[org.whodat]

Place is swamped with spam posts of the same BS over and over.

[big'ol_freeper]

Same problem here.

[spyone]

I’ve noticed the same thing.

[wolfcreek]

I’ve been getting these problems for about a month. They seem to come and go.

Jim has ordered a couple of new servers to try and help the problem.

IMO, there has been a lot more activity on this forum combined with outside interference.

[library user]

Works fine here in Ohio.

[svcw]

I have been getting:

not responding

server busy

timed out

(blank pages that need to reloaded)

(extremely slow response time)

Frustrating enough to stop coming to the site (if it keeps up anyway).

I too would like to know what is going on.

[deport]

I don’t know the answers to your questions but there was a few hours outage a couple or so weeks ago. I’m not sure everything is totally back to normal since then. I think the search function is still acting screwy as an example.

All said it’s still better than not having FR around.

[kitkat]

I don’t know the answer to your question, but may I ask a question of my own which is also of interest to all on FR?

When FR is down, we used to have another spot on Yahoo to converse about the outage. That way, we knew whether it was our own computers, or FR that was having a problem. I lost the address for that site. Does anyone know it?

[dubie]

time to get a bigger pipe...

[JRios1968]

You just have to make sure you’re properly logged-in...

[Arrowhead1952]

About a week or so ago, Jim himself said FR is buying two new servers before election day 08 to handle the load.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2070591/posts?page=53#53

“We just ordered two more servers this morning. Expecting millions of more visitors through the elections.”

[Mike Fieschko]

What is odd - a ping of 209.157.64.201 (the IP address of FR) comes back just fine and quite speedy. Yet the errors and slow response when opening threads and posting are getting worse.

I'm not sure if you know this, but ping only tests if there is a route to the address you're pinging and whether the address responds to the ping.

Responding to the ping doesn't mean that there's a web server at the address, and that the web server is serving pages quickly, slowly, or at all. You can ping an address where there's never a web server running, and pings don't go to port 80, where most web servers listen.

An analogy: think of freerepublic.com as an apartment house, where there is a web server (apt. #80), a mail server (#25), and responds to pings (the main entrance door to all the apartments). If you go to the main entrance, it's similar to getting a response to a ping, but that doesn't mean that there's an apt. #80 or #25 inside the building. If you knock on #80 and #25 and someone inside answers, it's similar to confirming that a web server and a mail server are there.

[nutmeg]

Is FR back up? I think I accessed FR thru some "beta version" link, but now I'm not sure where I am... what's going on?

It doesn't appear we can search by title either... I've been using a Google search on titles on FR...