I too have noticed a slowdown in 'rosity respose over the last few days.

Personally I suspect it is due to the database look-up.
Although they have (IIRC) recently updated the servers (exactly how I don't know), even if they have a distributed database it won't always respond quickly if a lot of users are trying to access the same part of the database at the same time ('cos it's all on the same part of the distributed system).

"MySQL has gone away" is a definite clue to this sort of problem. "SQL" = "Simple Query Language" and is the de-facto standard for database access.

Sometimes that comes up; other times it doesn't (but all that means is that the SQL engine is managing to trickle out tiny bits of response at a time.... fast enough to prevent the time-out coming into effect, slow enough to get you eating the carpet as a boredom diversion)...

Cheers,
Diolma
Edited to add: Today, 'Rosity has been commendably fast (with 2982 users online)! (Just goes to show.. you never can tell..) But credit where credit's due:-))

Message edited on: 12/08/2005 15:29