Our server that hosts The Coffee Shop is handling record levels of traffic - not so much from Coffee Shop users, but rather from automata which are indexing the various sites on the host, and from traffic levels on the sites that have had an increase in traffic (or in the case of
http://option247.uk are new). 6.5 million requests so far this month!
99% of the time it's fine - with system loading being in the range of 50% to 70%. However, at certain times there's a spike and you may see occasional messages like this:
Connection Problems
Sorry, SMF▸ was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.
For most of that 1% of the time that the loading is too high to handle, requests are queued and users don't even notice - but if the busyness persists, the queues can get full, and you may see the message above. Typically it happens during some sort of backup procedure where a table of database has to be reserved / locked by the backup process to ensure the integrity of the backup; such procedures are scheduled as much as we can to happen at quieter time, but as we have long periods of busyness and some fast changing (and growing) databases, there are occasions when they're happening at a busy time.
Should you get the error message above, please follow the suggestion and "try later". During the daytime, 5 minutes later should be plenty; night owls (who normally get very fast responses from our server!) may find that it takes a bit longer to be back with you.
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