hey guys. sorry to hear about the problems.

there was a brief DNS issue on Mon from 10:30-11:00 am through the gateway that our hosting provider uses. this was quickly resolved.

first of all, the site does not slow down because of user quantity or bandwidth. we have 2 terabytes of bandwidth available, and have never had or experienced a server load of greater than 0.10, even with 150+ members on the site downloading simultaneously. our peak was .3

http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/articles/6/294/0/1

the problem is here:

8 26 ms 25 ms 26 ms 192.205.33.42
9 93 ms 94 ms 92 ms 213.248.80.146
10 92 ms 92 ms 108 ms hurricane-113208-dls-bb1.c.telia.net [213.248.92.22]
11 70 ms 72 ms 72 ms pos5-0.gsr12012.lax.he.net [66.160.184.5]
12 84 ms 84 ms 84 ms pos3-2.gsr12416.pao.he.net [65.19.129.1]
13 85 ms 84 ms 84 ms pos5-0.gsr12416.fmt.he.net [216.218.229.33]
14 84 ms 83 ms 84 ms galactica.cedgecons.com [64.62.200.216]


there are 14 steps between you and the x5world server, md. all it takes for one of those to timeout, or slow down, and bingo.

this is a function of your ISP provider. somewhere, when things slow down, you all 'share' a common slow pathway to the server.

the reason it is the same handful of people everytime is just that. whatever ISP you are using daisy chains you all through a similar route.

i don't have a solution for this. i've not had any issues since we moved to a dedicated server. we are running a DUAL xenon 3.4mhz pentium machines with twin 160gb HD and 2 GB of memory on a fiberoptic backbone.

doesn't get too much faster than that...

the only thing i can suggest is when the site slows to try a friend's ISP or internet cafe/free hotspot and compare. if they don't use the same ISP and the site is status quo, then there's the problem.

wish i had a better fix!

-d