Bartertown.com

I have been having issues on BTown in the last couple of days.

From 1000am EST to 1159am EST I couldn't use the site 6 times. It always came back up after a few minutes, but then went down again.

Is anyone else seeing this intermittent connectivity problem?

This is the first report I've seen of it.

Eric

I had the same happen to me today around that time.

oAF

That's because that's the server's busiest time of the day.

Take a look at the attached graph of server load (%) versus time for the past 3 days.
The server's load is the absolute worst during lunch time - somewhere between 10am and 1pm. During these times, it's sometimes running at over 80, or 90% capacity. The site averages roughly 40,000 hits a day, roughly 90% of which happen during that 3-hour block. See the green bar at the bottom? The slivers where it's red means some critical system process got choked off and the system dropped offline for a minute.

It's just the sheer amount of traffic the site gets during those times. If you want better service, I highly suggest signing up for Bartertown+. The money from that goes straight into server hardware upgrades and helping to offset server runtime costs. For the time being, this is the best we can do.