[Tom]

Yep, I'm still seeing it too. MCaver, I'm almost positive it's someone hogging the database connections on the shared server. The forum slowed to a crawl and I was able to monitor the situation via phpmyadmin. There was only 1 user connected (me) so I know we weren't using up all our connections. Very basic queries were taking up to 30 seconds to complete, and eventually I got a "could not connect" error. A few minutes later everything was running fast. Ugh, while posting this I got a "could not connect" error. Edit: 15 seconds later it's faster than blazes.

[Newt]

I tried getting on around 10:30 and it was dead dog slow. Finally made it. Later when trying I kept getting an error message regarding not being able to access the data base. I would have posted this from work but it's against the law and can have crappy things happen to me. Even for just lurking. Would this have anything to do with search engines and their displaying the found pages? NN

[Tom]

NN, nope it doesn't have to do with search engines. Basically this forum (and site) runs on a server somewhere. It's a "shared" server meaining other web accounts are hosted on the same server (you don't get a "dedicated" server unless you pay big bucks, and you don't really need one unless you're a really busy site). What can happen is one of those other sites hosted on the same server can be hogging all the resources and slowing everyone else down. I think that's what is happening. We had this problem before and moved the database to another server and it fixed everything... until the last month or so.

[MCaver]

Unforunately, there's not a lot I can do about it. If I'm online when it happens (so far I haven't been) I can log into the server and see how things look there. Other than reporting it to our web hosting provider, the only thing we can do is move to another database server.

[Karen]

Thanks McCaver and Tom ... System seems to be running up to speed, at least for the moment. Karen

[Erik the Nav]

You guys are hosting with Pair.com, right? I've found them very responsive, the few times I had to work with them about anything - I'd guess they'd be concerned about the problem. If that's where you're hosting. I, too, notice the intermittent slow responses...