[Jim Robinson]

Sorry, I’m fresh out of ideas. I’m sure John will get it solved, but I don’t know when. I’m hoping there are still enough people donating to keep FR going through this rough spot.

[PittsburghAfterDark]

Jim, with all due respect you need to consider a professional hosting option if you’re still physically hosting this on a set of machines you’re actually reaching out and maintaining.

If you’re getting hit with DNS attacks during these times, which would not surprise me, so would any number of political sites on the right and left. I lurk on maybe 12-15 sites during peak times and this is the only one where uptime is an issue.

[epic stache]

It seems like the OP was asking about the relationship between donations and performance.

There is some relationship, right?

[Ingtar]

Years back, I was in charge of a site that faced millions of hits during competitions. We had what sounds like a similar problem. The server and even network seemed to be operating well and handling the volume. It was the software we had installed to track hits that was hanging up and bringing things to a crawl. I wish I could remember the specific software.

[Dianna]

I know nothing about how this works, but maybe this information will be helpful. I couldn't access the site at all (tonight during the debate and during the last one). Both times my parents could access the site, but they said it was slow.

This could be a personal problem though, after giving up on FR I tried to turn on the tv and found my satellite box was broken. I was almost desperate enough to resort to smoke signals :)

[SWAMPSNIPER]

Jim I could get through occasionally but things were just overloading. We should expect to get hit, the rats are running scared and crazier than usual. It's working 100% now.

I only see some names appear to bitch about something, they never take part in anything else.

[MacMattico]

At first I thought that when people mentioned a “denial of service” attack, that was ridiculous. But I couldn't get through to post on either the Presidential or Vice Presidential debates, and then my server would go down for no reason. About 20 minutes after the debates, my server was fine and I could post on Free Republic or anywhere else no problem. I don't know much about computers, it was just me on my iPad watching the debate but after trying to access FR, my RR high speed wouldn't work at all until after the debate and then no problem.

[FrogMom]

I had trouble getting in last night, too, just like the last general election night.

I hate to talk about feelings when facing an issue, BUT,
FreeRepublic is feels like a child to me - I love it dearly even though it screws up occasionally.

My name is on the list of monthly donors and suspect it will remain so until you have to post me on the Memorial Wall.

Hugs, Jim, ya’ll will figure it out!

[mlo]

I would suspect it’s not a horsepower issue, it’s a caching issue. Websites with a lot of users have to cache database hits, they can’t do a live query every time.

[ShadowAce]

Sorry, I’m fresh out of ideas. I’m sure John will get it solved, but I don’t know when.

We have a ton of IT professionals on this site. My problem is that I do not know the configuration or the setup of what FR is running. We can't troubleshoot without information.

Can we get information on number/type of servers, type of internet connection, NICS per server, traffic each NIC is seeing, Apache/database/OS versions? Firewall setup?