Get rid of the Page Loading Time!

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Solver
Staying at Apolyton is staying online. I guess your bills are in hundreds of USD, and thousands of Drachmas.

actually, today i got the latest phone bill. 100$ for 2 months.

of course 8 hours/day i'm at work

[OneFootInTheGrave]

the loading time has to do with the time you access Apolyton, or better said how many users are on at the moment.

For example Saturday evenings UK time, it is totally useless for me to come here. In last 2-3 months I always get the page timeout. Or truly slow loading when something appears. Posting a post is impossible. (if you ask other internet pages work fine, so it is not the local loop that is stuck)

Anyway what is going to happen in November after the Civ 3 launch.

Will the normal hours get congested too?

[spartak]

Page Loading Time: "Please wait"

[Dauphin]

183.03 seconds. Is that a record?

I find the pages load up in a few seconds once downloading starts, although sometimes it takes a couple of minutes before there is any activity.

The only way around this during slow times is to have multiple windows open (which does compound the problem ) but allows me to read whilst another page loads.

[Dauphin]

Huejj, 480 seconds!

actually, today i got the latest phone bill. 100$ for 2 months.

Do you have to pay to use the internet still? I thought most if not all ISPs give a flat rate connection fee and no call costs. Or is that just the UK?

Edit. Damn my grammar and spelling.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Big Crunch
Do you have not pay to use the internet still? I thought most if not all ISPs give a flat rate connection fee and no call costs. Or is that just the UK?

what i mentioned was the phone costs. to my isp i'm paying a flat rate of 135$/year...

[johndmuller]

Markos,

I've been mildly pleased by the new look and mildly annoyed by the degraded responsiveness since you upgraded the site. One thing that has been especially lacking, however, is straight talk and open mindedness about the extent and causes of the poor response that afflicts the site quite often.

For example, it took 142+ seconds to load this Reply form, which I hope you will admit is rather "lite", the main graphics being the smiles and the advertisements (the last of the smiles, btw, was seemingly responsible for 15-20 of those seconds).

Most of those 142+ seconds were NOT lost to the difference between my 56k modem and faster connections, as there was ZERO line activity during most of that download period - the page was download in 3 or 4 WIDELY separated batches of reasonably continuous activity. Had all that activity occurred without the long pauses, it would have downloaded the page in a quite reasonable time.

The 142+ seconds only reflects the time that elapsed AFTER the download has begun - presumably the counter is one of the first objects to download - but NOT the often EQUALLY LONG period of time which transpires BEFORE anything is downloaded.

This is occurring on a Monday, at shortlly after 2PM EST, which may be a heavy period in Europe, but is hardly peak time in North America and I presume that it is some 3 - 6 hours before your weekday peak usage period.

The slowdowns started after the changeover to the new system.

To date, I have seen the following reasons offered for the poor responsiveness:
1) Excessive use of the pretty new features by users not selecting "Lite";
2) Use of poor and/or slow connections at user end;
3) Heavy use of Apolyton by patrons (i.e. peak periods);
4) Competition at Apolyton end for bandwidth with unnamed site(s).
Suggestions from the user community that the servers or the database engine may be underpowered or overutilized have been VIGOROUSLY DENIED or DISMISSED by alleging that the servers and database are DEFINITELY NOT the problem.

NONE of the 4 stated culprits explain the observed problems. Unless there was some coincidental change in the network situation at the time of the changeover, the only thing that seems to be left is the NEW SOFTWARE. Is that the problem?

Whatever is causing the difficulties, nothing is served by trotting out the same old nasties when they are really not the problem; it makes it look like you are just putting out a smokescreen instead of taking an objective look at the situation. We all appreciate that it is sometimes hard to root out some of these problems, but a little less denial would be a better approach toward building mutaual understanding.

[MarkG]

johndmuller, i dont think i have ever "VIGOROUSLY DENIED" the possibility that there is a problem with the server

but how am i supposed to respond to someone's complaint of a 200 secs loading time when at the same time my loading time of the same page with a 56k modem is 20 secs? how am i supposed to respond to someone saying that he has a problem cause the 15 pages he opened at the same time take too long too load?


yes, at peak hours loading times are much higher. and yes the last 10 days or so at peak hours there is a delay in the initial response of the server(after which the page loads at normal rates). and these issues are of course being invistigated. but at the same time our average concurrent users on the forums have increased by 30% since the days of ubb.

and that fact alone easily explains all the problems that have been reported.

and what we end up is with only 7% of the people using the light styles...

[MarkG]

the thread with my reply above loaded in 27secs

the reply page to post this messages loaded in 26secs

and in both occasions the page was "functional"(in was able to read some of the posts in one case and start writing in the other) and there was initial delay in the server response

now if the above behaviour and times are too much for you, i'm sorry, but i'm afraid there are very little things to do....

[spartak]

Page Loading Time: 69.74 sections and time to load reply 54 seconds. I don't have these delays at other sites.

[Spekter]

Time of day: 14:38 (PST, GMT -7 or -8 I think)
Connection: Cable
Style: Default
Users On: ~130
Page Loading Time: 459.89 seconds and the smileys and other small image files still hadn't loaded
Page Reply Time: 699.03 and still waiting for some smileys and stuff
<hr>
Ping:
Pinging apolyton.net [204.138.239.69] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 204.138.239.69: bytes=32 time=91ms TTL=245
Reply from 204.138.239.69: bytes=32 time=111ms TTL=245
Reply from 204.138.239.69: bytes=32 time=112ms TTL=245
Reply from 204.138.239.69: bytes=32 time=109ms TTL=245

Ping statistics for 204.138.239.69:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 91ms, Maximum = 112ms, Average = 105ms
<hr>
Tracert:
Tracing route to apolyton.net [204.138.239.69]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 25 ms 26 ms 26 ms 24.77.220.1
2 25 ms 26 ms 22 ms rd1ht-ge8-0-0.ok.shawcable.net [24.67.224.7]
3 59 ms 34 ms 30 ms rc1wh-atm3-0-3.vc.shawcable.net [204.209.214.193]
4 54 ms 33 ms 32 ms dis4-vancouver-pos11-0.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.110.177]
5 69 ms 35 ms 33 ms core2-vancouver-pos9-1.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.101.69]
6 109 ms 88 ms 91 ms core1-toronto12-pos8-0.in.bellnexxia.net [206.108.101.181]
7 113 ms 87 ms 87 ms core1-toronto12-pos5-0.in.bellnexxia.net [64.230.242.193]
8 126 ms 88 ms 90 ms core2-hamilton14-pos1-0.in.bellnexxia.net [64.230.241.126]
9 129 ms 93 ms 90 ms dis4-hamilton14-pos5-0-0.in.bellnexxia.net [64.230.241.106]
10 122 ms 92 ms 88 ms 204.138.239.66
11 118 ms 97 ms 91 ms apolyton.net [204.138.239.69]

Trace complete.
<hr>

Understand that I'm not whining, here. I'm just trying to help get things straightened out. This cannot be right. Maybe one of the add servers is holding things up somewhere? Submitting now, wish me luck...

[MarkG]

THANK YOU Spekter, you have given an almost perfect example of what we wish people were doing when they have problems with the loading times. yes, this is definately not whining

one thing that is missing is whether or not you had other pages from apolyton loading at the time or if you were downloading something else as well

so, yes, this could a problem on our side, either a bandwidth issue or a server issue. if the ads took a long time to load it could be a problem on those servers. almost all of our ads are on other servers.

also, did you get continually get these kind of times, or was it just this one? and finally, why dont you use the light style?

[Lefty Scaevola]

I have ADSL. The loading times are extremely variable. Sometimes it appear to be a congestion issue with many sites loading slow, but more commonly it is just Apolyton, or Apolyton and Civfanatics (which also has UGO ads). Since I have plenty of resources at this end, my usual solution is to open multiple browsers, minimize the loading page, and flip to another browser window while it loads.
I do not has the net skills to trace problems.

[Urban Ranger]

Markos,

This is essentially what I said to DanQ in another thread, that the traceroute attempts return normal but the pages load very slowly. Now it seems that it's not a bandwidth problem, since it takes a long time to start loading, but once it starts the loading time is within reason.

So it seems that the bottleneck is at the CPU.

[Asher]

I've been saying CPU for how long now?