For me, the best time to access the boards is usually between midnight and 7:00 a.m. CST - most of the time the board is almost as fast as it was ye olden days (before the membership reached 5,000).
However, for the last three days in a row, I’ve suddenly gotten the ‘problem with the database’ page at about 4:00 a.m. and been unable to access the board for anything from 30 minutes up to 2 hours. As far as I can tell, my connections elsewhere seem to work just fine during that time, and one reason I can load the board faster is because I bought a new Compaq Presario a few months ago, so there doesn’t seem to be a problem at this end.
Did I miss an announcement that a ‘maintenance period’ has needed to be scheduled for that time period? Is it just my usual bad luck - I’ve found a good window for accessing the boards, and something else between here and Chicago is cutting me off regularly? Or is something happening that the Tech Gods need to know about?
If this is going to be a regular ‘down time’, I’ll certainly work around it, and of course it’s probably something beyond the Tech Gods budget/control, but just in case it’s some simple glitch that can be easily fixed, I thought I’d mention it here.
Oh, and if it’s because that last chocolate shipment disappeared, well . . . uh, my dog ate it. (Psst! Can someone loan me a dog for a few minutes?)
I think so. It’s been like this since the latest upgrade, as far as I know. It’s every night starting at 3:30, and ending at 4:10-4:15 (board time). I think you just have to work around it. Every night at 4:20 I come back thinking, oooh, I haven’t checked out the board in almost an hour! I’ll bet there are a lot of great new threads. Then of course there aren’t, because nobody could access it for the past hour, and I feel silly.
Oh yeah. One more thing I’ll mention. Between about 3:30 and 4:00, you’ll time out if you try to access the board. But from 4:00 until they come back online, you’ll get the “unexplained error” message. But it’s not unexplained, and refreshing won’t do you any good. I suggest just being patient.
And if you’re working on a well-crafted, enormous reply to a thread around 3:20 AM, if you don’t send it off promptly, you’ll have to wait 45 minutes before you can.
Thanks Tuba and Jerry - I think I must have been signing off right about the time the board goes down until recently, plus accidentally working around it without noticing at other times. I’d lost the board at that time before, of course, but blamed it on the usual overload and went to do something else. (The old board did maintenance at about 2:30, didn’t it? I must have unconciously been thinking the same for this one.) I only began wondering if there was a problem when it happened 3 nights in a row, and then I couldn’t get back in even after waiting a couple of hours.
However, Achernar’s post probably explains that - a lot of posters that can swing it have started taking advantage of the early morning lull. Everything works just fine until the board is taken down for that 15 minutes, then all of us are trying to get back in at once so that some of us get locked out for a little while. Then the board starts slowing down again at about 7:00 a.m., which I’ve assumed was the ‘daytime bunch’ started to check in, and I must just be getting caught in the middle.
Also, I have Windows XP and have found that I get a LOT of ‘can’t find server’ and ‘page not found’ results when surfing that work just fine if I click ‘Refresh’ two or three times.
Anyway, I know Jerry and the rest do the best they can with what they’ve got - wish I could win the lottery or something, maybe the CR would be willing to accept a loan with extremely good terms. I would (and have, I guess:)) deal with worse than that in order to enjoy the SDMB. I just wanted to mention it in case there was a simple (and cheap-to-fix) problem that had just popped up.
Have y’all noticed that anything that gets popular seems to suffer for it eventually?
I suppose this is possible, but I seriously doubt it. What I’ve experienced between 4:00 and 4:15 is far, far too consistent (IMO) to be caused by what you describe. And if that were the case, these posters who did manage to get through would post something, don’t you think? But quite often I return at 4:15 and find nine gray boxes down the side of the forum list. It’s my experience that 4:15-4:30 or so is the least busy time for board activity. But of course, I’m not behind the scenes, so this is just my impression.
FWIW, I was able to sorta time it this morning, and sure enough, I got the ‘database error’ page for right about 45 minutes, just as Jerry said. I also found a Pit thread that seems to be talking about the same thing, and Lynn mentioned that the board slows down when she is checking IP addresses. If one of the admins is taking advantage of the ‘slow time’ by running a check right after board maintenance, maybe that explains the odd delays I had.
My apologies if I’m being an unnecessary pain in the butt. I’m just a sickly SDMB addict whose become paranoid about hackers/crackers messing around with the board.
I would (and have, I guess:)) deal with worse than that in order to enjoy the SDMB. I just wanted to mention it in case there was a simple (and cheap-to-fix) problem that had just popped up.