If I'm not mistaken, the software renderer works with 16 bits for color (and a third byte for transparency?). Is it trivial giving it all 24 bits (plus a byte for transparency). If so, would you?

It should work now.

I found the issue, but I can't fix it myself. I have to contact my provider.

I see. That's a bit strange...the forum has a database user configured which works for everything else for some strange reason not for the search. I'm not sure why that it, I'll have a look and try to find something.

Please try to search for a topic. It doesn't fail sometimes, it fails every time.

It's nothing that I'm doing at least. I can only imagine that it's the JIT-compiler kicking in. Older VMs had the option to compile everything at startup. I'm not sure if this option is still available on newer ones but if it is, it might be worth to try to see if it fixes the problem. It might not be a good option in the end, because it hugely increases startup time, but to track down the problem, it might help.

Never seen it and I got no error mail either. I had to upgrade the forum because of the old version being insecure and unspported. As long as it only happens every not and then, I guess we have to live with it.

I've tested it with Edge, just in case. Same: "Database error. Please try again. If you come back to this error screen, report the error to an administrator."

When the program is already running, each animation cycle gets progressively faster. It's probably not noticeable on the OpenGL renderer only because the hardware rendering already starts fast. Is there no way around this apart from delaying the execution, then?

I'm not sure what you mean be "animations" in this context. There's nothing that "warms up" especially when using the software renderer. The only thing that I can think of is the VM itself. It might take some time to get up to speed with compiling the bytecode into native, but apart from trying to influence that behaviour with some VM switched, there's no way to change this.