Hullo.
Can someone post a link to the thread or post which best explains why the board is having a lot of timeouts lately?
I’m not complainging, I’d just like to see what the explanation is.
And also wondering if my suspicion that a lot of searches makes it worse has any truth.
Well, the search limit is currently 120 seconds (2 minutes). It was limited to this in an effort to prevent board outages due to excessive searching months ago.
Or ‘complaining’ even.
How does one ‘complaing’?
Don’t know. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s not so good.
If you want to complain here, go on ahead.
No, I came here to complaing
Last week was the pits. I keep track of the timeouts I get, and it hadn’t been that bad since July.
We are almost always worse in January, presumably the result of all the people with their brand new computers playing around on the net, finding us, and doing things like reading everythread in GQ.
It usually gets better by February.
Well noticed, yesterday.
I think we’ve had a lot of new users coming in because of the “I Waterboard” thread in GD. Maybe that’s slowing it down?
Like the gym. I hate the gym in January. Most of you people aren’t going to stick around, so get off my machines!!
(There was one guy working out on the machines while wearing flipflops. Good thing he wasn’t over by the free weights.)
So, why were we corrupted today? Anybody know?
Weekly SDMB forecast: Scattered outages and light slowdowns with occasional timeouts. Wear appropriate bad-weather gear and make sure your backup devices are charged.
It was on Metafilter just before around Christmas. It should have made the rounds then, so why would it have an effect now? College students returning after Christmas break?
Good guess and quite possibly a factor. Also lots of after-Xmas sales, so new computers aplenty, no doubt. Lotsa bad weather, people are staying in, more computer time, more traffic on the board, there you go.
Why do you need to guess? Can’t you just look at the site stats and say “Hey we had an unusually high number of new people on”.
But if us lowly members are going to have to guess, I’d say it had something to do with that database corruption which forced Jerry to shut the place down while he fixed it earlier today.
That might be a problem too. I’m not discounting anything short of DSL-blocking waves from Tralfamadore and maybe there’s something to that as well. 
I know, I know, you didn’t mean that seriously, but every time I’ve observed a halt in the Board’s operations – not just slowdown, but halt – I’ve been able to ping both the straightdope IP and the boards.straightdope IP (…200, …199) and the ping worked fine. Therefore, I tend to blame not the Internet, ISP or DSL connection or even cable at my end, but something inside the straightdope organization. I would think this would be significant to Jerry or any technical person.
I was joking, of course.
And I’ve had various experiences with this of late; sometimes just the board is unreachable, sometimes the entire site is unavailable.
I have no explanation and I have not heard from Jerry on this subject, so I don’t know what to tell you. I do know it doesn’t last and the site comes back and everything works again, usually after a short period. It just bees that way sometime.
Maybe I should look deeper into that Tralfamadore thing.
SDMB - Chicago - Bad Weather
"Nuff said.
Or maybe Little Ed shouldn’t give the hamsters so much candy for Christmas. Lawd knows I’ve been sluggish lately. . . .