I hate to nerd everyone out, but the connection speed to the forum is just as fast on a 28K modem dialup connection as it is on our T1. Once you get connected it better on the T1, but not as it should be.
Working with zero knowledge of the network configuration at the hosting site, might I suggest that this could be a hardware issue?
Could it be an array missing members that can’t be recovered or a memory bank dead or dying? If the forum database(s) are striped across multiple drives or arrays or a memory bank on a RAID controller is bad, blah blah blah.......
Is this consistent with the intermittent nature of the problem?
I never appreciate it when somebody is a "Tuesday Morning Quarterback," to me, but I concur with Dwight. I've been away from large Internet based data bases for a number of years, but it sure looks like either the new software is not properly setup on the server, or the server is having a problem.
I've seen similar problems before, but like Dwight says, "with zero knowledge of . . . ," it is hard to pin point a problem. The way it has acted for the last several days, I think we are probably headed for a crash, as it seems to look harder and harder for data, and places to put data. It seems to be getting consistenly slower, on average. It was faster right after some mods were made early last week. I'm assuming everything got reset and cleaned up at that time. I've seen Java/SQL driven databases do this when caches were not being emptied. But, it could certainly be any of the things Dwight mentioned. A crash might actually be good. Could the site be moved to a different server with the present host?
IMHO Pond Boss surely doesn't seem large enough, at this time, to warrant a dedicated server. I don't believe it is a bandwidth issue either.
But, if a dedicated server is required, I strongly believe that this site would be very good for advertisers. I read Pond Boss Magazine cover-to-cover in a few hours, and then glance at it a few more times until the next issue comes out. I look at the site many times every month. I believe we also have a lot of non-subscribers who would see these ads.
Ken
