I don't get any errors clicking on Buffistas Home. That's been pretty consistent.

Sadly, I have gotten a couple of the errors loading the home page.

Still getting the error at 7:24 a.m. on the east coast. Man, the posting volume is just brutal this time of day.

Man, the posting volume is just brutal this time of day.

Snerk.

I get the error message in Mozilla and IE, at completely random times of day, with random frequency. It would seem that it's not a browser issue.

However, that's all I've got in the way of mildly useful info, so I'ma go back to lurking now.....

Again, to repeat what has been said, it is unlikely to be browser specific. (That is this problem probably has nothing to do with what browser you are using.) And, as has also been said, it is unlikely to be specific to the activity you are doing. Whether you are reading a thread, posting or whatever should not affect it.

1) If it is a spider, then it has zero to do with regular user activity.

2) We see this happening during comparatively light activity - lighter than other times when it does not happen. This means that if it is not a spider, but in the code or host configuration, it must be some specific type of connection is causing a problem or not being released. At this point the code has been gone over pretty throughly, so it seems that spider is still the most likely, with host the second most probable, and obscure code problems still not impossible, but definitely third in probability.

Yeah, I agree with Gar. I don't know what we can about a spider, but we can ask if they've changed any settings on the server.

(After having first post eaten) Because bored now.

I just got errors twice while trying to connect to my Message Center.

I'm having a hell of a time reading anything, much less posting.

Is anyone else having this much trouble? And do we have any information from our hosts as to what's causing the connections not to close?

I'm not having enough trouble to make posting or reading difficult, but I am getting the error message fairly often.

It comes and it goes, for me. Three errors in a row, and then no problems for an hour.

I was reading something else and remembered that this same problem happened 3 weeks ago. Back before, our server usage problem was such that it was invisible until the number of open connections racked up enough for us to go into the red WARNING section of the dial. And it was, like, every 3 months, or something like that: build up, crash, lose database bits, restart (and reset the connection counter to 0), and we're fine for another 3 months.

So, this pattern is different -- for one thing, we haven't been taken completely offline at any time, to my knowledge -- but we are experiencing a build-up of errors server-usage-related errors, a peak, and then a slow die-off of those errors. Every 3 weeks, so far, since the code got adjusted and the people Kristen talks to installed the Magic Doohickey that times out connections.

I'm just thinking out loud, trying to help construct this all in my mind, in hopes it's a help. What is there about the installation of the Magic Doohickey, or the change in code, that could perpetuate the cyclical problem, on a smaller time- and disaster-scale? I mean, as disasters go, I like small ones, but I prefer no ones.

The current behavior is slightly different than last time, because we don't appear to be losing post numbers as we did last time around. Thanks for small favors.

When I get some time tonight I'm going to go over to the test site and bang away to see if I can get the error to crop up there. It didn't show up there last time, but who knows.