Combatting Board Slowness

Instead of waiting for a window to load when the board is slow, what I’ve been doing is to open another IE window, and link to another thread or to new posts or to my subscription list and let them load in parallel, then go to each in turn.

I only have to log in once to do this, so I don’t think my action slows down the board additionally, and it sure does help me get off the computer and back to work more quickly.

FYI

Because of this place (it’s past slowness) I have developed the habit of using ‘open in new window’ a lot and doing what you do. Our computers can load them in (virtual) paralell. But the extra request on the server adds to it’s slowness. I am not sure by how much.

P.S. This is day two of the current really slowness about which I posted in this forum.

You do realize there are a finite number of things the website’s servers can do in any given span of time, and if you open up multiple windows and browse different parts of the website, you’re using more than one “share” of the server’s ability, right? Not that there’s likely to be a huge downside on the server end, unless you’re doing searching & indexing kind of things in several windows at once, but still. Just because it’s faster on your end doesn’t mean it’s faster on anybody else’s end, and, if you hog enough resources, it could end up being a lot slower for everybody else.

Good point. Generally I’ll just be reading a thread in one window (no drain) while waiting for something to load in another, so I don’t think I’m using more than my share.

Certainly it should be used judiciously. Multiple searches, et. al., would be hogging the resources.

Not to increase the drain on the board, but this is what tabbed browsing is all about… Try out Firefox if you haven’t already done so. Click the link with the middle mousewheel and poof! A new tab opens up behind your current window. Click on five threads, each one pops up in its own tab… I’m never going back to the old way!

EZ

I’ve got firefox and I can’t work out how tabbed browsing is much better than ‘open in new window’ (or shift-click) It just means you click ‘down there’ instead of ‘up there’ for each thread.

What am I missing?

I’m using Netscape 7.1 (Mozilla 5)

It’s far and away the best browser I’ve ever used, so I suspect that any reasonably recent Mozilla-based (e.g., Firefox?) browser will be eminently satisfying to most anyone who tries it. I agree with the others about the vast superiority of tabbed windows, and I was dubious about how much I would like it, I assure you. I’m not even remotely a “first adopter” of any tech, whether hard or soft, at this stage of my life. Lobsang, how long have you been using it? It tooke me a while to learn how to use it to best advantage.

WRT having SDMB open in more than one window, that’s the way I’ve “always” done it since resuming activity this spring. I didn’t watch too much whether I was calling on one or two, or even three different threads, because I can only look at one at a time. :slight_smile: But I can’t really recall ever having more than two loading at one time under the “old regime”. When I’m writing a long post, it usually goes through umpteen revisions (>5>25, depending on complexity), so it was always worthwhile to have another loading while I review/revise.

What’s bugging me is that I can’t request <whatever> and go to another window (the initial intent of multi-tasking), coming back to a completed request. If I do that now, and go to another browser tab, I’ll come back, sure as shooting, to an empty window. :frowning:

About 2 weeks.
The next time I get the impulse to ‘open in new window’ I’ll ‘open in new tab’ and try to see what the benefits are.

I don’t know why the slowness, I’ll call it to the attention of the Powers.

It’s just easier to keep track of things… At first I thought it was just kind of gimmicky, like the scroll wheel on the mouse (“What’s the big deal? I can just click and drag…”) but now I regard it as a necessity.

I used to do the multple window thing. The trouble is, if I had other windows open on my desktop, applications and directory listings, they’d get mixed into stack of windows and it was a pain to find the one I wanted. Add to that the taskbar with fifteen different buttons, one for each window that was open. Clutter city!

With tabbed browsing, all the browser windows are opened in one window. So if I want to find my browser, I look for the one button in my taskbar and it’s there. If I want to close them all, it’s one window. If I want to close a tab without looking, I right click and close the tab without disturbing the top layer. If I want to open a new tab, I middle-click, and the link opens in a new tab. If I want to look at two pages side by side, no problem – I open a whole separate window just like IE. But for me, tabbed browsing is the only way to fly. On message boards like the Dope, I keep the main message list in the first tab, and then open each thread in a new tab.

It works great. Of course, it may do nothing for you but if you browse in multiple windows you ought to give it a try. After all, it’s free! :slight_smile:

EZ