disappointing......

"We had a problem processing your entry:

The Unified View is database-intensive and the database has become

very busy. Please try again later. Meanwhile, the individual forums

(listed on the Forums Page) are still accessible (0.67).

Please back up using your browser, correct it, and resubmit your

entry.

Thank you."

On several occassions over the past couple of days, I have received

the above response when trying to access the Unified View of Forums.

I find this rather disappointing when the majority of traffic on the

forum sites appears to be from people who do not see fit to support

the site financially. As a subscriber, I feel that those who pay

should be prioritised over the non-paying site members.

I acknowledge that some non-payers contribute far more than I do in

terms of experience and advice but those contributors deemed worthy

are identified by the appropriate icon and could be prioritised as

well. The site still needs financial support though. You can't

upgrade the servers without cash!

This is purely a question of benefits to subscribers since it has not

diminished my enjoyment of this fabulous site.

I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on this matter.

I don't disagree with you, Rick, but when you get that message it is because the database server is overloaded. If we prioritized things for subscribers, the best we could do would be to have dedicated web servers for them. But that wouldn't help, because when there is a bottleneck, it is the database server. The webservers always have plenty of capacity for everybody. And I wouldn't know how to prioritize a subscriber's database query on the database server.

Fortunately most of the time we don't have that problem, as the DB server is running at around 50% to 60% capacity. As a matter of fact, lately the only time we have a database bottleneck is at around 9:00 PM at night, which is weird, because that isn't a peak time.

I've noticed now for the last couple of weeks that the database gets choked up at around 9:00PM every night for about 10 to 15 minutes. I have not yet figured out why. I think it is a search engine robot or something similar that is regularly hitting the site every night and isn't well-behaved, but I can't find the culprit in the logs, though I've looked.

Thanks for your prompt response, Brian.

Cheers