I love this page, but for some reason it is slower than most homepages? I know there is a lot of people accessing it, but there are almost no images. Are there any plans to improve this? I think it would be a much better site if the speed was improved.
blade
It’s relatively slow because it’s damned good which means lots of people accessing it which means heavy traffic… and the Chicago Reader can only devote so much server power to a free service.
Also, remember you are accessing a database not just a web page.
But there is something odd about the slowness. It seems like many other web pages when I use my modem at home. But when I use my work connection, which is some huge fat pipe that makes many web pages blazingly fast, I often see the Straight Drop page taking 20 seconds or even a minute to load, far slower than at home. My question is, why it is often much slower when I have a great connection than when I have a cheezy one?
Napier, maybe it’s because at home there’s less traffic. we keep wasting time (ooops, sorry) fighting ignorance all day long at work, thus cloggging up the pipes. At home, not so many people are fighting ignorance, so it is easier to get thru.
Just my WAG. Probably wrong, but it sounds good.
Napier,
The site seems to be at its slowest during business days in America. This is a good sign of how productive most of us are for our employers. 
So, it’s not your connection, it’s the time of day you are accessing it.
this is sort of what I mean too. On a dialup and T1 there is almost no difference. It does not seem like a bandwidth problem (at least from their side to the user), but I guess it is taking time to process the database.
Aren’t there other pages with similar types of databases that run a lot better? It says at the bottom of this page the straight dope is powered by:
vBulletin Version 1.1.3
is this just slow?
blade
http://www.iguanaland.com/vbforums/
i just went to Iguana Land and there forum seems to run a lot faster, so maybe it is the bandwidth. I don’t expect that iguana land has a huge following.
blade
Should this be in ATMB?
bladeohlsson,
Iguana Land has a total of 3,950 posts, and few users accessing them. The Straight Dope has about 1,700,000 posts and a large number of users. Since each thread you open forces a database access, a large number of users will slow things down quite a bit. In the evening and on weekends, I experience very minimal delays, if any at all.
Oh, you are misinformed. The straightdope.com webpage is VERY fast.
boards.straightdope.com IS slower. Do them both & youll see what I mean.
"Should this be in ATMB?
Yes, I suppose it’ll be there soon with the other 400+ messages on slowness 
Because people keep posting things in the wrong forum, forcing us mod types to move them, which slows things.
Off to ATMB.