I know the boards were moved to a new server and that this would mean a temporary slowness. I noticed this slowness pass yesterday and the boards were running smoothly. Today it’s running quite badly and it’s only early in the USA. Is something happening?
Anyone?
It’s been like this for at least 10 hours now. No-one has a clue?
It hasn’t only been slow.
I’ve had to try more than once to load a forum, sometimes several times. But hold on, there’s worse:
I double posted two responses today because the window from which I was doing the post did not load correctly following my clicking “submit”. I’m not the only one this has happened to in the last 24 hours. I remember noticing at least two others it’s happened to. And I don’t read that many threads.
It appears to me that we’ve taken a giant leap backwards. It has been quite a while since the ‘cannot find server’ screen graced my monitor, but today, 4x at minimum, and pages are taking for-stinking-ever to load. For this we paid? 
I, too, have had problems and I’ve got some fast connections.
All I can do is bring this to the techs attention. Jerry did say it might get worse before it got better.
Sorry this happened.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
If you’ve ever worked someplace that got new software or new hardware, you know it takes some time to make it all work properly. That’s what we’re going through now. You can be patient, and it will get better, or you can be impatient, and make yourself crazy. It’s up to you. 
I’ll be patient; I’m all stocked up on crazy.
An upgrade for the new server has been in the works since Monday morning and was approved Tuesday afternoon. I’m in the process of scheduling the requisite down time for the upgrade with our new hosting provider. I don’t have a date estimate yet on when they might be able to perform the upgrade but I’ll keep you informed (and announce to the board) when I do know. We’ll probably only need to be down for 1 to 2 hours and we’ll more than likely perform it in the middle of the (Chicago) night.
Jerry
I think that many of us are misreading what the Reader recently did as “an upgrade” to the boards that wasn’t. If you read Jerry’s announcement carefully, it was no such thing – the SDMB was migrated onto another host server in order to free up the main Reader server, which was strained by the continual and extensive access of SDMB by several thousand of us, so that the people who actually work for the Reader and make the money that supports most of our fun with these boards could get their work done more efficiently.
Look at it this way – if you work in an office, are dependent on the office network to get your work done and exchange business e-mails with people, and that’s being held up because some people in Australia are arguing about the impending elections there and somebody across the continent is bitching about the poor paving in town, and they all for some odd reason have the right to use your office network to do it, wouldn’t you be inclined to fuss that maybe they ought to be farmed out somewhere else?
I’d have to see figures from Ed or somebody, but I’ll bet kopeks to Krispy Kremes that the $5 and $15 we’ve fed into the kitty is no more than 10% of what it costs to keep the boards operating, on a strict cost-accounting basis. The Reader covers the rest of that cost – they deserve some consideration!
Polycarp is on target. We performed a hosting provider transition last week to free up much needed bandwidth for the Chicago Reader’s corporate offices. After the transition we saw a degradation in SDMB performance and so now we’re about to perform a server upgrade. We’ll see what the results of that will be.
More information on the impending upgrade are available here.
Jerry