|   A Plea to the board operators | Bruce Burke
Apr 24, 2001 8:47 AM | | PHLULEEEZE restructure the way this board operates. It takes my computer at home over a minute, and my conputer at work nearly as long, to do a screen refresh.
I have come to believe it is because the software appears uses blank gifs to create the nesting indents. This takes forever to process all of them.
I would suggest using the Unordered List function of HTML, which is far, far faster! It's just a matter of selecting the proper nesting level then.
Regards,
Bruce |
| re: A Plea to the board operators | estan
Apr 24, 2001 2:36 PM | | I don't know...their table structure is ok and the .gifs are very minimal but there are a huge amount of them but I don't think they are the whole problem.
At home I use cable modem with an average download speed of 1.1 mbs, in my office I have a full T-1 with up and down speeds of 1.5 mbs and on the road I use a 56k modem built into my Mac laptop.
The crazy thing is that the refresh time on the road with the modem is just as fast as the T-1 in the office and also the cable modem.
I think it is the way the pages are called from the database that is giving the big problem and I will have some of our programmers look at it.
If it was just images there would be a much longer wait for a load on the modem than the T-1.
I did a quick test on their host...ABOVENET...and their server is plenty quick with no real bottlenecks.
Later...Stan |
| re: A Plea to the board operators | CE
Apr 24, 2001 5:46 PM | | Something wrong with your cable emodem..my cable modem hits 8 MBPS... |
| re: A Plea to the board operators | MajorDump
Apr 24, 2001 6:58 PM | | I have no problem on my end either. Could be some bad hops between him and here. |
| re: A Plea to the board operators | estan
Apr 24, 2001 9:09 PM | | Where do you live and how much are you paying for that amount of bandwidth...and no ... nothing is wrong with my cable modem. |
| Bandwidth...very interesting | Eyespy
Apr 25, 2001 10:18 PM | | This is an interesting off-topic subject. I just checked my connection speed at:
http://www.cnet.com/internetservices/g/bm/msn/0001.html
Assuming this to be an accurate service (I don't know if it is or isn't), my cable modem connection speed exceeded 1.5Mb/sec. By how much, I don't know, as speeds higher than 1.5Mb are simply reported as "Infinity kbps". I pay about $40/month for the cable modem service, in California. |
| Bandwidth...very interesting | estan
Apr 25, 2001 10:51 PM | | That's about right...you are getting maxed at the moment...you can buy more bandwidth from some providers but I haven't seen much available over 3 or 4 mb/s and that should cost a few hundred bucks a month at todays rates. CE is claiming 8mb/s...well you would need a T-3 to match that ...it is 5 times the speed of a full T-1...SDSL will cost about 600 a month for T-1 speed.
Pretty costly unless you are running a cluster of web servers or are sharing a connection with a few hundred users on a LAN...but what do I know? |
| re: A Plea to the board operators | Bruce Burke
Apr 24, 2001 8:58 PM | | Stan,
Not sure if they are the whole problem or not, but I do know that my computer sits and thinks about something for a loooong time before I get a display beyond the header information. This certainly is the only board that uses GIF images to create an indent. All others use the HTML listing function. I have no refresh problems with them....so....
I'm running ADSL myself at home. And the download time isn't all that long, it's the processing and I know that because the whole system freezes up while the CPU is number crunching which, during this time there is no drive activity.
At work we have a 100MB/sec LAN and my workstation is an HP UNIX box.
The slowness is a serious limiter to how much I can read and contribute. |
| re: A Plea to the board operators | estan
Apr 24, 2001 9:17 PM | | agreed ...and I had our senior UNIX sys admin look it over and he thinks that its a server speed issue on the forums.consumerreview.com machine. The bandwidth appears to be just fine, and the fact that the site is not designed well, would not cause the same load problems. This is a slowness issue in the return from the crforum CGI app. This can be attributed to either a slow server, or too much load for the server to handle. |
| 55 seconds on my UNIX machine | Bruce Burke
Apr 25, 2001 5:32 AM | | Stan,
As you can see, I just measured how long it took to get a readable screen from the time hit the "back" button on your message.
I noticed download speeds, both here and home they run around 23kb/s
Thanks for the info.
-Bruce |
| Something doesn't sound right | Eyespy
Apr 25, 2001 10:32 PM | | I have a hum drum home built PC with 450 PIII, Windows 98, nothing special, and the AR screens load completely in about one second, sometimes 2-3 seconds. But it used to be MUCH slower. Why such a discrepancy with your results? BTW, I have a cable modem, and the cnet bandwidth speed calculator tells me over 1.5Mb/sec. |
| Something doesn't sound right | estan
Apr 25, 2001 11:01 PM | | I'm in New York and you are in California...guess where crforum is...San Jose!
It's 17 hops for me and quite honestly what we are noticing is some huge delays in the ad server called "spinbox". The actual page loads after the ads are very quick. Again CGI scripting might be improved but that is a big programming task and would be quite expensive....they could always sell more ads to pay for it...
When I was in Seattle last week with my laptop on a 56k connection it was as fast as my cable modem in NY. |
| Something doesn't sound right | Bruce Burke
Apr 26, 2001 4:55 AM | | I've played around a little more. Using our WTS server(NT 4.0 emulator for UNIX) I found that it is only a couple seconds when using IE. However, using Netscape on WTS, it is about four times that.
So processing speed as a lot to do with it as well as the browser. Still other boards don't have this platform/browser difficulty.
-Bruce |
| Something doesn't sound right | estan
Apr 26, 2001 5:21 AM | | that sounds more like a browser issue than processing speed...Netscape and IE are not equal across platforms or release versions. My Power Macs can't keep up with the Linux boxes using IE the Macs get smoked every time. But that is not the problem ...the real problem is after you click refresh you can sit and wait a very long time before there is any response from the server and the first server to respond is the ad server and the PCPHOTO REVIEW ad is usually the real slow one....but...it is much faster in the last 2 days than it has been in the past. |
| I can say...... | Chris Garrett
Apr 24, 2001 9:11 PM | | that if you go over to AudioAsylum.com, things move much, much faster. People over there, who I gather have offered some help in the past, tend to think it's a 'software issue' here and maybe, all of the banners.
I've been coming here for 2.5 years with the same computer and I can say with honesty, that things have gotten much, much worse--both in speed and in layout. I realize that there will have to be ads and if these are the cause, I can understand it; however, this site has really gotten slower and I refuse to believe that it's because of increased 'traffic.'
Anyway, I still will attend, but constructively, it's gotten much worse from a vistor's perspective.
Chris
AA Hi Rez and Digital. |
| I can say...... | estan
Apr 24, 2001 9:24 PM | | spinbox... which is serving the ads is definitely a dog. |
| ads.... | estan
Apr 24, 2001 9:29 PM | | BTW...normally if they are using an outside ad server the way it works is the ads must load before the rest of the page. We really think that there is some question as to how this site was built in combination with slow servers and a dog of an ad server. Also all of the forums could be sharing 1 box so maybe its time for someone to buy some more space in the batting cage. |
| ads.... | estan
Apr 24, 2001 9:35 PM | | this is the most offensive and slowest of the loads...
http://spinbox.consumerreview.com/?RC=4030&AI=1736&RANDOM=124730356318086 |
| Timed it... | Eyespy
Apr 25, 2001 10:34 PM | | ...at just under 2 seconds. Is that good? |
| Timed it... | estan
Apr 25, 2001 11:04 PM | | excellent but the net seems fast tonight...maybe someone read these posts and tweaked something...very possible because we are convinced it is server side and a lot can be done there. |
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