Free Republic's Technical Problems

[per loin]

Of late, FR seems plagued with slowdowns. Is this a temporary problem or is some limit being approached?

[Unknown Freeper]

Things have been better for the last five minutes or so.

[kitkat]

Thank you, John. We ALL know the frustration of network computers.

[BluH2o]

I'm disappointed, everytime something significant happens, I get 'booted' off. What's going on?

This happens with distressing regularity on FR when big stories break ... must be all those "lurkers" out there jumping on board to get the latest most salient/viable intelligent opinions available on the internet. However, that isn't happening because the regular FReepers (moi-11/98) can't hook up ... grrrrrrrrrr!

[Unknown Freeper]

I've gotten this when I've clicked on a couple threads

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

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@freerepublic.com 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.

[FourPeas]

BTDT. Thanks for your hard work.

[MileHi]

BUMP so I can find this

[rdb3]

It means that a server is receiving a massive influx of requests within a very short span of time. Look at it like an oil funnel for your car. Yeah, you can pour quite a bit in the big cone portion, but it flows slowly into your engine when it comes out the spigot side, right? In fact, you can make the cone overflow while it's draining at the same time.

Same thing here. The requests represent the oil in the cone of the funnel. FR's bandwidth pipe is the spigot portion of the funnel.

That make sense? My wife says that I geek people out sometimes.

[Cool Guy]

Before you hit the Bottle, can you tell us what happened? Thanks.

[alaskanfan]

You beat and I'll pry!

[FourPeas]

Geek people out? Nah, couldn' be. Your wife would have appreciated the time my geek husband tried to explain ISDN to his untechnical 75yo parents. For the life of me, I'll never understand why he tried.....

[Russell Scott]

My guess, American hating hack attack. They can't stop good (Christ and His perfected church) from taking over the planet, which we are so close to occuring I can almost taste it.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I thought the beta was dead.

What happened to the Yahoo message board?

[HoustonCurmudgeon]

I believe the Technical problems on Free Republic are caused by a small group of lawyers who refuse to pay their Beer Debts.

That's odd. I have it on good authority that it's caused by thirsty old farts. I wonder who's right?

As we both work in Houston, I suggest we just step out on the street in front of your building and ask the first one hundred people we see "who do you trust, lawyers or guys who have spent their entire life in the oilfield?"

We can either bet a case of beer on it or I will settle now for two six packs of Heineken.

[Dog Gone]

You mean this one?:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/freerepublic2/

[Bella_Bru]

It's working! Allow me to buy your the first round. Who is taking second round? The man deserves it!

[CWRWinger]

I feel for those on dial up.

The best Bell South can do for the dial-ups here is (14.4). Living in the country, there is nothing but a skinny little wire for a phone line out here. No cable, no DSL, no satellites, either (just kidding on that last one).

Sometimes it takes 8 minutes to log onto the ISP and FR is always slow. Actually, I've only noticed a slight slow down from the usual slow.

[Miss Marple]

John, for heavy news days, like today, or the day they arrested the snipers, is there a way to cut down on the load so that we could still get access? Could the non-news forums be de-activated with a note that it is an emergency? Does freepmail take up space that we could temporarily sacrifice? How about blocking lurkers from access until things slow down a bit?

I am not a computer expert, nor do I play one on TV. I am just kvetching because this has happened twice this week when I REALLY wanted to know what was going on. Thanks for your work and your patience!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I can't get to the Beta at all!

Is it only for the Texans?

[Publius6961]

The last 5 minutes, things have been (almost) normal
5:05-5:10 PDT)
Been having trouble accessing all day today.

[Salvation]

There was a thread about major servers being attacked by some mysterious foe last Monday, I think.

The timing to me suggested only one thing -- alQaeda.

Was there any positive feedback on the actual cause of the ISP servers going down