The dsl installation should be complete by tomorrow. I got the dsl to download and upload files faster for my business.
Now will it help me enjoy the SDMB more. I mean I hate watching that little hour glass for ever while it loads a new screen.
Is DSL going to make SDMB faster or not?
I hate to tell you this Mr. Wildest but while a DSL line can fix a lot of things, speeding up the SDMB is not one of them. The Straight Dope gets hit hard during the middle of the day almost every weekday. Those pesky housewives must really love doing research in between soaps :). This really bogs down the server. You could have a dedicated T3 line and it would not make much of a difference for this site.
It will not help the long waits while loading the pages. The speed problem is at their end [or other choke point near them], not at your end.
It can help in that you can surf the web for answers while you wait for the “reply” dialog box to open.
What they said.
I have a cable modem, and when I go to to certain sites, the pages come up instantly.
Not so with the Strasight Dope.
Sometimes, it takes forever to load a page.
But, what can you do with a broken shoe?
Now that you are going to have DSl, be sure to swing by
to get some ideas on how to tweak your registry to take advantage of broadband throughput.
*Originally posted by mavpace *
Shoot. I was looking all foward to speedy page loads. So I guess this DSL is really not going to help me get more work during the day huh?
You must be referring to my rant on Soaps that I did in the pit. Well, I’m happy to tell ya I’m a changed man. I think women should watch as many soaps as they want. Especially, during the time on the I’m on the SDMB. 
I’ve had Sprint DSL and found it fast, but I’m finding Roadrunner (through my cable system) is much faster and no annoying cutoffs as with Sprint DSL.
But the boards are no faster during the day with either my home or work computer. Evenings and very early morning, yes.
SDMB’s problem is the software it runs on, not your connection speed. I don’t know what kind of database it’s using, either, but I bet that could use some optimization and archiving. The software in use was probably not designed to scale to the usage level it sees on a daily basis. However, considering the loads under which it must be operating, it performs remarkably well.
I got cable in early December and hoped The Straight Dope would be faster, no such luck. 
But, on the bright side, most other sites are a lot faster! Go to Discovery.com and watch the live shark cam, or adcritic.com and watch funny ads and you’ll see a definite difference.
Or else surf the Straight Dope between 12AM and 7AM like I usually do.
I am going against the flow here. I have a 1.5MB ADSL at home, and you bet it helps. Sometimes, I will admit you still have to wait a bit for it to start downloading the message (if its congested…thats probably what most posters here are talking about), but once it starts its done right away. Far, far better than my old 56K.
Thumbs up over here.
This is a common misperception. In order to get to the board, you must go through many computers on the route, plus hubs, etc. All of them have to be working at top speed.
If you did a traceroute from the board to your computer, you’d see all the computers it has to run through first.
DSL can’t make those computers any faster…sigh
No. But, it will decrease mine.
jk
Hijacking slightly here, but the specific DSL question seems fully answered.
Here’s a way to greatly “speed up” your SDMB experience. It doesn’t speed up the arrival of any page
but it does remove most of the time spent waiting. In effect you can read many more pages per hour.
This is the full “Dummies’ Guide”. Geeks can skim read it…
I lack the skill to explain it easily, but it’s much easier than it sounds.
Use 3 browser windows at the same time:
Keep one permanent window open, always displaying the Forum such as the list of General Questions
and use two ever-changing “reading windows”.
When you see an interesting thread DON’T left-click it. Right-click and choose “open in new window”.
When that first thread has opened, don’t read it yet. Go back to your permanent window1 and choose
your next thread, again right clicking to open it in a new, third window.
Immediately switch to window2 and read it while window3 is filling up.
When finished reading window2 don’t read window3 yet… close window2 and switch back to your
permanent window1 to choose your next thread for a new window2.
Immediately switch to window3 and read it while window2 is filling up.
And so on.
All this juggling can be confusing at first but you soon get used to it. It doesn’t matter if you
make mistakes. It soon gets so that when you finish reading a thread the next one is available already.
Just remember: before reading a thread that is ready, choose a subsequent thread for the other window.
By the way:
It’s unwise to download two threads at the same time. This would be unfair to other users if SDMB is
busy and it’s unnecessary. You only need to request the subsequent thread after the current one has
fully arrived - but before reading it all.
By the way:
I use Opera which has MDI (Multiple Document Interface, like having several documents open
in one instance of your wordprocessor) plus tabs for easy switching between the child windows
all of which I keep maximised.
However this method works just as well with three instances of IE5 or any other browser.
There are lots of ways of switching windows; experiment and find one you like.
If someone is able to write clearer Help stuff, would it be worth putting an edited version of this in ATMB ?
Anything that would optimize the message board experience for our users without compromising the situation for others is helpful and would be considered by us as nothing but a good thing.
So I don’t have a problem with your 3 window solution, long as it doesn’t keep other people from accessing the board (I’ve been told it makes no difference as long as you’re just reading), that’s fine.
And yes, at some point (hopefully soon) we can add this sort of helpful hint to our FAQ.
As other have helpfully pointed out, it’s not just where you’re coming from in terms of modem and etc., it’s all the ways those data packets snake through the system. I recommend looking at the Internet Traffic Report, http://www.internettrafficreport.com, you’ll be amazed. And frustrated.
BTW un, why does your post override the margins? I’ll need to go in and manually fix the word wrap but before I do I’d like to know what you did and ask you nicely not to do it again. (Again, so we can try to keep this sort of thing from happening in the first place, it’s annoying for people to have to scroll back and forth to read.) Can we have this be a little more manageable? 
Finally, the vB software is fairly new and we’re one of the their bigger sites, no doubt about it. It’s very much a work in progress and we make no pretense of it being anything else. We always hope for the best around here . . . the situation doesn’t always come out that way.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
No, but it will do wonders for your porn collection.
TubaDiva wrote:
“BTW un, why does your post override the margins? I’ll need to go in and manually fix the word wrap but before I do I’d like to know what you did and ask you nicely not to do it again. (Again, so we can try to keep this sort of thing from happening in the first place, it’s annoying for people to have to scroll back and forth to read.) Can we have this be a little more manageable?”
I wasn’t aware of this overriding of the margins. I guess the page looks different in my browser (Opera in a maximised 1024x768 window). Now you’ve told me, I’ll try a different method so it looks OK in other browsers too.
I think the problem arises because I write in a text editor and then copy and paste the text into SDMB’s Post Reply box. I guess this adds some carriage returns in mid paragraph at each wrapped line ending (ie where the wrapping was in the editor’s window). Maybe the wrong kind of carriage return codes too??
I wrote this one directly into the Post Reply box. Just the first, quoted, paragraph was pasted (not from the text editor this time but from Opera’s view of the thread). Does it work any better (in your browser)?
Glad you told me… it must mean my other postings have looked messy to the teeming millions.
I access the Straight Dope on an OC3 I’m sharing with about 6 people at work, and on a 56K dialup at home. Hardly any difference in speed. It loads faster for me than a lot of pages, though…
There are some pages where the ads really slow it down. Somethingawful.com is one of those - these days whenever I load a page there, it will hang for about 5-7 seconds before loading, it has nothing to do with the speed of my connection. There are also some pages which seem to load faster at home than at work, probably because of browser differences (I use IE at home, Netscape at work).