What is the matter with this site?

Dunno, but I got one of these messages for about 15 seconds today. Went away with a refresh.

David

David, I think it is time for paying for your popularity: you need a more strong hosting. I use OVH, they are reliable and not expensive.

David,

My participation here is minimal and declining because MOST of the time this site is unavailable to me either because it just doesn't work or it is too slow to be usable.

This is the only site I with which I have this problem.

I am running Win7/IE8 on a four core machine with buckets of memory.

Sometimes I have to login because you have reset something. On these occasions, usually in the morning (GMT-7), the site works very well for a while. By evening it is very ragged or unusable again.

Hostmonster is one of the best services around - certainly better than any of the alternatives we have tried - and has a good record of consistent stability. I'm able to access the control panels and admin very rapidly, and I work enough hours of the day to spot any problems. But it's not causing any such problem for me and I am doing fairly intensive loading/reloading/navigating.

I have many more problems with other sites that take a long time to load - especially sites like MySpace and Facebook - and I don't know why these problems should affect individual users more than others. As you will know, I've also logged on from many different places including the USA via AT&T broadband last month. That was fine too.

David

I just returned to this site. It took about forty seconds of blank page to get to the first screen.

I have returned to this site again. It is exremely fast at the moment. Instant response to any click.

That is probably because the site is loading from cache on the sencond visit. I see in your screen shot you use NORTON I'm wondering how it would affect you if you turned norton off completely (is that even possible on the later versions?) I ask because if it's not just a poor connection it could the nortons examination of the site thats causing this delay and subsequent errors.

I don't think it is related to the OS or anti-virus. It is a Server problem -too many connections. I had the same screen many times since Photoclubalpha is THE NEX friendly forum.
It happens by the end on the AM (USA East time: +6 hs) and during the PM use to be good...

Winston I get that Error occasionally here as well, (mostly in the early evening when all the teenagers are online), I don't think PhotoclubAlpha.com is actually on the fritz either, I got Vistas networking and troublshooter too investigate and 'ping' the address (one time there was no problem detected, and another time there was no response). I've been thinking it's router overload somewhere on the web between you (me too) and the destination. So I've been blaming Cisco and/or Sun Microsystems.....
Greg

ps. Caught your post Javelin, good point, security issues again, notice photoclubalpha.com doesn't have https://photo-etc. I know for sure Windows/IE security is extra suspicious of sites without the s after the http, that might explain some of the problems some of the time...maybe, also could be permissions for the site as well in 'Internet Options' but IE at least won't allow full permissions for sites that don't have the 's'

Updated threads/new posts were just a fast.

Winston, try using a different DNS server. You can google for some of use Open DNS.

Sometimes they're a bit slow in resolving the domains. That still doesn't explain the error in your first post.

The only time I find it slow is when our connection on my end is slow. And working nights lately (now back to days) I've used it at just about all hours.

Dusty

We moved to a large US server rather than our old smaller UK based server, which simply could not handle the load. The website traffic can affect the forum, and the connection problem shown is queries to the (shared) MySQL database, not the server's own limits. That's basically one file on a machine, and no matter how fast you make the server's delivery to the outside world, the number of simultaneous connections to the MySQL database is not infinite. Most connections are very brief, but when pictures are loading, they persist for a period. If you get a large number of users loading new pictures (not yet in their cache) that could slow things down.

I do occasionally purge the cache system for the site, which will slow it down for a while, but we have fast cacheing plug-ins installed to ensure that it runs as fast as possible from the server. I have not purged the caches for about a month, but I notice that the search engine optimisation plug-in insisted on rebuilding 32 fields of the database yesterday.

David

I don't know what time you did this but today's performance is the best I have seen on this site in months.

Thirty seconds per click to get to this thread. I have no idea how long it will take to post this.