I assume we are still having trouble today, Thursday, Sept 21, between 11AM and 3PM thus far? Just took 4 or more attempts to submit this post.

I got three of them, along with one of the "connection timed out" errors with which I started the thread between 5:30 and 6pm eastern time.

Um, make that four, five.

I have been to busy with my own SQL server problems at work today to play on HB. However, I have not had any 503's this evening.

Yes, I saw the same errors today and they are in the server logs. The e-mail sparring match between me and the support team continues. Unfortunately, the SERBC coming this weekend will slow my investigation. However rest assured that I will correct it even if that requires finding another host with better support staff (recommendations welcome).

Update: While they don't know the cause, the site's host support team recommended migrating to another server.

You may need to flush your DNS cache to accurately access the site. The new IP address is 208.109.78.21. To flush the cache on Windows, run ipconfig /flushdns from the command line. To confirm the address, run ping home-barista.com from the command line. You should see something like this:

Pinging home-barista.com [208.109.78.21] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 208.109.78.21: bytes=32 time=91ms TTL=38
Reply from 208.109.78.21: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=38
Reply from 208.109.78.21: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=38
Reply from 208.109.78.21: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=38

Please let me know if you note a sudden improvement in reliability.

We'll never know the true cause, but according to server logs, migrating to another server had the happy side-effect of eliminating the 503 errors. Should you notice any performance availability problems, please let me know.

PS: In tracing the problem, I noticed that Firefox reloads CSS and JavaScript files even when they're already in the browser cache. Does anyone know how to eliminate this behavior? It would trim 200 milliseconds off every page load (don't laugh, little optimizations like this add up).

Dan,
You probably know of this page already, but in case not, an answer might be found here:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/d...irefox_1.5_caching


Regards
Timo

Thanks for the link, but no light bulb went on. It could be the page loading stats are wrong as every reference I've found says CSS is cached (in fact, most discussions of it were about how to disable this behavior). Oh well, I did optimize the non-forum pages this weekend just a teenie bit. If anyone notices load problems among the Reviews / How Tos / Opinions / Resources, please let me know.

Whatever you did is working. The site's pages are loading faster today than anything else I'm visiting.

Excellent. I've measured consistent sub-second response times for displaying forum threads this week; let's hope it's not a quirk.