Every time I’m on this website, I’ll click on a few posts and then the next one will take over a minute to open up. It happens every time I’m on here and about every 5 or 10 minutes. By the way I have dsl, and every other website in the universe works fine, including other forums, but not staight dope.
This question is better-suited for ATMB. I’ll move it there for you.
Must be your computer. This site is nothing but fast for me. Sometimes the threads open before I even click on them.
Happy
No, I’m on broadband, and the site has been slow as anything during most of this afternoon.
The site has been consistantly fast for me in the past several months, connecting from several computers in several locations. Perhaps there is something going on with your connection. I’ve seen some rare timeouts, but that only happens about once a week for a very brief time.
I believe Happy Lendervedder was being sarcastic.
I’m sure TubaDiva will come around and explain this soon enough (she must have the response saved on her computer by now).
I suspect that part of the reason for the board slow-downs are extensive prefetching by the users. If you’re not sure whether you have prefetching enabled, you can visit http://www.dnsstuff.com/ to find out-- type in an IP-ish number in one of the boxes and press the button. If you’re prefetching, you’ll be redirected to a page telling you how to disable it.
YMMV, of course, but I don’t find prefetching to be very much faster unless I’m going to click almost every link on a page. Add to that the extra load it puts on the server (multiplied by however members are using it), and it’s probably not really worth it.
Suspected as much, ta. Cool link, SoulFrost.
I too have noticed during the last two weeks that at some times of day the Dope (and only the Dope) has been far slower then normal.
Let me be first to unreasonably blame the ads.
Oddly enough, I’ve had a vast improvement in speed the last couple/three weeks. Go figure. (Perhaps earthlink has figured out how to suck up bandwidth from other users for me.)
“Why is this so slow?” has many potential answers, any or all of which may apply to a situation.
Generally speaking you are at the mercy of internet traffic; if there’s slowdowns or bottlenecks between your computer and our server, that will be reflected in your wait time. Please see the Internet Traffic Report for more details on how this happens.
The resources available to this board are finite. It does seem sometimes (especially at peak times, when everybody and his brother are calling for pages), it seems those resources are stretched beyond limits. This means that at peak times the board reacts to overdemand by thrashing around and resetting. The outcome from this is that some requests for pages go through lickety-split (on the good side of the reset, when there’s a lot of bandwidth available), some go through very slowly (at various points in the process, usually getting slower as the demand builds), and some don’t go through at all (got dropped by the server while it was resetting).
There’s no way of predicting which of those scenarios will happen to you; it’s the luck of the draw.
It can also be a local problem; what browser are you using? Some are more effective than others. I suspect most of our users these days swear by Opera or Firefox rather than IE or the other less-powered browsers, like the one built into AOL, which, to give the technical term, sucks scissors. Taking care to clear out your temp caches may also improve your experience.
The board is huge – too large, really – and we are looking at ways to offload our archives so that they are accessible but not part of the everyday database. That should speed things up nicely. We’re also looking at ways to improve the server. All this is in process, and it’s happening slowly, but it is happening. All we can ask you to do in the meantime is be patient and bear with us.
TubaDiva
The board has been very quick today and we seem to have lost the spoiler tag.
spoiler tag
Was there an upgrade?
Jim
I noticed the loss of the spoiler tag too. What happened?
It working again, Hooray
Cute 
I’m still getting peaks and pits of doom, performance-wise.
Would it help for Jerry and crew to put a custom tag on the pages to disable any prefetching?
Perhaps something along the lines of this bit of PHP:
if (isset(_SERVER['HTTP_X_MOZ']) && (_SERVER[‘HTTP_X_MOZ’] == ‘prefetch’)) {
header(‘HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden’);
die();
}
It never occurred to me until just now that those “accelerated” dial-up services are prefetching every link off a page while the user is reading something, leading to wacky-high load on our poor hamsters. Likewise, if a broadband user has prefetch turned on, but they should at least be done faster.
Trouble is that this board is database-driven, rather than a huge pile of pre-made pages, the system dives into a database server for text, then slaps it into a blank page layout and serves it up, so all that prefetching is probably killing the database side.
So - as a totally WA suggestion from a self-confessed Luddite - is there any way of archiving the old stuff off-site? Say anything over 6 months old, so anyone really wants to search they can link to it, but keeping the day-to-day boards open to general traffic? {I’ze iggerant 'bout suchlike matters}
I have wondered the same as the OP. It’s not that the boards are slow, so much as that they are punctuated every few minutes by sudden slowdowns. I’ve always wondered what the cause of this is.
-FrL-
Could be any number of things, not necessarily on our end, so it’s hard to say.
Internet traffic is affected by everything that could happen between your computer and our server and vice versa.
When you add in the slowdowns that tend to come from more demand on our server, it means we have times when it is difficult to get on and do much of anything.
It’s quite frustrating. We are aware of the situation and are looking at fixes.
TubaDiva
Is there something particular going on today? I’ve had more drop-offs today than I have in over a year. Every second page load, it can’t find the server and earlier I had to stop browsing because it couldn’t find the server for over 20 minutes.