Our webmaster reports that the updates she just did, in response to complaints that the forums were having a lot of problems, went well. Please let me know if you're still having trouble. Thanks.
In the last several weeks, it has been worse than any time before. "error 503 service temporarily unavailable" and timeouts after minutes of more or less connecting has been horribly common. And much of the time, the forum has not been reachable at all.
Overall response times have gone worse, it was normal to have slow response first time in a day when going to the site (probably from url lookup being slow for some reason ), but now that happens maybe 1/3 of the times loading any page on the forum.
Ping shows nothing odd. Tracert shows 24 jumps and nothing really noticeable. Only potential thing i can spot is that jump 14 sometimes goes through ccr21.lp101 and sometimes mpd22.lon13 while all other hops stay on a more narrow route, and even those two are still very close in ip#.
I'm poking around the forum today after getting several complaints of slowness, and I can see your point. I've let our webmaster Wendy know, but she just left town for several weeks on military maneuvers, so it's hard to predict when she'll have a chance to look into it. Sorry.
Note that last week our website host was fending off repeated hacker attack for several days ... our whole website was down for quite a while as a result. The slowness looks like something different, though. I'm just thinking that we're talking about more than one issue, which makes it more complicated to track down.
[strike]This came up on the Berklist, and it's been ongoing since May 7th. Someone on that list claimed to have contacted you and gave a reason, reportedly from you. Is that situation still ongoing? Was it accurate?[/strike] Nevermind...
I will say that the behavior is remarkably similar, though... I wouldn't necessarily buy the line your webhost is feeding you, because from my point of view, the behavior is the same, while the frequency of disruption is less often, yet still far too frequent.
Just as an FYI, this is the error message I receive most of the time.
Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Fixed except Member map, thanks, mouser Still can't find where your screenshot comes from, though...