Just talked to our tech guys and am happy to report the following:
Last Friday 5/26/00 we ordered a 2nd processor for our server, which can run two processors in tandem. It should arrive in a few days. This should produce a 50-60% increase in processing speed.
A 2nd T1 line is being installed Friday, 6/2/00. You may notice brief delays till the DNS servers update (although we’re keeping another machine at the old IP to bounce users to the new one). This line is to be used only by the SD website. Since the SD accounts for the majority of traffic on the existing T1 already, we’re not going to see a huge boost in performance, but it’s bound to help some.
Rumors to the contrary, the techs think the slow service is NOT the result of a denial of service attack. We’re just busy, mostly. In addition, the Chicago routers (we mean the backbone routers, not our equipment) have been redline for the past few days and this may partly account for delays. We don’t know if there was an equipment failure or if it’s just heavy traffic. Who knows, maybe it’s all because of us.
We hope these upgrades will improve service. You can help by:
Being patient if the system is slow to accept your new post. Don’t keep presssing the submit button repeatedly, you’ll just wind up posting the same thing multiple times.
Conserving bandwidth. Don’t post just to get your total up. Don’t quote a hundred-line post just to add “I agree.” Be concise.
If you’re composing a long post, do it offline so you don’t tie up the connection.
Thanks. We hope your enjoy your experience at the SDMB. And whatever our advertisers are advertising, buy a ton of it.
Thank you for the update. Glad to hear that help is on the way, although I do wish to express my sincere hope that the installation of the new hardware will not involve sacrificing a small child, whose body would then be interred under the threshold of the server room. Not all of us are THAT interested in speeding up the boards.
I also have a question about #3, “If you’re composing a long post, do it offline so you don’t tie up the connection.”
I am not a tech person. I have one of of those “Guides to the Internet” magazines that in its explanation of how cookies work, says, more or less, “Your computer talks to the Web, brings up the page, puts a cookie on your hard drive, and then breaks the connection with the Web. Then when you ask the computer to do something else at that page, it goes and gets the cookie and uses it to log back on.” This seems to say to me that the connection is actually severed while you’re composing your post in the reply window, so it wouldn’t matter how long the reply window was hanging there while you went and looked for ammunition in Roget’s Thesaurus.
Does this mean that it’s all of us frustrated novelists who are draggin’ the boards down? :eek: Say it ain’t so, Joe!
DDG…you are correct…I keep the sdmb up all the time. when I’m on…open other browsers and do my chatting and surfing. When I come back and refresh the sdmb…it says welcome back.
My mediocre internet expertise agrees that Ed is mistaken concerning the “compose offline” suggestion. No bandwidth is used while the page is static.
One comment I’d like to make to Ed (esp: the techs) is concerning the slow page speeds. I have a Cable modem and operate at low usuage periods (12-5AM), so I’m gonna stipulate the problem is clearly not on my end. While its been hashed out in other threads, I’d like to offer some small experimental evidence. Whilst in chat I’d be struggling to load the MB pages, each taking 3-5 minutes, pissing and moaning all the while. The other chatters would check and most had relatively quick page load speeds, with a few experiencing the identical symptoms I had. Later the same evening, or the next day at what seems to be a high traffic period my problem is no longer present. In other words the lag is intermitent, but severe when it occurs.
Now I’m no expert but this seems to support the arguement that one of the routers is damaged, where I can’t say. The point being that the new T1 and processor should help across the board, I don’t forsee it doing much to help the temporary severely slow periods. If I’m repeating something already said, my appologies.
Jerry said in an earlier posting that you can do whatever you want while online with us – reading, writing replies, etc. – and it only matters when you hit the button to get it to process something.
I don’t see how knocking ourselves out would help much. I guess it won’t really slow things down at all to sit at our computers comatose for hours on end with the SDMB on the screen, but I can’t see that it would do any good. Unless it’s just a method to prevent us from posting as often.
I think that Ed’s job is more related to sneaking a couple inaccuracies into the master’s work, so that the average person isn’t harmed by viewing their stunning perfection in its original form.
Well, whatever it was the techs did, it seems to have worked. My loading times have been vastly improved since last Friday (touch wood, spit three times, turn around in a circle widdershins…)
There were a couple of times on Friday when absolutely bizarro stuff came up on my screen, warped mutant versions of threads with all the Profile, Reply w/Quote icons, etc. twice as large as normal and in the wrong places, but by Saturday it was fine.
