Yeah, you only make tabs for the forums you would go to anyway. Again, I’m speaking of the forum page that simply list the threads, not the threads themselves. It’s the page you would go to anyway, if you read any threads in the forum.
Ooops, didn’t quite answer your question. Yes, I do go to the same forums every time I go to the SDMB. And I don’t make tabs for the forums I don’t go to.
Give the hamsters some trucker stay awake pills…
Revtim, as far as I can tell, without looking at the code, most actions in the SDMB cause a load (I’ve got my brower set to “Never refresh pages” and the SDMB server still refreshes them.)
I do pretty much what Coldfire says: read one page while another loads.
One drain I’ve found easy to avoid is when posting: as soon as the thank you screen appears, hit “Stop” (or ESC). Redisplaying what’s just been written seems to take as long as displaying the thread in the first place.
Putting a tab or a bookmark on the forums you’re going to read and loading them all simultaneously really an addition, since you were going to load those pages anyway. However, opening multiple threads simultaneously IS increasing the load. Instead of doing one thread at a time (and waiting the long period between), you are hitting up the server more often. Now if you only read the threads you were going to read anyway, this isn’t that big a deal. But here’s the catch - because you are reducing your waiting time, you are likely to read more threads simply because you have more time. Most people have a limited amount of time to dedicate to reading SDMB a day. That may be 30 mins, it may be 6 hrs, but it is a consistent amount of time. But if you spend your time opening one thread at time, then your six hours gets burned on a certain number of threads. If, however, you open a dozen threads simultaneously, then you are sqeezing in 12 times the number of threads you read in your six hours. Assuming you still spend your 6 hrs at SDMB (because who could run out of things to read?), then you have effectively spent 12 times the load on the server. Now did you get 12 times the reading done you would have? Yes. But you still took 12 times the load.
Realistically, a lot of people do multiple threads at once, and 12 is an exaggeration (though 6 hrs might not be). Still, the principle is the same.
Now, RevTim, is your recommendation that surfing with multiple windows is better (because it saves you time), that Mozilla is better (because tabs are better than extra windows), or both?
And how are tabs better than windows? That’s not rhetorical - you might convince me to swap browsers.
Netscape is slower than Internet Explorer. We discovered this at Excite@Home, when we were forced to switch for “business reasons”. Since we were a broadband company, and IE made us look better, we were pleased.
It’s possible Mozilla is faster overall than IE, but not likely. Microsoft spent a fortune optimizing IE. Money Mozilla couldn’t possibly afford. Mozilla could be faster, if it stripped all kinds of other features and emphasized speed above anything else. But most people wouldn’t like the “speed before anything” tradeoff.
Revtim, you mentioned you always go to the same forums every time. That’s interesting. I always look to see who’s responded to threads I’ve contributed to (using search), and “View New Posts”. I wonder what a typical Doper’s browsing profile is?
We’ve done something similar before: Preferred method for navigating this board?
Short answer: There are at least two factors of the server load. Requesting multiple pages at once which you would read anyway doesn’t impact the momentary server load statistics, as long as the number of your simultaneous requests doesn’t become a significant percentage of the several hundreds of requests the server can handle at once without timing out. It doesn’t change anyone’s probability of not being able to read the board. However, it is likely to make you request more pages at other times with lower load, but the number of pages read is the one load factor we actually want to go up instead of down.
The reason I recomended Mozilla is because it has the feature “Bookmark This group of Tabs”. Once you have a tab with every forum you always visit opened, you can bookmark the group and open them all up with one click. It’s functionally the same as opening new windows, but with a single click. That’s one of the reasons I like Mozilla.
Besides the “bookmark group of tabs” feature, I like tabs over separate windows simply because it takes less screen real estate.
Give Mozilla a try, it won’t cost you anything except maybe time to download it.
Opera has the same MDI set-up with tabs rather than separate windows, and is a very fast-running browser too.
I believe that Mozilla uses a newly developed rendering engine called Gecko, which was designed from the get-go for speed. I’d still be surprised if the bottlenecks people come across aren’t simply the network, though.
I mistakenly assumed that most people surfed the SDMB like I do, going to the same forums every time via the forum window that displays all threads in the forum. It would be interesting to see what the typical method is, if there is one.
I bookmark the “View new posts” link and use that to view all threads since my last log in (or 2 days ago, whichever is the least).
Thanks for clarifying RevTim; I just had this nightmare vision of your software pre-fetching (or trying and possibly re-trying to) every single thread/page/link (including links to user profiles and thread statistics etc.) in every forum tab, which would put a horrific load on the server, but as you say - it doesn’t.
This does raise another question though; if somebody has subscribed IE to each forum, then it will try to pre-fetch links; is there a log of server requests that the Techs or Admins could scrutinise to try to detect this kind of activity? (I would imagine it would be pretty easy to detect; not from the thread requests but anyone who was requesting a whole bunch of user profile pages or post statistics pages in a row would be a likely candidate) - it might be that some people have this set up on their machines without really knowing the implications.
Wow, that’s a very good idea. I might consider changing by links to do the same.
I see Crusoe got here first, by an entire day. Pfftt.
I, too, have always used the “view new posts” option. If I want to see only one forum, I can then click on that forum name from the “new posts” page.