404 NOT FOUND
That’s what I’ve had for the last 4 posts!
There is obviously an overload problem somewhere in the system. I’ve noticed that page generation times and actual transmission times often don’t correlate well.
I did some approximate timings on my access direct to pages, typically to a most recent post in a topic from the list of most recent posts. The trends appear to be reasonably consistent.
Often it takes about half a second or more to connect to the server, (ie the whirly wait symbol reverses once the server acknowledges the contact), and then the server will generate the page and send it out, but the page generation time and the arrival time bear little relationship to each other, for example the last couple of pages I looked at claimed to have have generated in less than a second, but took the best part of half a minute of clockwise whirly to arrive.
Because of the slowness I tend not to frequently reload the list of most recent posts, I find that usually (but not always) take the longest (implying the server is working hard). I’ll not refresh it until I’ve worked through a few using the back arrow on the browser to look at the previously loaded list several times. Also when I’ve finished reading those of immediate interest I always tag the mark all as read flag to clear the history to minimise the length of the list.
By contrast a forum page at Amazon is usually so quick to arrive from click request that the whirly almost does not have time to appear. But then of course Amazon has an almost unlimited server farm and gigantic bandwidth.
I’m wondering if our forum is being spammed by more and more ever faster and more attentive web-crawler bots, maybe because the website is so tasty with lots of flag words attracting them.
Is it possible to ration their time on the server? Or maybe set up a gateway to prevent repeat visits too quickly or limit the number of simultaneous visits from a single IP?
I’m not being critical, because I’m a great fan of this website, and I’m only trying to be helpful, but I also feel frustrated and apologise because I don’t know enough about managing web host servers to be able to offer proper useful advice.
I wish everyone working on this the best of luck and hope they can beat the bots into submission.
Just want to reiterate as it has been lost in this thread that I am continuing to look into this and what can be done to help improve things.
We thank you 
Dropped you a message with some thoughts, maybe won’t help but never hurts.
No doubt it’s become extremely slow over the last week or so. I’m on fibre and this is the only site that gives problems. I’ve also been getting 503 errors when I try to load a different page.
JS
There’s another load of background jobs running on the server tonight so things will be worse while this happens, and availability may be intermittent. Hopefully the end result will be positive though.
I can get on this morning, couldn’t last night, so that is a positive.
Feedback.
Working well for me today.
Pages are reasonably quick to load.
Definite improvement over the last few days.
Much better this morning.
Being a ‘techno-thickie’, I have no idea what has been done or by whom, but it seems to have made a great improvement - thank you.
Chris Phillips
Much better so far today
Thank you for your work on the system, much better now.
Many thanks for all the hard work! A good speed now, even on my 1.2mb piece of copper cable!
Thanks for all the your work, a lot better now
Thanks. Much, much, much better!
Feedback - Thank you! Well done. It’s working much better today.
JS
Is it just me, or is anyone finding it slow again and getting the “404 not found”?
Yes earlier I gave up and went elsewhere
Speedy ish now.
I can get onto the OC Forum site OKish but logging a post seems to take a–g--e–s.
It’s dire tonight, spends ages trying to load then comes up with a 404 error
It came up with a 404 error after I posted the first line
Keeping an eye on this – it seems ok for me just now but will see what happens over the next few hours
Edit: test edit
Edit 2: Posts seem fine for me too, but as above, will monitor.