What has happened to make FreeRepublic so slow?

Vanity Question | 01/24/2009 | Swordmaker

[Swordmaker]

I have noticed that FR has become abysmally slow in response and page loading in the past day or so. I've noticed a few responses in the threads where other Freepers mention in passing the slowness. I checked it on several of my client's locations. Everywhere I brought up FR was slow.

Sometimes takes up to 30 seconds to load the browsing pages. Moving to a topic, is a bit faster but not much.

I also noticed last night that doing title searches that used to bring up pages of responses now only bring up less than a page.

John, Jim, what's going on? Are we being hit by a Denial of Service attack?

[Jim Robinson]

We knew, er, I knew. Couldn’t get in touch with John. He’s out of town, but finally got back to me. Didn’t take him very long to find and fix the problem once he got online.

[tubebender]

Thanks for the update and my thanks to John also...

[US_MilitaryRules]

Oh that is to funny! ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Brad’s Gramma]

and kicked off a bunch of search engine spiderbots that were killing us.

AHA! Good job, John!

[Brad’s Gramma]

Couldn’t get in touch with John.

Slacker.

Him. Not you.

Sir. :)

[Brad’s Gramma]

Shhhhhhhh.....don't tell anyone. I single handedly shut down a thread, and I didn't even need The Thread Hi-Jacking Crew! WHOO HOOO ME!

[Girlene]

I really thought it was just me:)

Same here, nahanrac!

[JudyinCanada]

Being technologically stunted, I don’t really know what it all means, but it sounds pretty impressive. Hats off to John...and thanks for the post!

[Uncle Ike]

Glad FR is back up-to-speed...

Just a minor nit to pick — and maybe this one is ‘just me’...

It appears that about every third time, or so, the FR main board (and sometimes the ‘pings’ page) loads with improper/incomplete formatting....

Anybody else noticing this??

[bethybabes69]

FR is loading ok for me today.

The only significant latency for me today is the hop over the pond with NTT networks, and all subsequent NTT Network hops (mostly California).

So, all's good taday from Britain, there's latency, but it's not so bad.

Be worthwile doing some comparisons with people from other parts of the US, especially latency via other nodes of NTT.

I wonder if FR traffic is getting cached somewhere on NTT . . . . . /conspiracytheory!

[ViLaLuz]

I noticed yesterday, too, that the titles displayed on the page were an unusual dark blue color. It’s back to normal today.

[SouthTexas]

Clicking right along this morning. :)

[combat_boots]

There are reports of an increased number of firewall hits on personal computers.

[Jim Robinson]

It sure is. Looks like one or more of the adjustments John made yesterday cleared up some of the problems that have been plaguing us for months.

[SouthTexas]

Do tell him thank you for me. Patience is not one of my strong points. :)

[Revolting cat!]

Is it still slow?

[Swordmaker]

Is it still slow?

N

o

t

a

n

y

m

o

r

e