What has happened to make FreeRepublic so slow?

Vanity Question | 01/24/2009 | Swordmaker

[Swordmaker]

I have noticed that FR has become abysmally slow in response and page loading in the past day or so. I've noticed a few responses in the threads where other Freepers mention in passing the slowness. I checked it on several of my client's locations. Everywhere I brought up FR was slow.

Sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to load the browsing pages. Moving to a topic, is a bit faster but not much.

I also noticed last night that doing title searches that used to bring up pages of responses now only bring up less than a page.

John, Jim, what's going on? Are we being hit by a Denial of Service attack?

[Poser]

Obama’s fault.

[Dallas59]

[1COUNTER-MORTER-68]

bump

[org.whodat]

The last time it was this slow it crashed !

[Jim Robinson]

I don’t know, but hope it gets cleared up soon.

[libh8er]

What would you recommend instead?

ASP.Net is popular, but not my preferred choice since it would lock you into Microsoft. The J2EE stack (Java EE) is a good alternative. It's open source (free) and has a very extensive set of libraries and frameworks with which to build.

[LuxMaker]

Obviously the fairness doctrine in action.

[TomServo]

Probably a combination of vanity posts plus being spammed incessantly with Apple news, rumors, etc...

[Slings and Arrows]

* Black helicopters (or is that considered racist now?)

African-American helicopters?

Helicopters of color?

[Slings and Arrows]

The hamsters are tired.

[mojitojoe]

Slow for me too, but better now than it was earlier today but still slow. Usually with my internet speed loading is instant.

[CarlosFonke]

It’s because of a Black Barry virus.

Bump to that. You'll be here all week, right?

[lilycicero]

And like magic...it’s fast again....

[JudyinCanada]

Well how about that - it’s all good. Nothing like whining to get something taken care of.

[SouthTexas]

It’s baaaack. :)

[nahanrac]

True, true. Amazing:)

[nahanrac]

Glad I’m not the only one.:)

[Jim Robinson]

John shifted some things around to better balance the load on our servers, reconfigured some system settings and kicked off a bunch of search engine spiderbots that were killing us.

[Swordmaker]

It’s baaaack. :)

Maybe we just had to let John and Jim know there was a problem...

[Swordmaker]

Thank John for us. And thank you!