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The site's sluggish serving pages tonight. Sometimes very sluggish, taking a full minute. There are also infrequent, erroneous "connection reset" messages; these should never occur since this server's http port (80) should obviously be open at all times.

Repeated reloadings of a page are sometimes needed to get it to do more than just stall with a blank page displayed and an unmoving progress meter that's 70 or 80% of the way to finished. (I'd think the text on the page should at least have rendered by that point, but no. It's invariably still blank.)

This started about 2am Eastern time. It may or may not be related to the buggy behavior of the gallery upload feature. However, you created new gallery sections within the last few days for the contest, and not only do the new sections exhibit buggy behavior that is (thus far) preventing anyone from actually adding images to them successfully, but this other buggy behavior has developed within a quite short time, so it seems fairly likely there's some connection.

Disturbingly, the httpd problem seems to be getting steadily worse over time; at this rate the site will be effectively unreachable by 7 am.

hmm, i encountered problems like this repeatedly over the last monthes, last time i tried
to fix it using htaccess, or something else, but it seems that my provider has server problems from time to time ( during nights, backups ? i dunno )
right now it seems to be stable again

It's not.

I haven't had any problems... right now it's 7:18 (right?) in Eastern Time, no problems. At about 3:00 AM eastern I was using FF, and without problems...  :-\

i deactivated the pretty urls cache now, should be workin now better