I got similar errors and slow web site response until about 15 minutes ago. Everything now seems to have come good again.

Your Hunting Tool 3.0K image is showing here ok now.

...after changing http to https :D. Even auto-sign-in fails again in the browser... just reverts me to the maon screen that says name or password was wrong... back to mousing the field and picking the member name stone age method.

We made some changes in the past 25 minutes that should resolve this issue. The core of the issue is that the web server (IBM HTTP Server 8.5 aka Apache 2.2) was configured to handle 650 concurrent requests. We've raised that to 800. That server is pretty loaded right now and so we have to balance the number of concurrent requests allowed, with the processing capability of the server so that it does run out of cpu or memory resources to process each of those requests. At one point we allowed over 2000 concurrent request, but that resulted in the server running out of memory and becoming unresponsive. As a result we have to limit the number of concurrent requests to the valid number. The server is currently serving the images to the email that we just sent out which is generating the additional load.

We haven't said anything about this more but we are at the beginning stages of migrating to a new hosting environment. The last time that we upgraded our core infrastructure was back in January of 2009 - over 8 years ago (https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg...ad,22984_offset,0#198062). We have been working on pruning some legacy technologies (such as moving from Java 5 -> Java 8 on the website and moving away from EJB 2.1) and migrating the twitter posting application from running on IBM sMash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Zero) to now using Spring Social and running on Java. This migration is designed to position us for the next 5 years of growth (at least) and resolve many of these tight balancing acts we have been doing to handle the load that you all so wonderful generate for us. We aren't ready to start talking more details or dates at this time, but as things become clearer and dates become firmer we will begin to share more information. The point of me bringing this up is to highlight that we do have a plan in place to address this load issues, but the implementation is a little bit down the road at this time.