Cannot use search at this time?

A few times last weeks (right now, for example) I can’t get the list from “view new posts” or “view unread posts”, when I click those I get:

I haven’t actually tried performing a regular search, but I’m sure whoever’s sending me that message knows what it’s talking about. Just wanted you to know that something’s up.

EDIT: In the time it took me to write this it went away. Maybe nothing to worry about.

I too have seen this quite regularly. I’ve assumed it has to do with server load.

Same here. I wonder if the forum is seeing steadily more use or if it’s temporary? Hopefully Merk can weigh in.

Me too. And over Thanksgiving weekend I’d suspect that it isn’t because of heavy use, at least not by humans.

You do realise that Thanksgiving is a very local celebration?

I don’t even know what people celebrate when they celebrate thanksgiving. The existence of turkeys?

Yes, but I’d estimate that at least one-third to one-half of the regular users of this board are in the U.S., so I’d be very surprised if there was a spike in activity during a major U.S. holiday.

Being alive another year. Having food to eat, and friends and family to share it with. Enjoying the rewards of one’s labor. Past trials that are over now. Present trials that help to give life meaning and to make us better people. The inherent joy in the small pleasure of living that are usually overlooked.

For what it’s worth, a few seconds ago it was saying that there were 35 users online – four with accounts (one the Googlebot) and 31 guests. The most users ever online was 99 on Sun Oct 28, 2012 12:15 am (not sure what time zone). I’m going to guess that some of the 31 guests are nefarious spammers, but I don’t know.

I don’t mean to be cynical or disrespectful, but isn’t that true of new year’s celebrations?

Mind you, if we could manage to live like that every day instead of once per year, so much the better, and screw the holidays.

Peter, my impression is that Thanksgiving is more family-oriented, and New Year’s Eve is more friends(/significant other)-oriented.

I’ll buy that.

Also, New Year’s may be supposed to be more prospective as well as retrospective – you make New Year’s Resolutions, ring in the new year, and ring out the old – while Thanksgiving is perhaps more present-oriented, or not future-oriented in any case – you give thanks for what you have now.

In practice, Thanksgiving is a time when you make truly nightmarish journeys on airplanes, get together with your family, eat a large meal in the late afternoon/early evening, and then fall asleep, while New Year’s Eve is a time when you get together with a bunch of people in your city or the one you went to for your winter vacation, stay up late, drink a lot, and kiss someone at the stroke of midnight.* That is to say, what tove said.

*As ever, your mileage may vary (I don’t do that kind of New Years’ Eve now that I have small children.)

On a subject totally unrelated to this topic, has anyone figured out why the search feature sometimes doesn’t work?

It’s been a while since I hosted a phpbb board or even thought about the internals, but the occasional “can’t search” situation is likely due to the site re-indexing its search term database. It has to do this regularly to avoid searches destroying system performance.

If it isn’t, it’s probably doing some other kind of background maintenance that impacts search. Hard to say without seeing any details.

I’m getting the “you cannot use search at this time” message all the time now. The site seems a bit sluggish overall as well, it takes a couple of seconds for any page to load.

Ditto here.

And here. It is now more common to be unable to use search than to be able to use it.

This is getting out of hand. I think the problem is load on the server. phpBB checks the average load in the last 1 minute. If it’s too high, search is disabled. This is configurable.

But it might indicate a non-forum related problem on the server running the forum. Someone should check what’s going on there. Could be some process being stuck and using all available CPU.

The high quantity of on line users tends to be around the IF Comp Season, so it could just be that a lot of users keep up to date with the comp.

But then we’d all want more!