Is it my connection?
Or is the board amazingly slow?
I can’t seem to get into any threads.
Same here Johnny… although there was some maintenance 5 minutes ago, and it seems to work now.
There was an announcement yesterday about them working on the index (I think) and how that would slow up the board until they were done. I’m working from memory here so I may have some of that wrong. Perhaps now they are done with whatever it was.
Of course! I saw the link, but never clicked on it. Well, FWIW, the board seems to run MUCH quicker now, at least for me. All hail the Tech Gods!
It’s still unbearably slow for me. For two days now.
Slow DOWN the board, heathen.
–Tim
There is a misperception that you are connecting right to the board. This is not so. You are going thru a lot of hubs, routers & computers on the way to this site. ALl of those have to be working right for you to get the speed you need.
You can do a TRACEROUTE to find which computers on the route are slow.
What’s a “tracerout” and how do you do it?
In windows 98/2000 (and I think NT as well), open up a DOS command prompt, and type “tracert boards.straightdope.com”, and you will see all the intermediate hops your internet traffic has to take to get from where you are to the boards. Note: if you are behind a corporate firewall or some such, the tracert command might not work for you. Tough cookies.
The unix command is “traceroute”, but if you’re using unix you probably already knew that. 
This is one website among many that you can use to do a trace if you can’t use DOS tracert:
If tracert works on your PC, there are also many programs which provide more info. NeoTrace from NeoWorx is one such program.
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- The last couple days it’s been real slow for me too: I can connect to a couple threads, but only after waiting 60-80 seconds. (normally it takes 5-7 seconds) After the first 2 or 3 threads, it wouldn’t connect at all, but would just “connection timeout”. Everything else on the internet seems to run at normal speed, and I got the same performance from the SDMB on the computers at the college I go to also. Seems normal now though. - MC
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If its slow, just open another browser window or two, open the board with each of those. You can read lots of forums all at the same time while the slow ones are waiting to load. neat huh MC?
Even better, when you get to a forum list, right click on the thread you want and it appears in a new window. Your position in the forum list is intact at the old window, which you can continue to study while the thread loads.
This saves processing power at SDMB, as well as saves you time, because you aren’t reloading the forum list after every thread.
We are still experiencing intermittent problems with the board.
The techs are working on the situation, but a problem that comes and goes is the hardest to diagnose and solve.
As a result, I cannot tell you with any certainty if/when the problem will be resolved.
Sometimes it’s just that we have too much traffic; we cannot always serve all the people trying to get into the board as well as they would like and the server gets overloaded and times out.
And as other posters have pointed out, it’s not always the board that’s at fault, there’s a lot of stuff between us and you and anything can happen.
Thanks for all the tips, guys, we appreciate very much.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator