Housekeeping Note

April 13, 2007

As readers have no doubt noticed, the site’s been loading very slowly the past couple of days, which has been frustrating (for you and me).

I’ve talked to our hosting company, which assures me it’s not a server problem. We’re in the process of trying to identify exactly what’s causing the trouble — is there a webmaster and/or WordPress expert in the house? — and how to fix it.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Rest assured, we’re working on it. In the meantime, I’m going to keep on publishing items on a normal schedule.

I appreciate your patience. And now, back to the news….

Actually I need the site to be unavailable on occasion. Otherwise I’d get absolutely no work done here.

  • if it helps, when i open the page i hit the stop loading button while it sits there sputtering and then voila there’s the page, i of course dont know if this symptom means anything to a diagnostician or not

  • Probably not a server problem but a bandwidth problem. The server company will likely say, ‘oh no, you get 100GB of bandwidth,’ which may well be true, but the problem with that is you are only getting it through a straw! No point in having a lake of fresh water, if you can only drink it thru a straw!

    I checked your speed here — http://www.vertain.com/?sst

    Speed test results:

    URL: http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com
    The test timed out, as the page did not complete loading in 13 sec.
    You should definitely be concerned about your server’s speed.

    The other complication may be that other sites on the server are hogging all the CPU.

    I would suggest switching hosting companies, or getting a dedicated server

  • I ran a traceroute from my machine. Your provider should be able to read this and identify/fix the problem (this should have been the first thing they did).

    C:\tracert http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com

    Tracing route to thecarpetbaggerreport.com [63.247.129.126]
    over a maximum of 30 hops:

    1

  • Ok, the comment poster ate my traceroute report, where can I email it? It’ll show you where the hold up is.

  • Ms Carpetbagger here.

    Unfortunately, Brian, the server is fine. When we had problems last year they removed everyone else off the server to isolate us. And someone checked out the server stats and it is an awesome server.

    They mentioned to look for bots so I’ve just banned a couple and made a few more adjustments to robots.txt. We’ll see if that helps. If not, then I’m back to square one.

    We do need to update the site in various ways as we’re out of date, but that doesn’t explain why this is happening all of a sudden. So we are looking for WP experts — if anyone is interested, drop us a line.

  • Heraclitus,

    Like the plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” WordPress must be fed. Take the recommendation and copy your post before posting.

  • Well, at least I can stop applying percussive maintenence to my own computer to try and get it to go faster. Now if I can only figure out a way to get the dents out…. 😉

  • I know we had a problem recently at our site where a google ad had some problems getting to the appropiate image it wanted, and it ended up tanking everything else as it tried to get it. There is the possiblity one of your ads is hampering you. Try turning them all off, and do a couple of test loads to see if that helps.

  • “http://proxy.blogads.com/tfcfofobefmqijbofu/thecarpetbaggerreport/ba_as.css” is the file that won’t load, according to my activity viewer. I don’t know if that is of any help. maybe your proxy is what is holding things up?

  • Yesterday I read an interesting statistic — that one out of four computer users have physically assaulted their machines.

    Maybe there’s a solution there somewhere.

  • Ms Carpetbagger again.

    FYI, I did play around with the sidebar, trying to get it to load after the main content. That didn’t work, plus I’m not very good with the html/css stuff, so it was ugly.

    I’ve removed all external sources (blogads, google ads, amazon, paypal, etc). That doesn’t seem to help, but it’ll remain that way until we figure this out.

    By the way Heraclitus, our host said it is normal for the * to be like that, and agreed with us that the server is fine so it is elsewhere that’s the problem (like blogads). Now, if we could only figure out what exactly so we can fix it!

    Ah, the fun of website stuff and not being an expert. Plus having a busy full-time job that’s not site related. So happy it is Friday 🙂

  • mark #12!

    What the TFCFOFOBEFMQIJBOFUTFCFOFOBEFMQIJBOFU.

    That’s a ba_as evil furthermucker of a CSS.

    Definitely get the crowbar to that one.

    [No, seriously, I’m with The sister — could be I’m getting an evening this Friday. And, Best of Luck, however long it takes. We’ll be here.]

  • I’m with Sister and Goldilocks – the more time that the server is down and the longer it takes to download pages, the more work I get done!

  • Turns out the link in the header for the “evil furthermucker” was the culprit. Things should be golden now.

    Thanks for your patience, and sorry you’ll be less productive now 🙂

  • I always come here first and read all posts and last 2 days definitely noticed a slow down and was thinking it was my pc (because it’s not that slow). Glad you mentioned it so I now know what it is. Most sites wouldn’t have mentioned it because it’s kind of trivial but then CB is not most sites. You’ll get it but please don’t let it slow you down from posting ’cause this is the best site on the net.

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