I think you've pretty much nailed the BB server issues, Kitty. Using Amazon's Cloudserve, the 503 timeout messages suggest the BB is still on Jarrod's home server that's connected to the edge of the Cloud on the cheapest connection he can subscribe to, rather than actually being hosted on a Cloud server. If his host server can't properly and promptly respond with both the web page info to be delivered and all the Google Adserver stuff to go along with it that he's subscribed to (in order to help generate revenue) then it times out and we get the 503 error from Cloudserve. The Google servers soon remember all these 503 errors and start giving an immediate 503/504 error even though other browsers can occasionally still get through. I notice that the BB server ping response itself is typically 13 msec, which is perfectly fine, while a traceroute has a number of timeouts. It's getting the whole web page assembled and delivered to us within the timout period that's the main problem.
I think this means the BB server needs one, actually more of the following: a faster host server, a more expensive Cloudserve account with a longer timeout, choosing to cut back on the sise and number of requested Google Adserve ads to be displayed, more efficient web coding, or altering the task priority within the host server as Jarrod likely has other web applications running on it. It's almost as if the BB is strictly a background task on his server, which wouldn't surprise me.
No matter what, there's way more to the story here than people continually blaming Google for all of the recent BB problems. I wrote Jarrod some time ago about this asking what's going on and haven't received a reponse. No question this is a low priority in Jarrod's world and there's no revenue worth discussing to justify making improvements. I fear the BB has long been on it's last legs with only a few dozen of us regularly particpating.
In recent weeks I've had to resort to using a bare bones old version of Win IE (a Win 7 Explorer version) in order to get more than a 50% success rate of calling up a post, also depending on the time of day, although within the last 3-4 days things seem to have notably improved and I can occasiuonally get through with Chrome under Windows. I'm thinking Jarrod may be doing a bit of tinkering this long weekend, so let's all cross our fingers for some long needed improvements no matter how many ads get delivered.
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Dave -still with 940's, prev 740/240/140/120 You'd think I'd have learned by now
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