I would estimate from around 7 am to 10 am Eastern time, the past couple of days, the SDMB has been totally inaccessible. When I try to load it, I just get a server timeout. It’s not my connection, because every other site on the Internet loads just fine during that time. When it finally does come back, it seems to load normally and run about as well as usual.
Those hours are a rough estimate only.
Don’t know if anyone else is having this problem or not, but thought I’d mention it.
Yeah, I’m getting loads of database errors and “document contains no data” messages when trying to load the site.
Having no problem here. But don’t take that as an overall indicator, because sometimes I have these same problems.
Just to be clear, this isn’t the usual, “sometimes when surfing the board, a page will fail to load” problem, this is the entire SDMB failing to load, for several hours at a stretch. The browser will try to connect for about half a minute, and then I get a failure error page.
Wasn’t here this morning.
I will check it out and and give back my feedback.
I’m having the same problem as MsWhatsit - it’s just the Dope, and it’s mornings only, US Eastern time. Pages won’t load, or I get a timeout message.
We’ve noticed this problem too. I’ve talked to Jerry and he’s going to ask our hosting company whether they’re running some process in the morning that slows things down.
I had that problem this morning, roughly from 8:30-10:00 CST.
I thought we had dedicated servers? 
I’ve had the same problem the last few days.
Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. My memory is hazy, but I seem to recall Ed saying something about there being a new server. But I can’t recall whether he specified that it was dedicated. Seems like he did, though. Not sure.
Upon searching, I did see that Ed referenced a “new server”, but there is no mention of it being dedicated.
No promises. In 2006, to improve board performance, Jerry deleted about a million posts from March 1999 to August 2001. He says he’ll look into restoring those posts when we switch to the new server. If doing so seems relatively painless, fine; if a major headache, then not. Let me be clear: We’ve got plenty on our plates and this is a low priority.
FWIW, I was on this morning from about 6:00-7:00 AM, EDT, and had no problems. I do understand as there have been other threads about this morning problem in the last few weeks.
Maybe the server is pregnant. :eek:
Maybe it’s just pining for the old days when the database was intentionally programmed to rebuild itself nightly between 3 and 4 AM.
7:00 - 7:30 am CDT time, completely unusable. Forum lists loads, but clicking into a forum either (eventually) gives a DB error or just never loads.
Simply abysmal performance the last couple of days. Perhaps 5 to 10% of the times I’ve tried to enter a forum, click on a page, post a comment or perform a search has it actually worked. Just trying to enter here to report this took 8 tries.
*Database error
The Straight Dope Message Board database has encountered a problem. *
Our host service is running some sort of time-consuming process on the database in the morning that causes tables to lock up from time to time. Jerry has asked them what they’re doing and whether they can reschedule it for the middle of the night.
8:50 hangs when trying to get to forum from main page.
9:01 Can get to forums.
I’ve noticed when this morning problem occurs that usually the main page works and you can click on the Last Post and it opens or if you saved the URL of a post you can access it.
During this time the PM doesn’t work either.
The main page has also had the problem during the database message stuff where the page tries to reload at one second intervals over and over.
Reminds me of a cute short story I once read 50 years ago.
Seems this big mainframe computer was the most sophisticated model available, and could even diagnose and heal itself from a spare parts bin. But operators noticed it didn’t come up to speed as quickly in the morning as it used to and kept printing out wonky trouble reports. Power usage was increasing and the inventory was declining. Parts were being used up, but they didn’t know where. Things deteriorated for several months, getting worse, driving the attendants batty.
Then one day, just when nothing could get worse, everything ground to a halt, the hatch door flew opened and out popped a shiny, tiny, new computer!
It might not be just the database - I got a ‘dropped connection by the server’ message about 15 minutes ago…