I'm very sorry for the slowness of the website at the moment. We are aware of it and are doing our best to find the cause as quick as possible!

Hi David, what a relief, I thought it was my computer! Thanks, Jan
P.S. Times on posts are still showing as an hour later than they should, BTW

I've just seen errors similar to the following, several times in succession:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005' [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Communication link failure /forum/show_forum.asp, line 20

(The error and page referred to vary)

Are you using an ODBC connection to communicate between the website and the back-end database? If so, I would suggest switching to a direct connection string, as ODBC can cause problems, and reduce performance.

You might also want to check the physical connections between the server on which the website is hosted, and the one on which the database resides (if they're different servers; if not, you might want to consider making them different servers, because of the demands that SQL Server puts on the system).

Alex

Thanks for the suggestions Alex. A simple reboot seems to have improved things considerably for now.

Good, I'm glad to know someone is keeping an eye on this sort of thing.

David, can you do anything about those really annoying and distracting ? marks in diamonds that turn up quite often in place of things like quotation marks?

I thought that problem was resolved. I certainly haven't seen it for ages on anything that I've submitted.

Sandra

Oh! I spoke too soon. I've just uploaded a real mess onto Flash Fiction.

Sandra

£

<Added>

Happens with pound signs. Maybe others too.

Happens with speech and other punctuation marks as well.
Sandra