Me too :(

I tried ScottCs Google idea which worked really well although I did have to search AAnother forum for almost an hour to find something posted a few weeks back......d@mn you thousands of active users in the AA forum ;)

Managing a high volume Web site has a unique challenge when you consider all the moving parts. Our latest problem turned out to be related to this:
Performance Hit Since PHP 4.3.10 / 5.0.3
Many people have noticed that vBulletin (and a lot of other PHP applications) suddenly started to run significantly slowed than normal after installing PHP 4.3.10 or 5.0.3 in order to patch the security flaw in previous versions of PHP.
This cause of this slow-down has been identified as a problem with the unserialize() function in PHP. For more details, see bugs.php.net.
This problem has now been fixed by the PHP developers, though the fixed version has yet to be released in a 'stable' version. However, the latest CVS snapshots of PHP 4.3.x and 5.0.x, available from snaps.php.net contain the fix and restore the original speed of unserialize().
While we would not recommend running a 'dev' version of PHP on any production server, we understand that the performance problem has been a major issue for some people. If you are badly affected, you may want to consider running a 'dev' version of PHP at your own risk in order to overcome the performance problem.

As it turns out, when we moved to this latest version of PHP to fix a potential security flaw, it caused the slow down (and as noted, not just for our Web site). We are currently awaiting the official release fo the new version with the fix not opting to go with the 'dev' version because there are risks associated with that and we really are not interested in becoming a statistic. Once this fix is released, we'll install, test and reopen search. etc.

Thanks for being patient as well as understanding there are a lot of moving parts on this Web site and we're not just talking about our members. HA!

Who is this person posting and where did you put our non-techie Randy Petersen.... :)

Thanks for the update.

William

Thanks for the update, Randy. Consider updating the announcment at the top of each forum which indicates that the search will be back on by 2/14 at the latest.

Thanks for the update Randy.

FT has gone very slow again today for me. :( Is this just me?

Getting very slow page loads right now.

Earlier this evening it was very fast (as it has been this past week), but since I signed on 10 minutes ago, it's been taking 40-60 seconds to load forum listings and individual topics.

Other sites load fine, so it's not just my connection. The main www.flyertalk.com site also loads fine during this forum slowness.

(Edited to add: At 10:15p, the site worked great again.)

I notice some changes when I logged back in just now. Perhaps the tech team are changing stuff on the fly to save taking FT down. If so I guess I need to be more patient - hopefully when they are done FT will be zippy again.

Edited to add - straight after post this, FT is zippy again ^ Thanks.

:D

To bring an old thread back to life (I feel like a broken record)...

Pulling up threads was very slow this morning and even now. Earlier this morning I was lucky if I could even get a thread to come up at all (it would just halt after the FT header came up, and then never finish loading any thread - even when I was very careful to not move my mouse over the FT banner during loading). Now, it just takes longer than it should... on the order of 30-60 seconds per thread.

Hopefully these comments help nail the issue down further... I'm getting tired of posting them, and think many people have given up hope of a resolution.

Not sure if you have missed it, but many of the speed issues are related to a problem with the current release of PHP, the backbone of the technology that drives the operation of the board. Over the weekend we upgraded the board software to the latest possible version to take advantage of new optimization features, and we restored the ability to search to see if performance would be improved enough to support searching again.

We know full well that the board is still not performing as well as you (and we) would like. Right now we are just waiting for the developers of PHP to release a version that fixes the current problem.

Thanks,
John

FWIW, I'd almost like to see search turned off again, FT just grinds to a halt every 10 or so minutes. Pretty much back to the speed it was before this weekend.

I think they heard you, New Threads is gone again.

What's up with search? - It seems to be down again.
 

"Search" is there, but any attempts to search get the "ed1, you do not have permission to access this page." message.

-Ed

It has been turned off - http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/annou...ouncementid=71

You must be accessing the link from an old or cached page. Try refreshing that and the search option should be gone.

No offense, but has anybody noticed how limiting it is when Search is down? If for no other reason than the "old hands" can't criticisize the "newbies" for having asked the same question everybody else did. ;)