I thought you should have this message from Brian Leverich. Ruth --- As you probably know, load on RootsWeb has been skyrocketing. The lists.rootsweb.com server now handles about 50% of the load of the biggest listserver on Earth (plum.lsoft.com), and the www.rootsweb.com server now handles about 20-40% of the load of www.microsoft.com (and they use 15 servers (-8 ). One problem we're having is that the Linux operating system just doesn't seem to be able to handle this load gracefully. We've been having multiple system crashes each day, and it's basically preventing us from doing other things we want to do (like get search engines up and Web interfaces to your message archives). Anyway, the solution seems to be shifting to a different version of Unix -- FreeBSD -- which is generally regarded as much more stable under load than Linux. FreeBSD is used by a number of very large sites, including Yahoo and ftp.cdrom.com (the world's busiest FTP site). We'll be converting lists.rootsweb.com and www.rootsweb.com to FreeBSD over the next few days. You can expect some down time and probably some annoying glitches as we make the transition. Please bear with us -- I think we'll have the moves completed in the next few days, and I'm guessing that we'll be fully back to normal (including achieving our old 98%+ uptime performance) within two weeks. Sorry about the growing pains, B. -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 [email protected]