If only Scotty could get to work on the SLD Web site. Last year, I had no problems posting 471s at any time right up to the deadline. This year, everything is quite sluggish, and today I'm even hitting some timeouts. I noticed some slowdown on Friday, but today it's been slow enough that I've had some timeouts. Woe to the last-minute filers showing up tomorrow.
I'm also getting several crashes a day. Part of that is that I'm not being so careful. Last year I would only run one Internet Explorer window, and I surfed very gingerly. This year I'm confident that a crash will only lose me one screen of information, so I'm doing lots of other things while I wait for pages to load.
And it looks to me, just from looking at the numbers assigned to my apps that hundreds of applications are being filed every hour, so it's not surprising to find things sluggish.
Conspiracy theory: one time I heard Mel Blackwell talking about getting people to file a little earlier, rather than wait for the end of the window. Perhaps this year's slowdown will encourage people to file earlier. Perhaps by not having a ton of computer horsepower laying around idle waiting for the last week of the window, the SLD has stopped rewarding the procrastinators. But I don't buy that. First, Mel is all about customer service, and second, if there are widespread slowdowns and crashes, it's going to create an unpleasant mess, which SLD will have to clean up, without getting any more funding to do so.
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