Those "extremely high load" messages..

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OK, I don't get it.. it seems to happen independently of how many people it lists as being online now. I've seen it pull the "try again in a few minutes due to extremely high load" thing when there were only like 350 people on, and seen it work perfectly fine when there were over 500 on. Does it take those few minutes to re-allocate server space or bandwidth or something? Or is WP on a shared server so that it depends what the other sites on the same server are doing? *scratches head* really, I'm not complaining.. I mean, it's annoying when that happens, but it's not exactly unusual for a website to get overloaded. What's bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be a pattern to it.. Can somebody please tell me why it actually does that when it does that?

Its because the site only has so much bandwidth. When there is a bunch of people looking at a ton of things, it fills it up quick. Think of ti this way. There are 30 people waiting to get into the theater. If they go 1 by 1, there will be no problems. But if they go 10 at a time, there will be less space per person and thus they wont get in as fast. Basically it happens when a bunch of people are requesting info from the server ( looking at a new thread and such).

Best way to elevate that is to purchase more bandwidth, which isn't exactly cheap, in fact it can be really expensive. Thus the ads and such on the sight ( ads = $ = ability to pay for the Bandwidth).

Yeah, I don't get this either. I'm a programmer, so I'm pretty familiar with capacity. It doesn't take much to power a (moderately large) forum site. A single server at a colo facility would do the trick easily. I just built and housed a server for a new site recently. The server was ~$3000 and the monthly colo cost is $80. For $3K you can get 8 cores, 16GB RAM, and an SSD to house the database. Database hard drive access is usually the weakest link in site responsiveness.

Of course, this is an established site, so it may still be running on fairly old equipment. It might be time for a site rewrite and new hardware.

I have not encountered the problem since Alex announced the upgrade (see his post, this forum); there are also times of when maintenance does occur that may contribute to a tax on the site resources.


M.

Maggie, it's very puzzling to me because sometimes I'll log on when all the USA are sleeping, and that makes the site barely in use, and it'll tell me there's too high traffic load... But I must admit that it's usually better when the USA are sleeping.