These forum pages load pretty slow at work with a T1 line using IE. They load pretty fast at home with a dialup connection using Apple’s Safari. Anyone know why that is? I know Dan is a Mac guy. Are these pages optimized for Safari? Or maybe the server is faster in the evenings/weekends?
I’m pretty sure it’s just because the server is faster in the evenings/weekends.
Your browser would have nothing to do this, unless you are tooling around with the old Lynx browser or something.
This could be from a lot of things. Highly active bulletin boards are known memory hogs on web servers, as well as bandwidth hogs. There is constant reading and writing going on the disc each second. This is more of a problem during the day—how do I put this—because people screw off during the day at work on the internet, moreso than they do at home on the weekend.
Normally, when you just click on a simple web page, the server just has to go get that file and show it to you. If its a forum, a script has to run, everytime somebody clicks on a post, replies, does a search, etc. It’s got to see who you are, log you in, if you are posting, print out the forum in threads, or flat, etc. The script has got to go out and find “what thread id, is this,” what message id, in the thread"; and do an “if this, do that,” or if not that, this warning has to be shown because he didn’t do X. And that’s just one person, and it all happens in milliseconds. Imagine 325 people making the script go through all of its routines, or 900, or 1200.
A forum which “times out” (won’t pull up for you during thd day) from a page request could be because the database its pulling and putting the posts in, or from, is overloaded from too many requests, during the day. Is the database on the same server, or somewhere else? Moving it off to a dedicated spot, helps tremendously. Increasing RAM helps out. Increasing the processor also helps.
If there are other sites on this server, and the server is not dedicated, they also share server resources, and there may be cgi usage restrictions on the web server during the day or overall on bulletin board software or script. The efficiency of the script, how it is written, is a factor.
If you want to speed it up, you would upgrade the machine ram, processor, and put it on a dedicated server, and put the db on something that’s not getting hammered too. All of that comes with a cost. Highly active forums can be pocket killers. They already suck up huge amounts of bandwith, which, by the way somebody has to pay for. Eliminating “threading” in your preferences eases burdens on the database and server some. If you have chosen “threaded” view in your preferences, it would take a bit longer for the server to render that out for you. A flat view just asks the script for all of the replies to the lead post. Print out everybody who replied to #12 in a flat page.
A threaded view causes the script to has to do this: Here’s post id #12, okay who replied just to #12?..#14 replied to just #12…now we have to go back to #14…who just replied to #14?..#24, #56, and #57 did…finished…now we have to go back up to #24…and so on, down the tree, making a tree.
By the way, Safari is a nice browser. I’m in it right now. I use a Linux and a Macintosh.