Forums server seems very slow again this morning, just like yesterday.
Has everyone got the same problem?

Yes - keep getting error messages which say "too many connections"

and when I do get into the forum it takes for ages to wait for everything.

Definitely not just you.

Absolutely useless

It's once again pretty much unsuably slow, and it's happening more and more frequently. I think all of us here in forum land would like a response as to what may be done about it. I'm really sorry to have to say that, but we all enjoy this resource the ABRSM provide, and to see it consistently running this poorly doesn't do any of us any good...

I typed my message above at 8.44am and it has been timed at 8.51 !!

Me too - and I'm trying to book tickets for a concert on another site but can't remember my password, and I keep getting an error message when I request a reminder - and there are only 4 tickets left where we want to sit! (Not that that has got anything to do with this site!) Not a happy bunny!

Totally agree with this

It's going at snails pace for me too.

Dire isn't it? Perhaps the AB should invest in a new one of these little fellows...

We're up to speed again. Hope this is a fairly permanent 'up to speed'...

GRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I typed all the Horses in for today, then got no connection , and lost the message !
I'll have to start again.
Anyway it seems back to normal in last few munites.

Sorry to be devil's advocate here (and I'm sure all the IT professionals will agree with me) but we don't pay for this wonderful service, so we can't really moan when it is not performing well.

Although I do concur that it is frustrating not being able to enjoy the forum when I have a moment to spare...

There go those pigs again.

It would be nice if there was a permanent fix for the problem.

I'm sure it would also be appreciated if someone from the board could offer some kind of explanation for why we've been having so many problems and what they are doing to try and solve things. I know that I'm not the only member who feels that the forum is an important aspect of my musical life, and it's basically been unusuable a lot of the time recently.

with every word of that Flossie.

Not sure about that... we may not pay for it on a pence-per-post basis, but as one of the overheads, surely we pay for it in the cost of ABRSM exam fees and publications/CDs? And it's not all one-way: the ABRSM must have acquired a fair amount of extra income in exam fees and publications/CDs through people doing exams and taking up other instruments thanks to encouragement on this forum; it's also a good way of monitoring opinion without having to pay a research company; it's brilliant free advertising in the sense that if people search for something musical, the likelihood is that the ABRSM forum will come up in any English-speaking part of the world; and no doubt there are various other benefits to make it worthwhile and justifiable for the ABRSM to continue to fund this forum out of their marketing budget (eg arguably it helps to improve standards of teaching and exam results, together with promotion of music-making generally which ultimately is likely to lead to more exam fees and book/CD sales. It's good PR if it works well, but sadly it's not working well at the moment and hopefully they'll find a permanent fix. I do agree it's a wonderful service when it works well though!

Yup happened to mee etooo (



Yup happened to mee etooo (

will the normal speed forum lasts this time?

No lizbun, it didn't

I'll reiterate : it'd be very much appreciated if someone from the ABRSM told all of us here in forum land exactly what they believe is causing the forum to operate at such an unusable speed so often, and what the technical people are doing about it (appreciate that they are working on it : thanks for yesterday's PM EdGJ ).

It is, after all, spoiling the forum for all of us, and not doing the ABRSM's reputation a whole lot of good.

Thanks in advance!...

Ugh. I tried at about 7 o'clock while I was making a cup of tea - gave up completely. Tried again now and it's soooo slow. Trouble is, if I can't get on the forum, then I browse other sites and end up buying things. If I spend a huge amount of money because of this site being so slow, then can I claim it back from AB?

I've put an emergency 'come in sit down' online, for people with forum withdrawal symptoms

It is literally just a cafe with a 'come in sit down' thread, and is only intended for use when this forum is slow/down/broken. It will be locked when the main ABRSM forum is working properly.

Click here to access the page.

I've been trying to get on for the last two hours and never got further than the forums home page before it crashed. I finally seem to have in though. I somehow doubt it will last.

Persistence seems to pay off - lots of going back and forwards, but it's not much fun.

Barry, your cafe threw me out The connection died while my registration was going through. But I only wanted to tell Solari that I don't recognise his music (though it's lovely), so it doesn't really matter

Persistence seems to pay off - lots of going back and forwards, but it's not much fun.

Barry, your cafe threw me out The connection died while my registration was going through. But I only wanted to tell Solari that I don't recognise his music (though it's lovely), so it doesn't really matter


Ooh - perhaps the going back and forwards isn't a good idea after all

I got thrown out the café at the registration page too!

Ah no worries - I posted it in the General Music forum now

I've just accepted you

edit : main forum seems to be running a little faster : but I'll leave the emergency come in sit down on for the time being, just in case

it seems to have been particularly sick today - so many problems I logged myself out by mistake!

Appears slightly better now so hello everybody - may be the only chance I get !

Like an asthmatic tortoise wading through treacle.

Hello maggiemay!

Forum may be unwell, but I'm happy. Charlton 2-0 up

I've finally actually been able to read threads! Each one is taking about 5 mins to load though at the moment.

Me too

THe only problem is as nobody has been able to log on there isn't anything to read!

Are we finally back up to speed again?...

Famous last words...

Don't jinx it.

Well, I'll try not to...we'd rather use here than my little green forum. I have less work to do here

Bah - with so few new posts to read my attempts at procrastination are failing!

I have fun out of excuses and will actually have to get on with the work I'm supposed to be doing. At least the NYO prom will give ne a decent sound track.

It's working...

*hopes that's not just because there's not many people here at the moment*...

I don't know if the mods are reading this thread but if you are, is there any chance you could please let us know something about what's happening behind the scenes.... Even if you don't want to give chapter and verse, just some communication would be better than nothing. It would be much appreciated... please!

I wonder if my constant having to re-log in is connected to this?

The speed seems OK now, but I was trying to post a post just now and it came up with an error message that the server was too busy to post my message (cheek!)

That sometimes happens if you try to post two messages fairly quickly one after the other, even when the forum is working normally.

I've done that before, but this was just my one and only message, so it wasn't 'flooding' (is that what they call it?) just that they were too busy. Perhaps people are posting as much as they can in case it all goes pear-shaped again

I see : and yes it's called flooding. It's a failsafe device built into most forums to try to prevent spambots doing too much damage.

I also had one of those earlier this morning.

I haven't yet spotted any official explanation for the going slow, so apologies if this has been covered somewhere.

It seems to me that there might be two reasons for the problem. One is that some IT equipment belonging to the ABRSM is failing and what is left to serve the Forum is insufficient to handle the traffic that we generate at peak periods. I don't have personal experience at looking after servers, but I would have thought that in general they can collectively collaborate to report their own faults, and that this type of problem should be relatively easy to solve. It might however require the spending of money on providing more IT equipment, or at least replacing faulty parts.

The other one could be a Denial of Service attack. This is when some malicious, or just plain mischievous hacker uses his IT equipment to flood the ABRSM servers. In this case, I am sure we would all agree that it is more important for the ABRSM official website to keep going, and that the Forum even though it is a useful marketing tool as Skylark has pointed out, could be allowed to degenerate in order to allow other parts of the ABRSM website to continue, frustrating though this is. These attacks require a certain amount of investigation to determine the source, and to be able to take evasive action. Admitting that they are taking place can also be rather embarrassing for the owners.

I guess we will have to be patient for a while longer. In the meantime, I will ponder on the fact that in the voting for Most Useful and Most Sensible Poster awards, I got 6 marks in each, coming 42nd and 39th respectively .

That was both useful and sensible, gedall, thanks. Now if you'd posted it a week or two ago, you might have got more votes

I don't think it can be to do with peak periods because I'm sometimes on late at night/early hours when there's nobody else around (lurkers maybe, but probably not many) and like late last night, it was still having the same problems.

So maybe that points to a hacker, which might explain why it's taking so long to resolve if they can't find the source. It must be a lot more frustrating for them than it is for us, so as you very sensibly say, gedall, we'll have to be patient and wish them luck.

Not sure I agree with you about the main site being more important than the forum though

I was going to mention DDoS/DoS but it just seemed silly. I can't see why anyone would have anything against the ABRSM tbh - it's not as if them losing these boards would incur any financial loss.

It's more likely that these forums were never put on a platform that was designed for heavy traffic

Ah, but you're assuming that people who do this sort of thing have rational reasons behind doing it. Well, yes, some of them do, but surely for some it's a 'because it's there', found a weakness let's exploit it thing.

On the other hand, yes, I can't imagine that when setting up these boards AB thought they would become quite so busy

while i don't have any actual evidence, the most likely situation seems to be what was suggested previously: poorly written software, which uses too many resources and eventuallys "clogs up" the system. (possibly combined with insufficient hardware.)

I think it's 100 concurrent requests maximum by default? I wonder if it's actually hitting that limit (you'd need well over a thousand people browsing I'd think to hit that at any one time) or just not closing the connections properly

Not sure if they've done any upgrades/patches to the forum software since it was put in? Oh well, we'll probably never know

Could it maybe be something to do with the forums now being a subsection of the main website so having to share with that? I don't really know how these things work but when it was forums.abrsm.org rather than abrsm.org/forums it worked better, I think, in general. There've definitely been a lot more problems since the new website was launched.