I'm finding server response time to be erratic, ranging between foot-dragging slow and lightning fast; is it just me, or is it a function of tacit's servers with which we'll have to learn to live? (No offense intended where thanks are due, of course.)

I'm seeing the same thing. It seems to be erratic.

One of the things that could be tried is enabling Zlib compression. It'll trade some additional cpu time for dramatically smaller files transferred to the browser which would decrease the load time (once the files are actually sent by the server). This technique usually applies to HTML output, CSS, Javascript, XML and other text files.

Same here. The following is the report from the server, on one occasion;

Safari can’t open the page “http://www.finetunedmac.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=12&page=1” because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection. This sometimes occurs when the server is busy. Wait for a few minutes, and then try again.

No.

There seems to be some erratic, intermittent database slowdown happening from time to time, but I haven't been able to pin down what's causing it. From here, it's highly erratic; I'll look at the forum and it will take forever to load, then two minutes later it's running fine.

The UBB techs say that this can be caused by turning on the option to show how many unread messages are in each forum; if a group of users all log in at the same time, calculating the number of unread messages for each user can put a sudden heavy load on the database. I've turned off the option to show the total number of unread replies (it'll still show you the icon showing that there are unread replies, it just won't put the number next to it) and I'm going to see if that helps.

Traceroute has started ...

traceroute to 208.109.62.65 (208.109.62.65), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 41.06 ms 2.179 ms 12.898 ms
2 10.200.32.1 (10.200.32.1) 30.679 ms 7.336 ms 7.803 ms
3 gig12-0-0-2711.tampfledc-rtr1.tampflrdc.rr.com (65.32.31.170) 10.497 ms 17.238 ms 11.499 ms
4 ge2-2-0.tampfledc-rtr3.tampflrdc.rr.com (65.32.13.62) 11.08 ms 12.652 ms 33.263 ms
5 ge2-3-0.tampfledc-rtr4.tampflrdc.rr.com (65.32.13.58) 28.943 ms 10.956 ms ge1-3-0.tampfledc-rtr4.tampflrdc.rr.com (65.32.13.26) 11.777 ms
6 ge-2-1-0.cr0.dfw10.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.106) 35.272 ms 35.924 ms 39.422 ms
7 ae-1-0.pr0.dfw10.tbone.rr.com (66.109.6.179) 37.506 ms 34.335 ms 36.596 ms
8 tengigabitethernet2-1.ar4.dal2.gblx.net (64.211.60.81) 35.34 ms 35.978 ms 40.052 ms
9 64.210.13.110 (64.210.13.110) 74.261 ms 72.756 ms 72.38 ms
10 ip-208-109-112-198.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.112.198) 64.814 ms 64.373 ms 64.958 ms
11 ip-208-109-112-150.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.112.150) 65.772 ms 65.025 ms 82.918 ms
12 ip-208-109-112-185.ip.secureserver.net (208.109.112.185) 66.04 ms 62.655 ms 64.245 ms
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 *

Mmm, interesting. This site lives on 208.109.62.65, and the database back-end lives on 10.8.13.130, both in secureserver.net space. I imagine the other secureserver.net IP addresses must be routers, but it seems strange that it's going through three of them.

My currnt home ISP, Clear (who I don't like, by the way) doesn't support traceroute. Di you see it stalling at any point along the way?

At the moment, the forums are operating quite fast for me.

As it was stated earlier it comes and goes, when i did the trace it was OK, but fifteen minutes earlier there was a stall for about 15 seconds.

If you can't trace send me and email and I'll run it.

Hey you never said how you liked Oregon...better than TB or hotlanta? I've spent some time in Bend, Sunriver, Mt Bachelor, Wickiup Junction where they had the reputation of having the only AirHead Refueling Station open to the public.

<edit>I wanted to add that I've had some issues with Godaddy lags running on Global Crossing AZ. and I think many other folks have as well. I've been leaning to Chicago http://www.dinsol.com/ through http://nlayer.net/ and the response time seems faster.

Much quicker now. Thanks!

Funny, everything was running smoothly until I tried to open this thread. I got the "Failed to open page" message. Five minutes later, I'm finally in. No other pages (here) would load for awhile either.

It's slow for me as of now.

No problems yet, tonight; FTM has been as snappy as I could hope for. (Fingers crossed)

Update: Response time has generally been pretty good; a coupl'a slowdowns, but not as bad as it had been.

Tried to get on at 2:32 PM CDT today, and got two messages:
First "UBB Message
We encountered a problem. The reason reported was
Unable to connect to database server, please try again in a few minutes.

Please click back to return to the previous page."

A few minutes later I got "Bad Response From Server

Bad Response From Server"

Those were copied from the Safari window. I'm not an expert, but if I were guessing I would say either not enough horsepower, or not enough bandwidth. Saturday afternoon a high traffic time?

I got the first one a couple of minutes ago.

The "unable to connect to database" was an issue with the database servers at GoDaddy. I'm not sure if it was related to the massive DDoS attacks that have been hammering a number of large, high-profile Web sites over the last three or four days, but I know that quite a few ISPs are frantically shoring up their defenses against these kinds of attacks, which may have been why the database server was down for a time.

Its up now and (knock on wood) FTM is quite snappy for me today.

If we continue to have intermittent slowdowns, I'm going to consider moving FTM to its own dedicated server. That will involve a bit of downtime, which might range from a few minutes to a few hours, so I'm hoping it doesn't become necessary.

everything seems to be responsive and fast tonight.