Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Howdy,
Is it just me or is the forum taking longer to load?
Perhaps becoming even more popular!
Has traffic increased?
Just curious...

Yes! I've been consistently "timing out" all weekend. It's happening on the wiki too, so I guess it's the host and not forum traffic. I gave up editing the wiki a few times because I'd lose edits when the page timed out after I'd submitted a change.

I've noticed that too.

It has seemed very sluggish the past few days for me, although tonight it seems to be much much better than it has been over the previous 3 or 4 days. I also have noticed a few server errors in the past few days when the page had seemed to be taking a particularly long time to load.

Traffic is about steady. Maybe the forum traffic is slightly growing.
I'm guessing it's mostly host issues since it's site-wide as jennypenny pointed out.
The forum database runs on SQL. I don't know whether database growth slows things down. I should think not.

It's slow for me. It returned a "failure to connect to database" type error over the weekend. I refreshed, and it was fine.
Maybe the site is being attacked?

Yeah... a bit slow and a few "Database" errors popping up...maybe the Retail Federation is hacking the site...after all we preach "Save...Don't Spend"...lol.

I've been getting the errors and slow performance also. For the last 5-6 days or so.
Bridge to engine room: we need more power!

I've had issues for a while, but just haven't said anything. Some days the forum times out. It's been weeks for me.

I think it's fixed.

I'm not getting a time out, but it's still much slower then other sites I go to. For some reason it's faster on my mobile.

Forum was running well yesterday, but has slowed again today.

Not slow at all.. and I am loading from up in the frozen plains of Scandinavia. I've lately been mostly reading on my iPad (borrowed). Could that be why? A browser issue that does not affect Safari users?

Really slow again.

Ditto, both mobile and IE9.

Very slow the last 2 days for me

Very slow today on safari, timing out...

seems to be working again

nevermind...ugh, I give up

The problem is that spambots (about 5 different ones) are hitting the account registration page every 2 seconds (1528 times in the last hour). This causes overload on the php server and the hosting company throttles the cpu on my account.
If anyone knows how to edit .htaccess to reject these asshats before they get to the php server and send them on their merry way, write me an email. I've already tried whatever solutions are easily google-able, so this needs help from an expert on Apache syntax.