speed

Over the past few days it has been taking on avg. about 2 minutes to load up any page on the website. This is from home (cable modem) and work (t1 line) you guys working on stuff or? Are you aware of it? Took me 8 minutes just to go to forums/website problems/ and then to post this.... just thought i would let you know

Kn1ght the complainer.

Chris has been overhauling a few things (don't tell me you didn't notice the frontpage changes where we're splashing news)... I'm particularly excited about it.. you can see I've been playing the local town crier and submitting news like a maniac.

I'm not sure if he's activated it for everyone yet, see if you have a 'Submit News' option in the left hand menu (where you have the forums link and the Max Arcade link). If you do, you can submit anything you like and after we've felt powerful enough rewriting it.. we'll post it... if you're nice... and the cheques in the mail

There are various reasons this could be happening. I too have various times where it will take time to download pages, but the average is more about 5 - 10 seconds. But I did have a couple of times where nothing was able to be loaded or, as you say, it took an intolerable amount of time.

This is the nature of the beast ( the internet ). I do know that Chris has been doing some work on the site and this may have caused the system to slow down while changes were being made, but overall, I don't think this is the case.

I know that sometimes I will be slow with this site and find that others are slow also (but necessarily all of them). There could be problems along a certain path. For instance, I know that pages that come from the east coast of the US and go to the west coast go through an area in San Jose called Mae-West (there is also a Mae-East) on the east coast. If there is a problem in these locations, most pages going across the US will see a slowdown.

Also on some days when the sun is causing extra electromagnetic interference (due to sunspots), they marginally affects the bytes as they are being transferred.. so some zeros change to ones and vice versa.. as a result, the data gets corrupted.. and as we all know, TCP retransmits corrupt data so the data is retransmitted.. this may happen many times and so the page doesn't appear to load.

A quick solution to this is to wrap your CPU and network hardware (including the wire of course) in a small amoun of foil, which will absorb the radiation. It may also affect your monitors performance, and you can solve this by lifting your monitor and lightly dropping it down onto the table again (be careful you dont break the stand !).. this will decarbonise the primary filter element behind the picture tube, and you'll get a clearer picture. Btw this doesn't work for televisions.

You could also use precision instrument number one (hammer). :lol:

Oh yes ... the hanner is my favourite , but I also loved Sahir's solution to avoiding data errors

Knight's observation amongst all others is noted I'll be checking the issue with our hosting provider in order to resolve the issue. The fact is that the page generation is also taking a long time ... I've seen it fluctuate from 1 second to over 20 seconds which is totally unacceptable.

As Tfs and Sahir noted, we have been doing a lot of behind the scene work on the site, but I very much doubt it would be the reason for such a dealy.

I am also suspecting problems with our server, but we will know soon enough. I'll keep you guys posted on the progress, we simply ask for your patience in this issue!

Thanks again,