We've identified two problems, both now fixed:
Apologies to all affected.
If you think you've diagnosed further problems, please direct message me or raise a ticket.
ETA: Site very slow at Fri Sep 16 18:35:23 UTC 2011 - we've obviously missed something.
ETA: Site fast now, and can't reproduce Friday's slowness. We're wait and watching - please let us know (see above) if you see any other problems.
Yeah. I convinced myself that the prior suggested that it wasn't just me. Yay adjusting for paranoia.
It seems to have been slow or broken more often than normally to me too.
I like that that url is so easy to remember. That way I'm not going to be trying to get it off of LW while LW is down.
I've been getting a lot of errors lately also. Sometimes the server just seems to time out. Other times I get the generic reddit error message. It seems that the error image file is also not being found when it does that. The current error messages also seem to be reddit specific (one version includes a link to the reddit store). Aside from fixing whatever is going on, it might be nice if we had error messages that were both more informative and more pertinent. It would be nice to be able to say "I got error message _" rather than "I got a stupid joke about free software which was randomly chosen by the server."
There's a DNS record for slowforeveryoneorjustme.com but whatever machine is there doesn't seem to be serving pages. (When I try to connect to it, some proxy between me and it says it can't connect. downforeveryoneorjustme says it's down.)
And is there a way to answer this question automatically, akin to downforeveryoneorjustme.com?
I don't think you'd be able to get that to work. Different websites have different usual speeds, so you'd need a database of typical speeds. Maybe a browser plugin?
Does the site server software have any sort of monitoring interface? Can it, for instance, publish data about the number of page views on the different types of page, including error pages served? I notice there are stats being exported to Sitemeter, but that only breaks down by hour so far as I can tell, and doesn't report on error pages.
Was unable to load it for a couple hours today (11 AM - 1 PM, estimated). I would just get a blank page with no HTML source. OvercomingBias had some latency as well. At one point I could load the wiki but not lesswrong.com main page.
(EDIT: Portland, Oregon. Pacific Daylight Time, GMT-7. Don't know the ISP work uses)
I have noticed the site often (but not always) loading very slowly. No error pages, but sometimes it seems to time out or only returns a blank page.
In case you didn't figure it out, LW uses the reddit codebase, and reddit used to be owned by Condé Nast.
And is there a way to answer this question automatically, akin to downforeveryoneorjustme.com?