I wonder if some of this sluggish forum business can be laid at the door of two major carriers having troubles. AT&T and S3 Networks. I’ve been in our server room when something like that happens to us. All the server activity lights, normally flickering cheerfully, go full on. Less fun to watch is some of our switches collapse when that happens, making the problem vastly worse everywhere else.
Good, robust health tends to ripple around the word…but so does massive failure.
Koz
I’ve been paying attention to this and it’s only slow at first connection. It’s like the first time connecting, it has to go out with a shovel and hand-dig a connection to me. After the pathway is dug and the dirt is all neatly piled, it works fine.
I can hear the Systems Operators screaming “DNS PROBLEMS!”
Koz
I still think it’s a DNS registration problem. If you ping audacityteam.org you get…
208.113.219.152
If you surf to that IP number, you get…
Site Temporarily Unavailable
We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this.
error id: “bad_httpd_conf”
So the web site DNS registration is messed up and the pathway has to error time out before it actually connects.
Koz
I concur with Koz - the forum has gotten very slow to load on the first connection. This has been happening consistently for around two weeks or so now.
WC
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a similar issue, but only on one day and it’s been OK here since then. (UK - Midlands)
Is your browser set to save cookies? Do you use auto log in?
I spoke too soon. I’ve been getting a “Network Timeout” error for the last 10 minutes.
Yeah, see? There are new, major chunks of time when the forum just isn’t there, and it takes its own sweet time to connect when it is.
This is so “I’ve seen this movie before,” because I set the DNS service wrong on one of our IP videoconference systems and it did the same thing. It cheerfully charged down the wrong pathway, realized its mistake, threw it into reverse, feathered the engine, carefully backed out, then went down to the right IP number.
It always connected, but it took its own sweet time to do it. Meanwhile the other systems were all…
GO [one potato, two pota…] CONNECT.
Koz
Loading the site fore the first time is still slow - but I also note two other activities that take an awfully long time to load: the login and logout pages. Logout is painfully slow sometimes )to the extent that I often just close the window after clicking on the logout button).
WC
It’s been bothering me that I’d seen this behavior somewhere else. Then I got it. This is how a machine acts when you have to wait for the hard drive to spin up. The first time is agony, and then it’s very sprightly after that.
Come back in ten minutes and you get to wait again.
Koz
You seem to be getting this problem as a regular feature, but I don’t (“touching wood” as I type 
), so I don’t see how the problem can be directly to do with the forum hardware or software.
I’ve been paying attention and I log in from different machines all hours of the day and night. Any minute now I’m going to time it and see how long it takes to drop out. Another possibility is to try logging in from two different machines at the same time and see if it delays each time. My fuzzy impression is that it doesn’t. Any activity from this corner of the world (in which it’s pouring with rain) is enough to wake up the system.
Koz
I’ve noticed a difference is that I do not generally log out, and I have Firefox set to log in automatically. Also, I am on broadband and my IP address does not change very often.
I am wondering if the slowness to connect that you are experiencing is due to the forum checking for banned IP addresses (of which there are now quite a lot).
I’ve also noticed that the amount of spam has gradually decreased over the last few months, which could be that the IP blacklist is starting to be effective, but perhaps the downside of an extensive blacklist is the slow connection that you are experiencing.
Do you think it is worth contacting the forum administrator directly regarding this?