We often discover when the site is really slow that it is one of three things:

1. Lots of traffic meaning lots of people downloading lots of stories. Some people open a window for every chapter in a multi-chapter story and try to open or download them all at once. Some other people use various sorts of scripts to download a lot of stories at once. We've actually banned the country of Moldova from accessing BC because of so many people with Moldovan IP addresses doing this. It normally isn't that much of a problem but it seems that people WILL do this just when the site is busy with 500 to 700 regular visitors on site in the middle of the American afternoon and evening. We've done what we can about this.

2. There's some kind of connection problem. We have people who check connections speeds for us and sometimes, the site is quick in Amsterdam and slow in Los Angeles, or the other way around. No real idea why, except occasionally it turns out to be a DDOS attack, not necessarily aimed at us; sometimes it is just paralyzing a trunk line somewhere because someone is mad at British Petroleum, the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, or some guy in his mother's basement in Upper West Peoria who just likes to piss people off on the internet for shiggles.

3. We have a lot of unfinished database requests piling up, possibly because of #1 above. We can actually go in and order the database to take no new requests until it has finished or times out all the old ones before continuing normal service. This is one that we can actually do something about all tho, often by the time we notice it, it's already clearing up.

4. The server is down for some reason; doesn't actually happen that often and usually in the early morning hours my time. We reboot when we find out.

None of the four above have really changed since the update, tho what we call the 500 problem does exist. But that doesn't really slow things down, it just fails to return a page.

Hugs,
Erin

We took the site down for a couple of hours, blocked some security holes and retuned the database and made a couple other small changes. Hope this keeps us at least at serviceable speeds, we're still working on things so if the site goes down for half a minute or so it is probably because we restarted the database or something.

Hugs,
Erin