I've just looked briefly around the bbs for the thread in which we discussed the recent (weeks ago, now) issue with slow loading of the front page of the bbs.

I've just had it happen for a couple days now that the initial load for the day takes about 20+ seconds.
Also, it seems very, very quiet in here. I feel like the Omega Man or something.

edit:
I should add that the site took 20+ seconds to load on two different machines for the initial load on at least two days running so far. Just a little worried.

This has been happening for me over the past two days as well. Yesterday using Safari in Mac OS it was taking upwards of 30 seconds just to refresh a page after posting. Closer to a minute sometimes. I don't believe marking everything read helped in this case.

Ditto here.

Very, very slow initial load, very very slow posting.
Marking stuff read made no difference.

Right now it's good, but that's the first time in days.
Hopefully it's fixed. (?)

No problems for me...

I'm going to have to find some way to slim down the memory usage on the VM. Once I have time to think about such things anyhow. Basically the DB is too big to all be in memory, I/O on this particular VM provider is not the quickest thing in the world, and thus when swap is used, it's extra, horribly slow.

I'm also back to the same slowness as described before. Everything is perfectly fine as long as I stay within my bookmarked Off Topic forum, but if I venture outside that even a little bit, I'm waiting for at least a minute...

I'd love to find a cloud provider where this wasn't the case.

I know we've said it before, but many of us are happy to chip in for more memory. It's not worth your time to optimize anything that can be solved for $22 a month.

Like last time's slowness, I am not seeing the current slowness. I'm not sure how that can be if it is a server load issue. Unless I mostly visit the site when it is quiet. Though I'm not sure that is true as I tend to visit the site a good half dozen times a day between 07:00 GMT and 20:00 GMT.

I'm finally seeing some slow downs, I don't feel so left out now

Ok, this irritated me enough today that I bumped RAM up on the VPS to 1gb total. Won't have time to look at optimizations for a while, so I'll let money fix the problem for now. This should hopefully help, as there is now enough RAM for the entire DB to sit in, and still leave room for my mail server and other processes on the box.

Actually, initial loading has been fine for me for the last few days.
Occasionally, though, after posting something the refresh never manages to get back to the thread. The page just sits on the editor page. The posting *does* occur, though.

Is that virtual (rented) RAM, or physical (capital) RAM?

Virtual ram.

Thanks for taking care of us all, Tom!
And let us know when you'd like us to pitch in and help cover the costs.

Cheers

-ml

Tom, I don't know about everyone else, but that seems to have fixed the issue entirely on my end. I can now jump around to any part of the site with zero lag time. Well done!