^^ I have seen that, too, but more often what I find is that I can read some posts and reply, but thereafter the sluggishness appears. I did ask Brad about locking mechanism he's using because I have a feeling that there maybe some sort of resource contention behind this, such as a resource lock in a loop (not being released) causing a transaction timeout at another level.

Or it could be something else altogether, like a combination of things, and what fun that is.

Sorry, I didn't see the question. Record locking is done for writing to the database but is not needed for reading from it. There is normally an application lock for the 'concurrent users' meter in the footer of the page as this number is generated by the session manager, not the database. This has been disabled since the move to the new server for diagnosis reasons but it's obvious that function isn't the cause so both that and the visits counter will be re-installed on Sunday.

Are you using SQL Server?

No, MS Access.

I've wanted to convert for about six years now but never had the time, despite installing SQL on a previous server.

No, MS Access.

My eyes nearly popped out of my head with disbelief when I saw that.


Surely MySQL or similar could be used, like many other sites do.

Methinks this site may be pushing the limits of MS Access by now.

MS Access is good for 4GB and we aren't close to that. The version of SQL Server I had running was SQL Express 2005, which is basically a free version of SQL Server with a 4GB limit applied. It would be perfect if I had the time to install it on the new server, set it so it was secure (there's a different setup process to Access) and then migrate and test. It won't happen any time soon unfortunately.

Robbbert: MySQL, whilst I understand there is a version for Windows, is native to the Unix environment. I've always been a believer in keeping apps designed for Unix on Unix servers and those for Windows only on Windows servers. Most share that view for live services.

The thought that the database may be corrupted or overloaded isn't a new one and it has been tested under a different version of this site which never went live and worked fine. At this point in time I am still convinced that an ASP file on the site is the cause and simply contains a coding error. The time taken is simply because there's a lot of files to work through.

I am hoping that I can vastly reduce the size and complexity of the file I plan on working on this Sunday.

Talk about the database here reminded me to fix the open HTML tags in Pete's post in the Insurance thread. I've done this, applied some MS updates and rebooted the server - hence the brief outage that just happened.

Hope it all works out on Sunday.

Not sure if you saw my message elsewhere about unneeded /div tags in each page. Presumably they won't have an effect, but...

The tags should all be even Steven. A large chunk of code was "absent" due to the formatting error in Pete's post. Should be okay now, though any excess code is under review when I go over each of the site's files.

I thought the database size limit is 2GB, although it's not that aspect I had in mind.

If you are using IIS, then this article on diagnosing 500 type errors suggests some approaches that may be useful if you haven't tried them already:

http://windowsitpro.com/web-development/iis-troubleshooting-tips-and-tricks

Hope you get a win.

Just a reminder to everyone that I will be working on the site this morning and you may experience two or three short periods where you cannot access the site. All work will be done by about 11:00 NSW time.

GTC: The good news is that in the past I've combed through a few pages like that one and there were a few times when content on those pages brought me to a few pages here to check on things but all were in the clear unfortunately. Also, the database as it currently stands is only 202MB so we still have many years to go before headroom becomes a problem, and that's a good thing. About four years ago I went a bit further with this and split the database into two smaller ones. The one that stores the membership data and the forums (202MB) is separate to the one that takes care of site event logging, which is a bit larger at 756MB. This bigger one is refreshed every six months so it will never get so big that it can't handle things. Every December and June a copy of the logging database is archived and then the copy on the server is over-written with a blank one.

Whilst it is possible to store all content on the database, such as images and documents, I don't do this because if the database was ever corrupted there'd be a risk of losing everything on it.

Should be okay now, though any excess code is under review when I go over each of the site's files.

Firefox still says there's excessive /div tags. But if you're happy, then it's not a problem. Only trying to help.

I guess something has changed in the Home... About Us... menu line. I intuitively click on the position where Discussion Forums used to be and now I get the Safety Warnings page.

I did make a small.change there this morning. The announcement archive is now delinked as the front page forum is no longer with us. Believe it or not, I made the same mistake about an hour after the link was removed and ended up in the services directory.