Painfully SLOOOOOOOOOW

[Mike]

So what? We are paying for a service that we aren't getting !! We should ask for a refund or to be moved to a different server.

[Rick]

It's usually (almost always?) the fault of the mySQL server machine, as far as I can tell. That's a shared resource, and I've no idea how many other websites use the same server, but the number's probably large. If one (or more) of those other sites gets heavily loaded (by fair means or foul) then at some point the server stops coping with the load, and all the websites it's doing the database stuff for suffer...

...and PowWeb forum reports suggest this problem affects all the mySQL servers at some time or other, so switching server isn't something that makes any real difference.

[Rick]

Anyone else find chunks of the web including the OAS sites painfully slow or impossible to reach earlier this evening? I'd have blamed PowWeb, except that it seemed a bit more widespread from here...

Things came back to life around 10:30pm(-ish)...

[Rick]

*sigh* We're being struck intermittently by another bout of extreme webserver slowness. This is, apparently, something a number of PowWeb-hosted sites are experiencing. Apparently PowWeb are working to fix the problem...

[JohnP]

Yep really crap again... isn't there a more realiable server we can use....?

[Mac]

well. its 21:42 and i've jsut caught up on 11 unread topics, its taken about 15 mins for all of the pages to load, and most of them dont have either the correct colour, backgrounds or pictures.

see attached screen grab.  Its not IE7, as every outher site i am looking at is working fine.

Even the OAS main site is the same.

even refreshing them didn't change them.

[Carole]

Yep, getting the same as Mac.

Carole

[Mike]

Last 2-3 weeks it is has been getting worse for me too. At times I find the site unusable. Rick when does our subscription with PowWeb expire as I recommend we try someone else. They seem more concerned with quantity than quality nowadays.

[JohnP]

Still not acceptable though in 'this day & age'... I vote with Mike we should look for someone else...

[Rick]

I've shifted the discussion about alternative hosting providers to Behind the Scenes.

http://forum.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/index.php?topic=3618.0