I have been observing lagging myself for a while now. I finally narrowed it down last night and began making changes. Unfortunately, these changes require doing things that can get in the way of normal useage of the site. I was up till 4 working on this. At the point I quit, I was almost there. Starting at around 10 AM CST today I found what seems to have fixed it. It very easy for me to monitor these problems as a user and as an administrator. All day I have had a process running that observes the performance of the server. About 3 times today, it began acting up. But each time, the problem was due to actions I was making behind the scenes that would cause everything to be in a state of waiting. The last of these was about 1.5 hours before the message I am responding to here.

My monitoring software shows no abnormality. However, it could be more complex than it is to get an accurate picture.

In thinking about how to respond to your message, I thought of a way to let power users such as yourself help me with diagnosis of trouble. If I can do it without affecting performance in any perceptible way, I'm going to add a benchmark for specific users. This will record the point of your click to the point of terminating the transaction. Then I can average the response time and get a clear picture of what actual users are seeing as far as speed of server response.

As for bandwidth, that's not the issue, although at 4 PM it could be since that's a peak period. I have to get my statistics generator going again to see if we have a run on users lately which could be the case. All images are passed between 4 networks, though, so I doubt this is the issue. Also an image will load AFTER the rest of the page loads, it does not effect the present page load, but actually is its own page load of sorts.

We have 4 networks and 6 computers involved in this site now. I don't think the problem is anything but a technical issue on the main server which I think I have solved or am very close to solving. So where I stand now: I think it's running extremely well at present. But I'm not trustung this notion and I am watching VERY closely for trouble indicators.

-JSBB
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'89 740 ... somewhere near 210,000miles.