Maybe I've been lucky - the site's been working perfectly for several days.

It has its moments. You can be lucky ... or not.

OK, 2nd try at this. Every time I do anything, the server freezes.

It's been a very bad day for error 500.

Login has been erratic for several days I did send an email at the time it totally died around 12:00 Hrs UTC.

I had a reply organised for posting when it all went awry. I saved it to word, will now post.

Okay, this is the plan for the rest of 2017:

1. Today I checked the session manager and all is well with it, so it is back online.
2. I have two more files to check before calling it quits on the review of the current website. After this there is nothing else to check.
3. If the errors don't go away there is nothing else I can do.
4. If point 3 remains I will build a new site from scratch but this work will not begin until after Christmas as there simply isn't the time to commit to it before then.

As mentioned the other day, I did find a 'smoking gun' that was causing a memory leak. It was on the site's main page so it was causing an error that would occur on any page. Fixing this has improved things but it is obviously not the only error and I am not sure why things have got worse in the last couple of days. That's the Internet and all I can do is apologise.

In two weeks I'll provide a final update on where things stand.

For the record: I haven't been able to connect all day until now. I don't recall it being that bad for quite some time, if ever.

So, a good run and then a train crash. Very odd.

I would consider the memory leakage has a similar effect as the Kernel leak that plagued a certain big, operating system maker. It eventually bogs everything up & the system gradually grinds to a halt, unless you get in early & reboot to clear it.

The factory computers running Unix never did that.

Thanks Brad for looking into it. After my previous post just above, it froze again. However I returned later and everything was fine, so I guess you may have rebooted.

The main problem earlier was I was able to read one reply then it froze trying to open a 2nd thread. Or, if I took too long writing a reply it had already frozen before I hit the "post" button and the post was lost.

^ same symptoms here, too.

The factory computers running Unix never did that.

I used to run FreeBSD here for a mail server and two DNS servers. Their kernels never went cafluey but they used to choke the hard disc with log files if a 'back door' called Sendmail wasn't disabled. In early versions turning Sendmail off didn't cause problems but in later versions it apparently did. Sendmail was the non-Windows answer to early versions of Internet Explorer, allowing hackers to play on the minds of the owner of the computer.

That's not the reason I gave FreeBSD away though. Overall it was a good operating system and required little maintenance and merely upgrading to the next version was easier than patching any known security issues.

I wonder what would have happened though, if Microsoft didn't abandon it's 9X versions of Windows. Windows ME was a royal disaster and not worth the marketing hype at the time. NT was always far superior in terms of stability but like old Unix-like systems it lacked the plug and play support it now has and it cost three times as much so people didn't go near it for domestic use.

It goes without saying that most computer users today would have trouble installing a product like FreeBSD or even the more hardcore OpenBSD. The installation processes of these still have defaults that a freshman can rely on but they aren't always the optimum settings. One of many examples is the partition structure. Most computer users don't know what a disc partition is and most likely don't really need to know. Windows installs these automatically and without the user realising it. Whilst there is the option of installing your own partitions on Windows (I have my own customised ones on both my laptop and this server [the latter, for security reasons]) it's not strictly necessary for most users and it's a decision best left to Windows unless the user has specific requirements.

Sadly, I've forgotten most of the mainstream Unix commands and would have trouble with running such a machine now. I'd have to give myself a refresher course.

The thing that amused me was that at the time at the end of the nineties there was an update to the hardware due to its running time, 24/7. at that point anything you could do with the latest computer at the time running windows, it could do faster with Unix even if it was on a 686.

Unix was much better for running the chemical reactions & associated feeds etc. You just could not have an unstable system.

It's pretty much what applies to anything really. Even though Unix-like operating systems are complex to novice users, they are a lot simpler than Windows. Even DOS was simpler than Windows and very stable. The place I work at was opened in 1998 and its original swipecard system had a terminal that ran DOS 6.22. It was rebooted once every couple of years and only for client software updates to add features. The OS was never touched. Security was fine because it wasn't connected to the public Internet.

A lot of the medical equipment at the time ran various flavours of Unix: HPUX, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and even Linux. Most of it was just command line stuff - no window managers because that is ultimately what lets down any OS. You can even get Windows Server as a command line OS these days, not that I worry about it. Having a GUI is my preference these days as arthritis prevents me typing at the speed I once did.

The quirks and foibles of various operating systems aside, this particular problem appears to reside in the application itself.

And I hope that Brad can ferret it out because it seems to be getting worse by the day.

Login is at it again. It actually only logged in after I changed to IE from Fire fox & chose "keep me logged in"? Which is what I don't want to do.

Is there a Malware / Virus program running on the system. I do get at least a couple of phone scammers a month & several would be infiltrators mailing in. It might help some of them if they actually learnt English. One moron's phone number left itself on the mobile, ....not clever.

Like him, it only takes one syntax error to bring things unstuck. It is hard to find ones own mistakes.

Marc

One moron's phone number left itself on the mobile

Scammers usually employ bogus caller IDs. Easily enough done.

My guess is that Brad checks the site for viruses, etc, pretty thoroughly.