TheFoothillsForum

"Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes." (I have a raging case of ADHD and concentration is not my strong suit. By the time I am able to search, I've forgotten what I wanted to search for.)

I'm going to put that right up there with -

"Your call is important to us" (Not really - or we would not put you the menu selection maze and why do you put me right through to an agent when I press "Sales")
" Our customer service agents are busy helping other customers" (There is only one agent and it is 2 am in Bangalore).
" Please listen. Our menu selections have recently changed. (No they haven't.)
" Your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes" (We want to fire anyone that doesn't take a full bucket of abuse from you)
" For English - press 1" (&$$@#$)
" Hi - This is Mayor Antonio Villargairosa.." (Why do I have to listen to him in Spanish when I pressed the $&^^%$ "1" button?)
"...in the meantime , please enjoy this selection from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra." (I hate tinny distorted music)

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AND LIKE. I agree on all of those. But yes I find that frustrating. It was explained that there was a good reason, I don't recall what it was. But yes it is like getting a busy signal when calling someone on the telephone.

Sometimes if you punch 0 (zero) repeatedly you'll get connected to a human because the menu can't handle it.

I believe the search interval is throttled to prevent search volume from overloading the database and breaking the site.

As an alternative you can use Google to search the forum. If you wanted to search for "stuff" for example, put this into Google:

stuff site:thefoothillsforum.com

That will give you all pages containing "stuff" on thefoothillsforum.com

Once upon a time I was transported into the endless-repeat-loop-from-hell:

"To reach an agent who will help you, press '0'"

<presses '0'>

-ring tone for about two minutes

"I'm sorry, that extension is not taking any calls - transferring call"

-ring tone for about two minutes

"I'm sorry, that extension is not taking any calls - transferring call"

-ring tone for about two minutes


and so on, and on, and on....

Well, I said "sometimes" and "press 0 repeatedly". That means in rapid succession until someone answers. That's worked for me occasionally.

Let me guess...WAMU? or CHASE (now owns WAMU)?

If I recall correctly it was a call to an insurance firm...

That's awful. I have horror stories from dealing with so many banks on short sales. Your hair would stand on end.

0 # still works on some systems.

The accounting software that the ISP uses for MySQL is broken. It rounds up query CPU time in whole seconds and uses that as the rolling average for CPU use. Then, at a specific thresh-hold number, they auto-suspend the account for using too much CPU time. It's like pumping $4.01 worth of gas, and getting charged $5. Most ISPs are oblivious to this.

There's one query that consistently brings up the message, the "View Active Topics" link. These results should be cached every minute or so and should not be constantly queried:

search.php?search_id=active_topics

The ISP and MySQL aren't involved, the board software (phpBB) handles all of this. It does a simple check to see when you last did a search, or if the load average of the machine is greater than some threshold.

If I get some time, I'll see if I can add some more info to the error message to see which limit is trigger the message.

I've decreased the time you have to wait between searches, unless you're really fast, you shouldn't see this message (unless something else is broken).

I've noticed that when it happens to me, down at the bottom of the screen the Yahoo and Google Bots are on at the same time. I would imagine that with the bots hitting the site like that, it would make certain features temporarily unavailable.

Right now the Yahoo Bot is on, and I'm able to use the "New Posts" link fine. When both of them are on, forget it.