Why does the forum lag so much from 9 AM to midnight?

It’s pretty obvious there are way too many people hitting the site at once, and the server just can't handle the load

Logging in at 4:00 PM
Finally managed to get a post written by 4:45 PM. 😬

It’s only been just two days and I can already tell this forum is incredibly slow. 🙂

It’s on its deathbed again 😢 🙂 🙂...

Everything is finally back to normal 👍

It works fine for me🙂
Hopefully I didn't jinx it☕

Honestly, this site has been an absolute disaster lately—just constant, grinding slowness over the last month. It’s driving me nuts. At the same time, every other site I visit loads instantly, so I know for a fact it isn't my connection. Right now, it’s taking me anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute just to pull up a single page... it feels like I'm trying to browse the web on an old x386 with 32 MB of RAM and a dial-up modem running on a shaky landline in some small town in rural America😁. It seems pretty obvious that the servers just can't handle the sheer amount of traffic this place gets these days. I don't usually bother posting about technical gripes, but this has become too much to ignore.

I’m out here on Safari using my iPad and honestly, I’ve hit a wall... there aren't even any more adblockers left to install. That's it. And the whole thing? It's dragging like it's stuck in thick mud.

Why won't the admins on Reddit give us a straight answer about this? Is anything actually being done? Are we looking at a fix anytime soon, or what...

...

Man, as soon as the clock strikes midnight, this Reddit thread just absolutely takes off!

I just finished setting up AdBlock on my Chrome browser, and honestly, it’s a total game changer—this Reddit page is finally flying along like it’s supposed to 😁

Kasol, give it a shot this afternoon and let me know how it goes...

The server is likely getting hammered by traffic spikes at certain times. It’s a classic bottleneck issue: you might have other sites hosted on the exact same server as Reddit, and if one of those sites is pulling massive bandwidth—we're talking a huge volume of images, animations, banners, and video files—it’s going to choke the whole system.

It could be anything, really. Maybe your ISP is just dragging its feet, or perhaps you haven't cleared your cookies in ages. You might also be lugging around way too many bloated toolbars and extensions in your browser, or maybe you're still stubbornly using Internet Explorer 😛

And let's be honest, tools like AdBlock aren't the magic bullet people think they are. Sure, they hide the ads and banners from your sight, but they don't change the fact that all that data is still being requested from and processed by the forum's server 😉

Larry Walker24 said:The forum just absolutely explodes once midnight hits!

It’s fine during the day, but after midnight? It’s a total graveyard. 🤷 Also, if you're still using Internet Explorer, seriously—do yourself a favor and switch browsers for this site. 😁 Everything works perfectly for me except on IE; good grief, it takes a minute or two just to load a single page.

I mean, what’s even the point of using Reddit if the site is constantly running at... like, less than 40% capacity?🤣

hollowsailor48 said:The server gets slammed because of the sheer number of visitors hitting it at once. Plus, if there are other sites hosted on the same server as Reddit that also get massive traffic—along with all those images, animations, banners, and videos—it’s just a mountain of data passing through the server all at once.

Maybe your ISP is just dragging its feet, maybe you haven't cleared your cookies, or maybe your browser is bloated with way too many toolbars and add-ons. Or hey, maybe you're still using Internet Explorer 😛

And honestly, AdBlock and stuff like that aren't really helping the situation. Even if they block all those annoying ads and banners from showing up on your screen, those files are still being pulled from the forum's server 😉

but... user numbers haven't really spiked in the last year, have they?

I'm sitting here in Chicago right now. I've got two different ISPs—one for work and one for home. My computers are cleaner than a surgical suite, I don't have a single extra tab open, I'm running Firefox (with AdBlock installed) on one and Safari on the other, and even with my antivirus turned off... the forum has been lagging, crashing, and choking for months now...

Is there anything else we can actually do as users? Besides 🙂

...

Reddit is slow as hell lately, honestly—it’s driving me up the wall. Especially today, it keeps throwing random errors and just refusing to load half the time. And look, before anyone starts pointing fingers at us users, let me make this clear: it’s not on us. This isn't about how we're browsing or what settings we have toggled; it’s clearly some deep-seated technical mess on the backend side of things. I see some folks worrying about whether they should be doing something differently on their end to speed things up, but trust me, it's out of our hands...

Zachary Reed said:The site is moving at a snail's pace today, just incredibly slow, and it keeps throwing error messages instead of loading properly whenever I try to navigate around...

I’ve been having the exact same issues since this morning, where everything just feels stuck, and no matter where I click, I have to sit there for at least thirty seconds waiting for a page to respond before the connection drops entirely, forcing me to refresh and start the whole waiting game all over again...

I’m starting to think it’s definitely not anything the users are doing wrong, but rather some backend mess happening on the site itself...

It’s usually been running smoothly, but tonight it’s being a total nightmare. I haven't been able to get online for three or four hours now; it wouldn't even load the homepage.

I just hit refresh, and then everything functions normally for a little while before it breaks again.😁

It’s working now. The great mystery of this forum is finally solved. 🤣

The forum was moving at a snail's pace tonight. 🙄

I guess we should probably ask the admins if they're planning on spinning up a new server soon, or maybe just giving the current setup a much-needed upgrade. 😁