What's going on with the hamsters?

what sort of outages did you notice? In and out? More than several minutes at a time? Site totally down or just slow?

Occasionally you get a 503, but mostly you get some static cache/mirror. You're no longer logged in, the latest posts are missing, and you can't interact with anything, plus it loads agonisingly slow.

This often happens for about 15 minutes, but this morning it seemed more like an hour.

Logging in took far longer than usual. Even going from one page to another is taking close to 10 seconds.

Occasionally you get a 503, but mostly you get some static cache/mirror. You're no longer logged in, the latest posts are missing, and you can't interact with anything, plus it loads agonisingly slow.

This often happens for about 15 minutes, but this morning it seemed more like an hour.

Yes, this. And it happened again this morning for about an hour.

Any better now?

Better? Maybe. Good? No. Hamsters? Yes.

It seems to happen at the same time of day. I'll check again in 13 hours...

Had a few connection to the site issues here, but they were swiftly replaced with "We're having some problems, try back later" messages.

There seems to be at least one hamster breaking out of his wheel. It seemed to take a few seconds getting to the site and to the login page. Not as bad as 2 days ago though.

So are the hamsters on strike? It's been slow or just plain not working. And that's been all morning.

It's weird. The site will take ages to transform to another page. Sometimes it'll 503, and sometimes it'll be instant. Half the the times the CDN decides to work or not, or I log out without reason. It's been like this the past few days.

i've been seeing this for a couple of days. The site hangs, and eventually you get the plain text "The site is temporarily down" message that usually indicates database connection issues.

It seems to come back after a while by itself.

Site is running like treacle for me today at least. Have to keep re-signing in too.

Site is running like treacle for me today at least. Have to keep re-signing in too.

If you're suddenly signed outduring those lagfest periods, trying to sign in won't fix it. The problem is that you're viewing a non-interactive cache of the site :(

Any chance this issue might be related to the hamsters serving malicious content? I'm just saying because that other issue with Avast popping up on here persists, too. Maybe the server is doing more than just serving the forums and putting in one or the other malicious URL at occasions. Maybe it's indeed serving a lot of other stuff (without your knowledge even). Pirate stuff or malware, or spam mails, or who knows what.

Michael: I realize that backing up the topics database, re-imaging the complete server, and restoring the topics database thereafter is a kind of no-fun task, and you guys probably have more appealing things to do.

But that malware thing has been going on for how long, almost three weeks? It looks like it most definitively is not a false positive either (nor am I the only one getting the alerts).
Personally, I'm not very much bothered since obviously my web scanner caught it, and in the mean time I have scripting completely disabled on the site just to be 150% sure. Insofar, I actually couldn't be bothered, apart from being unable to use the topic editors and vote buttons, and having to type BB code by hand.

But there's without doubt people who are downloading that content and don't even realize. Any chance of tending that issue, maybe that weekend?

I'm working on it.. hopefully the malware issue is gone for good.

I'm working on it.. hopefully the malware issue is gone for good.

It looks like you beat the hamsters into submission! Good job! I haven't had any issues for the past two days.

Yup, no malware alerts since a week, no "experiencing problems with site, try again in a few minutes" thing, and no waiting 2 mins for site to load since then. Well done :)