ECF Forum down?

[David Gilbert]

Hooray for Safari. Everything working fine for me, although yesterday it was running slow.

[David Sedgwick]

Thank you for the tip. I too have just managed to access the ECF Forum using Safari when I couldn't with other browsers. However, even Safari was pretty slow.

Whatever view you take on the merits of the recent flame war, I would hope that everyone would agree that it's pointless for the ECF Board to encourage people to post there if those who would like to do so can't.

After the recent spate of activity, there have been no posts so far today.

[Carl Hibbard]

Hooray for Safari. Everything working fine for me, although yesterday it was running slow.

It's an intermittent load issue they are having so browser makes no difference .

[MartinCarpenter]

Are they actually getting denial of service attacks or something, or is it just a very slow server? The budget must be tiny of course. I can't imagine the normal traffic to their stuff being precisely overwhelming

[Carl Hibbard]

Are they actually getting denial of service attacks or something, or is it just a very slow server? The budget must be tiny of course. I can't imagine the normal traffic to their stuff being precisely overwhelming

Not sure but expect it's my fault.

We continue regardless...

[Bill Porter]

I suspect the server budget is £0.

There are faster free hosts and less than £5/month hosts are much faster than the ECF host.

[Roger de Coverly]

I can't imagine the normal traffic to their stuff being precisely overwhelming

There's traffic when the British Championships are taking place and to the grading site of course when new grades are published. The performance over the past few days does seem to have been more erratic than normal. It's not their hosted forum, the main home page has been sluggish.

[Carl Hibbard]

I suspect the server budget is £0.

There are faster free hosts and less than £5/month hosts are much faster than the ECF host.

Not strictly true Bill it costs around £40 a month here to bring you the performance you are used too.

[Bill Porter]

I suspect the server budget is £0.

There are faster free hosts and less than £5/month hosts are much faster than the ECF host.

Not strictly true Bill it costs around £40 a month here to bring you the performance you are used too.

Sorry I wasn't clearer.
By 'ECF' I was referring to the English Chess Federation Forum host.
Even cheap paid hosts generally (from memory) guarantee around 99.8% uptime. They can sometimes take a second or more to load a page like this ( rather than the fraction of a second for English Chess Forum ) but are still much better than the English Chess Federation Forum host.

[Michael Farthing]

Hmmm. My former free host could boast uptime of that order but that's of little use if the SQL engine kept failing (as it did). Uptime is not necessarily the same as everything working! And, of course, a system can be 'up' but simply overloaded. That was also the case - well after all it was free so it did attract a lot of customers. I now run everything from a machine at home and so far have 100% uptime.

[Note to Paolo who recommended the free host: No complaints. It taught me how to do a lot and got the site running].

[Michael Farthing]

I now get the message "Resource Limit exceeded" for the ECF forum, which is at least informative though somewhat amazing!

[Alan Kennedy]

I had a look at the pages regarding the banning of Carl. Found a post about Mike Truran agreeing with Roger de Coverly and then the site crashed. Presumably the two events are connected?

[Mick Norris]

I had a look at the pages regarding the banning of Carl. Found a post about Mike Truran agreeing with Roger de Coverly and then the site crashed. Presumably the two events are connected?

Absolutely, the next thing is a campaign to free the Worcester one