Most of the time when I try to navigate these pages, it takes forever for pages to load, often ending in the dreaded “This page cannot be displayed” one, which is a poor substitute for the lively, entertaining exchanges of my fellow Dopers. Though I love this site, I feel like a pariah. whimper I’ve tried refreshing (no go) and deleting my cookies (minimal improvement). What else can I do to please the Straight Dope gods? Why do they look down on me with malice despite my devotion? (Read: addiction).
In actuality, I suspect my problem is the result of the Millions all Teeming to the same pages at the same time and jamming up the works but, just in case I’m wrong, does anyone have any ideas?
Sorry, Harmonix. I have DSL and it doesn’t seem to help at all. Maybe you get better results than I do. Still, I can’t imagine what it would be like to be back to 56k, again.
Oddly enough, on the SDMB it wouldn’t make a huge amount of difference. When all you’re doing is transferring text you’re not likely to see much difference in how fast pages load. Some, yes, but not much. Most of the delays we all see are the result of the web server and database server having trouble keeping up with the current load.
The board’s performance varies wildly, sometimes within short periods of time, but my understanding is that it’s mostly just a function of how many people are simultaneously accessing the board. The hardware is often pushed to its limit and every time they add new hardware more people move in to fill the “gap.” It makes sense - if the board is annoyingly slow, fewer people use it at once. If it speeds up, more people use it until it slows down again.
I seriously doubt you are on anything called a “T-100 line”
The SDMB server is slow and the load is huge, due to the popularity of the Board. The good people at the Chicago Reader do not have any particular motivation to upgrade the hardware, as the Board does not really provide any revenue.
I’m in Orlando for a month in an apartment with no broadband connection. So I stooped to the lowest of lows and installed AOL so I could dialup for free while I’m here. Just so you all know, the SDMB loads at the same slow (or fast depending on the time of day) rate on a 56K AOL connection as it does on a RoadRunner Cable connection.
If you really need a Straight Dope “fix”, do what I do…
Have another browser open on the SD Home Page, and when the board is taking forever to load go to the other window and do a Search on the archives … something interesting always turns up, and by the time you’ve read it the SDMB page has loaded.
(Presumably the main site is on a different server?).
Actually, the problem is a particular button at the bottom of every page. If people would quit hitting that button, things would be much better, but nobody seems to realize this and they keep hitting the button anyway.
