Yes it might, and it might make the board run more smoothly. I think we just don’t know.
I’m assuming until told otherwise that the server works with a simple length-limited first-in-first-out queue. At this size of its user base, there’s no statistical difference in the load if people request their pages one by one or (moderately) clustered together. It won’t snowball beyond the maximum queue length. If the server is full and requests are dropped because they can’t be worked off in reasonably time anyway, then it doesn’t matter if you throw one, five, or another hundred requests at it, they’re ignored.
If the queue isn’t full, all requests that got in will eventually move through, waiting their turn to be handled. There might be a borderline case where people could try to completely flood the end of a full queue with identical copies of their own request, hoping that at least one of them makes it in. It would be considered an attack, your provider may be asked to cancel your contract, and it is very different from clicking on a few links in your browser, mind you.
But since you can’t really request several pages at exactly the same time, the probability of one request getting in between the others doesn’t change if you wait between two of yours, they’re not correlated. Your second request wouldn’t with any statistical significance make you more responsible for pushing another person off the queue than your first, or than the hundreds of requests from other people already in there.
If you want to read a page, go and request it (just not more than once). If it times out, try again or give up. We all have equal rights to load as many pages as we want, whenever we want - completely and utterly unfulfillable, but equal. Restricting the access to one connection per user would only shift the composition of the user base, away from people willing to keep trying until they find free resources, to more of those who just give up earlier. I’m not sure that this is what I’d want.
However, you really can help by not reading the board at the time of the day when most people want to do the same.
And then you have people like me who, but for notable exceptions such as this, cannot connect at all from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm CST, trying every single hour. And yet…somehow everyone else can. I’m sitting on a T3 most of the day only a few short hops from the Reader, and on a fast static DSL line the rest of the time only…6 hops from the Reader? And yet…somehow, people can happily post all day long about which one of the “superhunks” is the “hottest” in IMHO, and I can’t even read GQ.
I love the SDMB and so many people here, but I’m being driven away by an inability to even read 95% of the time I am on, and to post 99% of the time I am on.
similar frustration
Hey, I have a minor request. If this will indeed help things, could there be a note saying as such on the search page? I just did a search and only afterwards did I remember, “Oh hey, there’s a different place I should go for searches, but I don’t remember where it is.”
Does anybody know if the connection timeout is the same for all OSes and browsers? People whose software aborts a connection-attempt earlier would experience a bigger ‘blackout zone’, wouldn’t they?
Legomancer, the Straight Dope can’t give an official link to BoardReader until they have been asked if that would be OK. I don’t think this has happened yet.