Well you did ask.........................!!

Another timeout. Something is definitely wrong. These are becoming common now.

When first attempting to post, I of course am asked to log in. Having done that I receive the message that I have logged-in. At this point I am in a different tab to that in which I was viewing the thread. So I close the tab, and am returned to my original view of the thread, but in an apparently different tab to that in which I was viewing it before logging in.

In this (apparently duplicated) original view, I click for the second time the new post button, and this time get the post composition window and associated options. I copy and paste my pre-compiled post from my text editor (Gedit) into this window, click the preview button, and check the post. When OK, I click the submit button immediately below the preview window.

Normally, I get the message that the new post has been recorded, and, after a short delay, the thread re-appears with the new post at its end. To get back to the 'users currently online' page from here, however, I have to close the tab and then click on the original tab in which I first started viewing the thread, and then click the back button in my browser.

At around 7:30 AM today I posted to the topic 'NSW Power Sell or not?', but even though I got the 'new post recorded' message, when after the short delay the thread came up again, my new post did not appear. Knowing this problem has been occurring, I did not attempt to resubmit, but closed the tab and went back to the original tab, clicked back to the 'discuss' page, then moved through the index and viewed the thread. My new post was there!

No error message came up at any stage. I am using Mozilla Firefox under Ubuntu Linux 7.10.

Hope the detail is of some help as to where this problem is arising.

Graham or Dewi,

From my end, posting these last few days has been "quicker" than I have experienced over the last few weeks, without the error messages I should add.

Any feedback from your end?

Hi Graham and gang - I had been feeling smugly immune to OLO's server and database woes, but I just had a post disappear into the ether. Fortunately I could recover it by clicking the back arrow.

The message I got was:

Server Error
Incident number 107-0509
Staff have been notified of the incident

(which means this post is probably superfluous!)

Anyway, it posted OK on the second attempt :)

Last night I rolled out a fix for the comment posting slowness & timeouts, which looks like it is working.

(The issue was related to the way Microsoft Data Access Objects cursors behave on large tables: the article comments table has reached the critical size where our old method stops working reliably, and causes a lot of server load.)

This should mean we also see improvements in general site speed, which has been patchy some days (like yesterday).

Those of you experiencing problems recently will have noticed that the crash messages have been replaced with a red/grey box which just supplies you with an "incident number", and more importantly sends a stack of technical details to us here. If you quote your incident number when talking to us about a fault, we can reliably see what technical details correspond to your specific issue.

This recording/reporting facility has given us a lot more information about some other problems, such as occasional timeouts on the front pages, which will be addressed soon.

I'm sorry it has taken so long to sort out the article comments problem - unfortunately the problems have come in threes, as we've had two hard drive failures in the office in the last 3 weeks.