Free Republic's Technical Problems

[per loin]

Of late, FR seems plagued with slowdowns. Is this a temporary problem or is some limit being approached?

[American Preservative]

You're about right. After FINALLY being able to post, I just posted to this thread, did not see the post, hit Refresh, and thread time seems to be stuck at @5:15, yet my 'puter clock says, 5:44....anyone have Art Bell's phone number? : ) Sigh.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

What happened to my posts?

[bradactor]

The Yahoo group is still there. I just got a bunch of group email from it

[ApesForEvolution]

evaporating posts before posting to threads post test. whew.

[HighWheeler]

"...is there a way to cut down on the load so that we could still get access? ... How about blocking lurkers from access until things slow down a bit?"

We'll only let people with screen-name initials from "A" through "L" allowed to get through during the high volume periods. That is my plan, and I think it would work fine.

[tubebender]

You must have a cast iron stomach to deal with all that goes on behind the curtain.

I'm wondering if you can post some stats of hits on the FR servers this past few days.of the sniper threads when you get some time ?

[Dog Gone]

As we both work in Houston, I suggest we just step out on the street in front of your building and ask the first one hundred people we see "who do you trust, lawyers or guys who have spent their entire life in the oilfield?"

That's not exactly representative, since the oilfield trash line up outside my building every morning to bring breakfast goodies to all the lawyers who really run the oil business from inside the building.

Let's just look at who the people elect to run the country.

Lawyers or oilfield trash, that is the question...

[ladyinred]

Good suggestions. I noticed the same thing when the sniper was caught, could not move at first, and finally, could not get on at all. Same today after Wellstone's death. I was just lost without FR! Having to rely on the TV newscasts is just horrendous to addicts like us! :-)

[luv2ndamend]

It was working well for a few minutes. Same posts as before.

[tictoc]

Your explanation made a lot of sense to me.

Because I don't work in the IT field myself (except when fixing my own $%!& computers), I hesitate to comment. However, could it be that it's not (only) a bandwidth issue?

I was thinking that from the technological point of view, FR seems to be one of a kind. Every pageview is unique and different for every user. If you and I log on at the same minute, we will still see different pages. Depending on our individual preferences, we will see different sidebar topics in different orders. "New comments" is bolded or not depending on individual user data. You may have selected the forum to show you 50 posts at a time, I may be looking at 100.

And so on. Even a second's difference in logging on will put new postings at the top for me that you didn't get to see.

So the server is assembling, and dishing out, many different pageviews every minute, instead of the same one to all users.

In addition, the database is huge - sometimes when searching on a keyword, I'll find threads all the way back from 1999. Click on the thread title and it comes up pronto.

I belong to a fair number of Internet forums and browse many more, but with the exception of Yahoo.com I've never run across one with such a huge message archive - and FR offers many more user features than Yahoo. (Inclusion of graphic files in posts, for example).

Could this be more than a matter of simply buying more bandwidth? Is FR's database server operating at the cutting edge of what can be done with technology - in uncharted territory, so to speak?

[MinuteGal]

Things still aren't right. My "Latest Posts" list shows no new posts after 8;15 PM EST. It's now a half-hour later. Also on some threads, the replies cut off at 45 in number and then switch to the 50-100 thread. "My Comments" and "You Have Mail" are lit up, but there's no new messages and I can't get rid of the problem.

Leni

[TomB]

Hey John, is this a dress rehersal for election day?

******crickets*********

umm......never mind........ ;^)

[John Robinson]

It is probably the searching that kill us. It puts an inconsistent load on the system.

We're talking about offloading the search engine and its own database onto another machine.

[DoctorMichael]

WIERD!

Just got on (9:25 EST) after trying since 6 PM.........The "Marker" at the very end of the Thread says there should be 91 Posts but YOURS is the last one I see (#62).

[Hank Kerchief]

I'm in N.E. Have no problem accessing FR, but nothing has been updated since 5:15 anywhere.

[slimer]

What's wrong with FR? I can't post anything and the page wont reload. It's been slow and unreliable all day.

[DeSoto]

Has anyone been able to get an updated latest-posts-page in the last hour or so?

[slimer]

Is it a technical problem?

[red-dawg]

Denial of service attack?

[KS Flyover]

Test post at 9:09 pm central time