Why is this site so slow sometimes. I’m on a T1 and I feel like I’m dialing up?:o
Its because of us hordes of teeming millions® that are clogging up the server’s outgoing bandwidth with our requests to find something more interesting to look at than what’s happening in real life.
Alougth the “Error 404” message is more interesting than my life, too.
It’s all the other people in line ahead of you.
And no, being on a T1 doesn’t give you the right to cut to the front of the line, either. 
Here’s a helpful tip: Questions about this message board belong in, oddly enough, the About this Message Board forum. Looking through that forum you’ll see that this question has come up many times before. Concensus seems to be that it has nothing to with bandwith (either your’s or the server’s) but the capabilites of the physical box the message board software resides on. There is so much activity that at times the computer simply bogs down in attempting to handle everything, and thus responses to your http requests may be slow in coming.
I would be willing to bet a can full of herring’s and my first born that the machine is actually getting CPU-starved. The PHP scripts that run this BBS are more likely to overwhelm the CPU than any other computing performance catastrophe.
I’d suggest it might be a RAM issue as well, but most likely the amount of data in the 97% of threads that get requested most often is actually a small enough amount of data that most of it should fit into RAM.
Do they prune any of the old threads at all?
I seem to recall a bit of a pruning a while ago, but generally, no. There are a lot of old classics out there, and with the number of threads and number of posts - I’d hate to just delete out a whole section of time and end up losing some of the great WallyM7 threads, or “Halvsie - the two-legged dog”, or any of a large number of my favourites.
Of course, I might be wrong. I shudder at the thought of the hamster having to sort through and present the millions of “-gry” threads everytime someone wants to know what the third word is…
They did a huge pruning just recently. Got rid of any thing over 2 years old.
And that, people, was my 666th post (again). The post party the first time kinda flopped, so maybe this is for the best…
[sub]Note to self: keep an eye out for #700 (again) and 750 (again), and with luck, you’ll notice #800 (a dozeon or so away, and CRASH!)[/sub]
This thread obviously belongs in ATMB. Hang on while I bounce it over there.
No, we didn’t. Here’s several older than that just as an example.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=427
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=265
Check the technical issues FAQ (a sticky thread in this forum) for a more detailed answer to the question.