The site is very slow...

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Sometimes the pages refuse to display fully until i hit the 'cancel' button on Opera.

Very strange, suspect it's something to do with the ads...

Unfortunately I have to run the IE gauntlet then.

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cron jobs - you can look that up yourself.

Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems. Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administration, though its general-purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes, such as connecting to the Internet and downloading email.

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I'm starting to get the impression that the server is not configured optimally for a site as busy as this and that at times of peak activity it's running out of resources. Not disk space or bandwidth, but available database connection handles or something like that.

Sounds plausible..

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'received a invalid reply'

I get this message a lot, refreshing the page cures the problem.  

The grammar and punctuation are bloody shocking.

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Is that actually coming down the wire or from your browser?

It's gotta be down the wire.  Never happens on any other sites.   Btw i'm using the latest Opera.

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Is it still lagging badly where you are?

Seems fine at the minute...

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That would explain not being able to connect at all or the occasional extreme lag (which I've had in the past too), but not the various "VB database error" messages.

FWIW, these messages are pretty generic and not necessarily indicative of a problem with the database content since any error at all (including failure to connect in the first place) that is caught by VB will result in this page being shown.

VB is a bloody horrid system anyway.  Shame.

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Received a invalid response.

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My IP address has been blocked etc,  message sent to webmaster.

Is this anything to do with the ongoing issues??

Starting to get annoying now quite frankly.

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Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@amiga.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at amiga.org Port 80


meh.