Thanks, Helmut. We're still trying to find a solution. What is surprising is that the usual figures for uniques, visits, pagereads, hits and bandwidth are very stable. It is only the cpu usage that has suddenly rocketed up. Someone posted a message on our forum on 20 Nov suggesting how fabulous the "search the forum" facility was and a few days later the cpu usage started rocketing up. I thought his message might have triggered many others to use the search facility and, in turn, this triggered some condition like the earlier one Alex fixed re the "user area". I now have a friend assisting who is much more savvy about server configurations and mysql databases than I am so hopefully, between the two of us, we'll sort this out.

Cheers,