Am I the only one seeing occasional "Generated in x.xxx seconds...." messages of upwards of 7-10 seconds for the last week or so?

I haven't seen that, but the FTM page seems to load slightly slower than usual. It takes about 2 seconds in my estimation.

I haven't seen that. Just now, for example, the bottom of the page for this thread is showing "generated in 0.012 seconds."

It is probably a temporary glitch in the data center. If it keeps happening, though, let me know!

I've been paying some attention, and I've found that I'm seeing two different things.

Some of my delays occur when I hit "Change Post" to complete an edit, and they register in the "Generated...." notation. (Example 1...Example 2)

But I'm also seeing delays which don't register as taking an unusual amount of time of to generate.

This now rings a bell! A similar, if not the exact same, situation cropped up some years ago, and as I recall, it ended as mysteriously as it began.

One more...even longer!

I've experienced something similar to that. i.e. click on Submit and then wait a few seconds.

It just happened with this post. After clicking on Submit I waited about 20-25 seconds and then had to hit Submit again.

I was remiss in not being specific.

My delays that don't register in the "Generated...." tag occur when I hit Submit"; those that register occur when I hit "Change Post".

Right now, the Web is experiencing the largest brute force attack in history. The attack is targeting Web sites running WordPress. FTM isn't using WordPress (obviously), but it's possible some WordPress sites live in the same data center and use the same database servers we're using, which would account for the strange intermittent slowdowns.

This is why we can't have nice things.

(Edited to add) And now I'm seeing it. Reloading this thread took 15 seconds.

Happy Christmas eve, everyone! I'm spending it in front of my computer trying to mitigate this attack rather than wrapping Christmas presents.

I've been noticing something similar over the past few days when trying to access various sites.*
Since I'm using dial-up access to the internet (with data transfer rates of 3-6 KB/s), the problem is magnified. When I checked with tech support for one of the dial-up ISPs I use, the tech freaked out, watching signals being bounced around from one coast to the other and everywhere in between. At the time he had no explanation for such. This might be that.

* My iMac's Activity Monitor (10.7.4) registers some really bizarre activity on such sites — for example, CPU activity related to Firefox seems to go berserk, sometimes indicating 70-80% user usage, with occasional bumps up to 110% user usage (if that were even possible). User usage is normally in the 10%-20% range.

It's too late for Christmas Eve, but Merry Christmas to you and all!

Many thanks for taking care of business when you could very easily, and not at all unreasonably, be ignoring it.

And on a different note, can you guess what the attackers are hoping to accomplish?

There is indication that attackers install code for cryptocurrency ‘miners’ to ‘find’ new ‘money’ with the help of the browsers of visitors.

Thanks.

Mining for bitcoin apparently takes an immense amount of computing power (and throws off an immense amount of heat, to boot) so I guess spreading the load over many "entities" makes sense. (There's a bit of insight here.)

110% CPU usage is entirely possible since you have more than one core in your CPU. Given a dual core CPU that could represent 55% of each of the two cores, 100% of one core and 10% of another, or any possible combination thereof. On my old Mac mini with a quad core i7 processor a usage figure of over 200% CPU was not uncommon. Given the new iMac Pro up to an 18 core processor and the right combination of applications and tasks, over 1,000% usage could be the norm!

Merci. Cool, yet somehow disturbing.

If you're running El Cap or later, you can download MenuMeters for OS X El Capitan 10.11 and later. (MenuMeters for Mac is compatible with OS X 10.10 and earlier.)

If you set your CPU prefs thusly, you'll see a separate thermometer for each core, and a visual presentation of joemike's explanation.

Thanks. I'll check it out.
I seem to get a semblance of that information from Activity Monitor's CPU usage window, which apparently stacks usage according to core utilization.

Activity Monitor shows you detailed % CPU usage by process, which may or may not be (I don't know.) limited to one core.

MenuMeters doesn't show you any where near as much detail, but it does show you how each core is being utilized. (Like so)

(I forgot to mention that you should select for "Percentage and Thermometer".)

It actually becomes even more confusing because there are "logical" and "physical" cores. For example the i7 processor in my MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2017, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports) has four "logical" cores running on two "physical" cores. Marcel Bresink's excellent System Monitor will selectively show total activity or the activity in each logical core. P1, P2, P3, & P4 in this image.

How many cores in an i7? addressed physical and virtual/logical cores, and likewise, MenuMeters shows my present quad core as having eight cores. (Like this.)

It's personal taste, of course, but I much prefer the MenuMeters presentation to that of SystemMonitor. (Unlike SM's "total activity" option, though, MM's option is for one icon showing average activity.)

I'm not observing any slowdowns at the moment. I think we're good, but definitely let me know if you all are seeing any.

I just posted a reply and from the time I hit Submit until my screen refreshed with the new post was 1 minute and 5 seconds according to the UBB. That was extreme but response has ben sluggish all morning. Other sites are responding normally.

I'm also seeing long lag times, although not that long.

This is different from the previous problem which affected only edits in my instance.

Update: Looks like we're back in business

I saw an earlier instance this morning where UBB was unable to connect to the database.....it said to try again later, so I did and then everything worked normally.

Ditto. I saw the above behavior too. It corrected on an immediate re-try.

I've been looking at these long server lag times. They all have the same source--an inability to connect to the database server, which is located in Dreamhost's datacenter--but curiously, the errors aren't being logged.

I put in a support request and the problem disappeared, so maybe Dreamhost techs fixed it? I'm not really sure what's going on.