I am curious to hear about other peoples’ experiences with the Straight Dope Message Boards area. Personally, it took me somewhere around 10-15 minutes of waiting to get from the Straight Dope main page to the point where I could post this gripe. I imagine it will take another 3-5 minutes just to get the post submitted and put me back on the message board. Has is this a fairly common occurance or should I attribute this to my location/firewall config, etc? For the record, I usually visit this site from work where I have a 200 MHz machine (not top of the line, I know)with a T1 line. I have little or no trouble with other internet sites, so I hesitate to believe that the hardware is at fault. Comments?
Nope, it’s not you. This is an extremely busy message board, with an awful lot of posts and views–the poor server just can’t handle it all. The techies are working on it, but in the meantime, your best bet is to visit during less busy times. Usually between 8:00 PM and 8:00 AM (Central) is the best time, from my experience.
-andros-
3124
I’ve found that I’d load up the site faster with a 28.8 connection at 2:00 AM than I do with a Cable Modem at 2:00 PM.
It’s great being a night owl.
It’s slow. Very, very slow. I sort of think of it as more a background activity. Click a thread, go do something else. Come back in 5 min to check… continue doing something else. Come back in another 5 min, aha! there it is! Read it, then repeat the process again.
Opal, you and me both. Only I will get a “connection timed out” message when I get kicked off for non-activity! Mine gets really pissed when it takes more than a minute or two to load something.
Being on the West coast exacerbates the problem, plus the fact that I usually log on during work hours.
Funny, we have high-speed cable at work and I can’t even get on most days, yet my molasses-in-January connection at home flies because I use it at night. Figures.
Like Spoofe, I am a night owl and usually only frequent at night. Occasionally I will be here during the day (today is unsually fast) I load a page, work on something then read, post if I feel like it then work a while and see if my post made it.
I really wish there was something we Dopers could do to help out with the connection/server or whatever.
Oh and I can only connect at 26.4 here (my phone lines really suck) so it makes it doubly worse when trying to load a long page.
It’s been bad, all right. Response time is so long, I don’t like using “Preview” anymore.
I’m going to see if I can get Web-TV so I can post from home instead of the library.
The problem, I believe, is that, along with the may views, each time you open a thread, you have at least 100-150 graphics loading up (The edit, reply graphics, etc). Each of them has to be called from the server every time. Since electricity can’t go faster than light, a page will have to take a minimum 5 seconds to load. Now if the calls for the graphics are blocked by high bandwidth use, then of course lag ensues.
I wish that there is a new protocol where the entire HTML code is collected in the browser before it is implemented.
I’m on the West Coast, and I find it’s usually slow if I log on before 8:00 PM weeknights my time. It’s tends to go a little faster during the weekend.
FWIW, during the day I find that IE will frequently give me “Connection Timed Out” errors, but Netscape tends to stick with it until the page loads. YMMV. In any event, having something else to do while it loads is an excellent idea.
Don’t forget the sig files.
On occaision, I’ve gambled and hit “Stop” before the page fully loads, hoping that the text, at least, will be there. It doesn’t always work; sometimes, I get a blank page! Also, the functions will work even if the graphics aren’t there.
Of course, you could always click the “show pictures” option off in your browser, specially for those visits to Straight Dope.
We could turn off pics; however, one gets to see disproportionally large-sized boxes where the hotlinks once were, and we get something ridiculous such as one word per line all the way down the page.
Regarding the graphics. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t these little “Edit” and “Search” buttons safely in your own 'puters cache file? In other words: they’re not adding to the load time, since your computer fetches them locally.
Or am I mistaken here?
Sig files ARE a serious item in this case.
It’s running pretty fast today. What gives?
Would some sort of site with an archive of old posts (pre 2000 / pre HTML) help? Assuming the posts are deleted from here?
Yes. And for all the graphics that are repeated on the page (like the profile and email) those are also called only once from the server, not once per instance on the page.
I knew I wasn’t completely off my rocker. Thanks.
It’s running great today, too. Could it be because Spring Break is over? Was the board so slow the last two weeks because so many college and grade school students were on the web during their break?
It’s really smoking today. Hell, I thought we had a new server, but I guess not, huh?
It’s moving FAST, though.