It certainly is in my case. Its taken me about 45 minutes to get to the point where I can start a thread. I never bother trying at 10am or 5 pm (GMT) as I never get a connection. Very often, if I open a thread, I’ll have to wait a good 3-4 minutes before it decides whether its going to show me or not. I can’t recall getting these problems on any other web site.
This is not meant to be a rant. I’m just curious how a site thats obviously built well can be so unreliable. Are there times when the traffic is just too high to cope? Or is there an adminstrative reason why it goes down at certain times? Any mods have the inside story?
Bottom line: there’s just way too much traffic. Whenever we upgrade the hardware (granted, we don’t do that often), it speeds up. For about 2 weeks, and by then, demand has caught up with supply again.
The board does go down for routine maintenance during approximately 45 minutes at 10:30 CET every day. So, that would be 9:30 your time.
Television Without Pity was pretty crappy for a while there, before it got funding from Yahoo. The forums and articles would fail to load regularly, which was a pain in the ass because they usually had 10-15 pages. At least at the Straight Dope, Cecil’s columns always work.
In my experience, the SDMB is pretty unreliable. It may come right up, it may load slower than molasses in January, it may or may not let my posts go through - whether or not I get a “cannot display page” error.
Sometimes it frustrates me enough to inspire a mini-vacation from the boards, but I always come back. It’s not a big enough issue for me to lose sleep over, although I will confess to an occasional tantrum.
If you consider a ratio of content to reliability, the SDMB is the most unreliable. I’m sure other sites have less reliability, but there’s no way they can provide the same content as the SDMB.
We really need to have some sort of fund drive so we can seriously upgrade.
Yes, the SDMB is the most unreliable website I use. However, it is also by far the most interactive website I use. Well, there’s one or two other very low traffic message boards I’m at, but the SDMB is in a whole other league.
I think that it’s a lot like my favourite gelato place, which usually has people lined up outside the door.
Sure, you could avoid standing in line by going down the road to Baskin-Robbins, but patience will be rewarded with something wonderful.
(I found the situation a lot more tolerable after switching to Opera, by the way-- no danger of losing your posts, because time-out errors are sensibly communicated via a program alert window, instead of loading a .html document, like Internet Explorer does. Also, form data is retained even as you navigate back and forth, which means you can check previously-read pages of a thread in the same window without losing your post, instead of having to open them in a new window and asking the hamsters to serve up a page you’ve already looked at.)
I agree with Larry Mudd, the SDMB is way better with Opera. Another feature of Opera is ‘Open in background’. This allows me to select several threads to open in new windows without having to switch back from each one.
I thought the reference was to content, and was ready to flame the OP!
The performance of this website is indeed horrible. Because the paper gets no income from it, I assume it’s unwilling to put much money into improving the response time. It’s the worst-performing, most unreliable website that I visit regularily.
But I visit it regularily because the content is very reliable. Much better, more researched & supported, than nearly all other web discussion boards. And people (except for a few) are generally careful to distinguish when they are posting personal opinions vs. facts. Also pretty good about keeping to the discussion, without going off into personal attacks & flame wars.
I’m willing to stay here for the reliable content, despite the unreliable performance of the board technology!
I thought the reference was to content, and was ready to flame the OP!
The performance of this website is indeed horrible. Because the paper gets no income from it, I assume it’s unwilling to put much money into improving the response time. It’s the worst-performing, most unreliable website that I visit regularily.
But I visit it regularily because the content is very reliable. Much better, more researched & supported, than nearly all other web discussion boards. And people (except for a few) are generally careful to distinguish when they are posting personal opinions vs. facts. Also pretty good about keeping to the discussion, without going off into personal attacks & flame wars.
I’m willing to stay here for the reliable content, despite the unreliable performance of the board technology!
In the linked thread in response to the suggestion that Dopers could “pass the hat” or something similar, TubaDiva states that “The accounting and tax headaches would make us more trouble than we are worth to the Reader and I hope you can see that.”
I’ve seen this before. An aquantence - a senior IT guy - wanted to donate outdated equipment to schools, etc. The paperwork required by his company to fulfill their legal obligations was unbelievable - a seperate document for each item donated, matching documentation from the organization recieving it, sign-offs from various levels of management, and on and on. But if he marked it as “disposed of”, i.e. thrown in the dumpster, that was ok.
I’m sorry, but that just means the upgrades are under-planned and provisioned.
I’m not a whiner. And I’m excited to do my part to make it better. Including paying money, or even helping host it or anything in between. And it’s really a bummer that the owner holds this place in such low regard that they won’t take appropriate steps to make it better.
On the one hand, the message is this place is too low revenue and too low visibility to worry about. But on the other hand, the message is that this place is too high revenue and visibility to entrust it elsewhere.
I keep offering the Reader my old 8 meg SIMM memory modules, 100 meg hard drives, 5 1/4 floppy drives and 486/66 token ring servers with 200 meg tape backups but they keep rebuffing me! The bastards!
[sub]The initial buffing is bad enough, but the re-buffing stings like crazy[/sub]
