Forum outage 6/7/2026

[xantia_v6]

Sorry for the forum misbehaving and going off-line for a couple of hours today.

The problems was a database software upgrade which went slightly awry....

I think that everything should be OK now, with no data loss, but respond here if you see any error messages from the forum software.

[mickthemaverick]

Looking good to me so far

[xantia_v6]

I think that I need to take the forum offline for an hour or two for some offline maintenance.

I think that I will do this tomorrow morning 7/7/2026 about 07:00 UK time.

[xantia_v6]

The forum is back online after a clean restoration of the database. The search index is still rebuilding, but should complete shortly.

[Richard_C]

Sorry for the forum misbehaving and going off-line for a couple of hours today.

Thanks for doing as you do. It was worrying though - I posted a reply with a link, forum went down almost immediately, aaaargh, was it something I me myself did? Will I be banned ..... Not that I'm a pessimist or anything.

[xantia_v6]

I have had a couple of very slow posts. Is anyone else seeing the forum performance has degraded recently?

[mickthemaverick]

From hitting 'Submit' to it actually happening is definitely a bit slower, no other issues for me though!

[myglaren]

Not that I have found, in fact much better than a couple of weeks ago.

[xantia_v6]

I have an idea of why it may be a bit slower for posts to be made, but I will need to do some tests over the next few days.

[Richard_C]

Posting a reply takes a while, but saving an edit is instantanous if that helps your diagnosis.

(I often edit, my kbyord skliss and eyesight for close work are a bit erratic so I go back to crooct my mistakes

Real example, this took 9.15 seconds from submission to appearing, the edit to add this line was immediate. But honestly, no big problem, I remember the days of dial up with a beepy modem so anything less than drinking a cup-of-coffee is a modern miracle.

[xantia_v6]

That is consistent with my theory, which is that the word search indexer (which runs after post submission) is taking too much resource and slowing down the system. I discovered a bug in the word search indexer, which caused me to switch it to a different mode, which should have been faster, but is, in fact, slower.

There is a 3rd mode which will definitely be faster, but requires some work to implement on our system.

I will revert to the previous buggy version for now, as it causes less pain until I can configure something better.

[Paul-R]

I'm getting this scrap of code at the top of pages opened. This is on my phone but it's the same on my laptop.

[xantia_v6]

Is it happening constantly?

I have not seen it, but I think that it is related to the search indexing bug that I noted yesterday.

[mickthemaverick]

i am not getting it here.

[Paul-R]

Yes, constantly on both phone (Android, Chrome) and laptop (Win 10, Brave).