I have been monitoring this slowness for several days now. It seems to come and go and I have been looking at access and error logs but no signs as to why.
We have SSH access to the host server so I am able to login to look at htop and other command line tools to check for runaway processes which would indicate a DDos attack.
I might drop a line to the tech support to see if it is from a Bluehost activity or something is hammering at our door. Just when I think it's really broken the forum is suddenly fast and responsive again.
The other times the forum was so slow was prolonged endless http page requests from a spider bot called Knowledge AI going through the http links to murga-linux.com which was the old forum and now uses URL rewrite engine to convert the old murga forum links, which there are many many of out there, to resolve to the correct pages in the oldforum.puppylinux.com links. This I am able to see very clearly using SSH and running htop. Although the SSH connection also sometimes is effected by this slowness and becomes wobbly wonky.
Keeping an eye out and continue to investigate. Even the slightest hesitation in the forum's responsiveness and my mind goes right to "oh no". This happens a lot and even when there is really nothing wrong at all. Twice bitten and now a bit shy petting the dog (like my neighbors Chihuahua). ![Surprised :o](./images/smilies/icon_e_surprised.gif)