When the forum was at its height in autumn 2007, there were 700+ posts daily, and sometimes over 800. For the last year or two the daily post count has only been 200-300, occasionally over 400. So ordinarily the current posts shouldn't be overloading the system, although when they changed the design of the site a couple of months ago, they may have reallocated space from the forum. If it's a case of overload though, it still shouldn't be difficult to get on when there's only one person posting, as I was around midnight last night.

it's common to run maintenance like backups at this sort of time; in fact, a badly done backup can lock the entire thing while it's running.

I often see errors from the MySQL database behind the site, complaining about too many user connections. This could be because there really are a lot of users, or it could be that maintenance is being done on the database. Over time the database will get bigger and this can cause performance problems if the database design isn't up to it.

Chris

They used to always do the maintenance at 1.07am for around 20 minutes, as us noturnal animals will remember When they changed the site over, they stopped doing maintenance at that time and it was possible to post right through. The problem isn't just happening at midnight though - it happens at any time of the day or night, and sometimes the midnight period is OK. If it was maintenance, surely it would be at a consistent time, not at random times throughout a 24hr period

You're right... it's on the same server..



It's possible that the database is on the same server too... I can't remember if the SQL error mentioned where it was located.

just to nitpick a little, that doesn't necessarily mean they're on the same server; it could be a load balancer. (but i agree that's unlikely ;-)

Do you think if we speculate long enough, someone might actually deem us worth enlightening?

Personally I think its a moderator sat there thinking "Goodness, I'm so sick of reading all these threads and posts, and deleting little bickering matches. Right, now if I click this button here, and type this bit of code here... Ah ha, right, now the little forumites can't post any more. I'm free! Free! No more moderating for me!"

Or something like that. Maybe its the aliens.

It's also been down pretty much all the time for a day or more at a time (with maybe the odd half hour when it works) e.g. this past weekend. It seems to be down more often than it's working, and I woudn't honestly expect that to be the case for normal maintenance.

Yep - it could be a WIP/VIP.. but I can't see them having a CSS, F5 or whatever to be honest

I doubt they'd have budgeted for that sort of kit for a user forum knowing what they cost (I've not looked into anything Open Source) If it were the case they could have fired up another server or two and added them in to the pool

Better shut up now, us geeks are unearthing our tendencies...

We're back for now.

Sweepstake on how long it lasts, anyone?

Looks like a classic case of "memory leak" to me. This is where finite resource is literally used up by some looping process or inefficient code. When I used to be a Problem Manager with a global Bank, the short term solution was to throw in more resource, whether that's space, server, memory, and then get the experts to work out where the underlying problem was.

Mind you, the Bank in question used to make billions in profits each year, and so could easily afford it!

I'd say get your Best Signature votes sent to me before they go down again

Car Expert

The server would stop responding to requests altogether if that were the case, methinks The http server is fine, but the backend (or connection to it) isn't, judging by the error message...

We'll probably never find out so no point in speculating anymore, really

Well I couldn't get on to the forums this evening. Finally crawled here, slowly, to moan about it!

Can't think of an any explanantions that haven't already been mentioned.

Sounds like you two should go round to ABRSM Towers to help them out!

I've just had a spam pm from a "georgesoveriegn" about renovating houses
Anybody else had one? If he/it has been spamming everybody that might be taking up some resources.
Should I report this? I've never had one before...

Block the sender, and immediately report to the moderators. I'll be blocking him now.

Thanks for the warning.

Thank you for the virtual votes - I hope you will remember them for this time next year . Regarding the main site, I was really feeling sorry for people trying to get results and useful stuff when all I seem to do is try to get votes for being the Most Cheerful Poster

During last night's long outage, in which I could not even get logged on because it said the server was busy, I checked out the rest of the ABRSM website and had no problems navigating round that part. So it would seem to confirm that the problem lies just with the Forum server.

I did follow instructions and only tried to log on about once an hour. It only adds to the traffic and therefore the problem if we sit at our PCs thrashing them into the Forum as many times as we can - but I don't suppose anyone would do that would they?

I found that the entire website was frequently out last night. I also got a wide range of different 'errordead' pages when trying to access the forum.

Of course I sit there pressing refresh for a couple of minutes each time. I find myself rather hoping that each time I get one of the various error messages, someone is also getting an equally irritating error alert logged, and hence something might eventually be done to sort it.

It's been working fine now for several days running - I think they must have finally solved the problem whatever it was Thanks mods!

HA! HA!

It's quite funny that this subject about us on go slow is a couple of replies above the subject about a certain Mr. Bolt smashing the world record.

He obviously didn't log onto the forum before he ran.

Or maybe he did...

Regards, Peter.