The Recent Outage

The website was not working this morning when I checked. I believe the outage began around 11 PM EST Sunday night when the server was upgraded to PHP 5.3.9 by our webhosting company. I had requested the upgrade but had no control over when it might take place. I assumed PHP 5.3.9 would cause no problems because I use that version on my development machine.As soon as I noticed the problem this morning I backed off to PHP 5.3.3, and the website seems to be working properly now.Apologies for the inconvenience.--Percy

So what you’re saying is the PH level was off a bit.I have an excellent blend I make that might help.I assume you have a quality grinder. The mix is 3 parts Sumatra Black Satin with one part medium roast Columbian. I make sure to time the grind to finish just after the water comes to initial soft boil. That way the water has time to cool to 205^o. The grounds go into the carafe and the water hits the mix within 15 seconds of the grinding. Stir and steep as usual for 4 minutes, press and, well, you know the rest.The Sumatra is a bit acidic but tempered with the Columbian brings the nectar into a most wonderful balance. The full body, almost syrupy, complexity of the Sumatra comes through with full force along with that "recognition" of the Columbian without the PH being out of balance. And the aftertaste is to die for!Give it a try

Very dry.

Percy, You're not supposed to eat the grounds but soak them in the water and then just drink the water without the grounds. Of course the grounds sans water are going to be dry! Don't do that.

Percy,Are you using cURL or VBO as ancillary modules? I had read somewhere that people upgrading to the latest versions of PHP had issues if these modules were not also the latest version.

Hi Diomedes,I'm not using any ancillary modules. I don't know when I'll have a chance to investigate the actual cause of the problem. We were at PHP 5.1 before, so I'm pretty happy at 5.3.3 - getting to 5.3.9 isn't a priority. I don't know if anyone else can tell, but to me the performance seems a bit snappier now, which is what I was hoping. The next dBoard release will have bigger performance demands, so upgrading to PHP 5.3+ was important.

Thats what I like about this place! It evolves and yet it also has a Creator.

To me the performance has been very slow for the past few weeks.

Given that the various machines I use to access the site (two desktop PCs, one laptop PC, one Macbook Pro) are all receiving very good performance right now, we might have to consider causes other than the server. If it's just this site that's slow for you, but this site is not slow for anyone else, then that's pretty mysterious and I would have no answers. But let's start with the obvious question first: how fast does your machine render this: This is such a simple program that if it's not instantly then the server cannot be the cause.--Percy

After the outage it speed up for me. LOL its one of the fastest sites i visit now no load time at all while others may take a few seconds to load.

Instantly.The regular pages often take many seconds to load. I go to another website while I'm waiting.

I notice that you leverage the Zend framework. My suspicion is that you are seeing an improvement in speed due to the modifications the PHP community has done to Zend. When it was first made available in the earlier incarnations of PHP, it was notoriously performance-poor.

Okay, let's try an experiment. Disable Javascript and then check if there's a positive impact on performance. If you're not sure how to disable Javascript then just let me know which browser you're using and I'll explain.

I had Javascript disabled for about an hour. I'm on a public computer at the Library so I had to turn it back on or the next poor sucker who uses this machine will think the whole Internet has stopped working. I didn't notice any particular change in performance.

Hmmm, okay. Are all pages slow, or just some pages? For example, is the Rules link (top menu bar) as slow loading as a page of messages?If they're both slow then I'm out of ideas.