would be the cause. Hopefully it would take a few hundred attempts before the IP address would raise some flag.

And indeed, the website could have simply been busy. Some sites do not handle "overflow" situations gracefully. And once overwhelmed it may take some restarts on their end to recovery. Or load balancing goes astray - even if present.

Also remember that when you log into a website, your packets (outbound and inbound) can take any number of paths through various servers. And the path can change if and as circumstances arise and require re-routing.

You can use "tracert" and "pathping" to get a sense of the routing (hops) that are being made.

If you and your son both run the commands it is very likely that the paths will be very different until the last couple of hops.

Once beyond your router and your ISP there is little that can be done.

Just my thoughts on the matter.

 

[hw_user]

Thanks Ralston18,

And indeed, the website could have simply been busy. Some sites do not handle "overflow" situations gracefully. And once overwhelmed it may take some restarts on their end to recovery. Or load balancing goes astray - even if present.

It is now 8 hour since I got the first error and I am still getting it now. The online registration for swimming lessons should already been filled by now. There should not be many current users. It is very likely that I am still hitting the "bad" server which maxed out and was never able to recover until a restart. My son was able to do it. His computer must be hitting a different server. My computer is behind my router which has an assigned IP address from my ISP. There seem to be some session affinity between my router and the bad server. Otherwise why I am still hitting the same bad server after 8 hours. If session affinity is the cause of the problem, how can I break out of it.

Can you try again from your location and see if you still get the error ? This may show that such affinity exist.