So we are back to slow responses again?

[johndmuller]

After things seemed to be humming along quite well several weeks ago, it seems that responsiveness has gotten worse and worse and stayed that way most of the time for the better part of the last week, give or take. I have been experiencing timeouts and long delays without any transmission activities, as if the server has been moved to Pluto instead of just to Greece. The appearance is that the server takes 20 or 30 seconds before it does anything; once it starts coming in, it is decently fast. Is it that once the chronic problems at the beginning of the year were finally fixed, that usage went up again or is it the gradual restoration of the various features slowing things down or is it something else altogether?

Whatever it is, it is nearly as bad for me as it was then and I guess we can look forward to users dropping out again and once more diminishing the Apolyton experience, such as it has become.

[MattHiggs]

Apolyton is running just fine for me. Everything except the images. But that is bearable!

Good work admins.

[DanQ]

If you are concerned that this problem is becoming chronic, send Markos and I a traceroute report via email. To conduct this test, type "tracert apolyton.net" at an MS-DOS prompt (minus the quotes) and then email us the results.

From what is generated by performing this action, you should be able to see for yourself if there is one or more digital 'hops' from your computer to Apolyton's server that may be slowing down the overall connection.

----------------
Dan; Apolyton CS

[Gramphos]

It is mush faster now then it ever was from Canada.

[Asher]

Images and avatars and posting are a good 4-5x slower than before, but the rest of the site seems unchanged.

[Gramphos]

No, everything is faster or unchanged, nothing is slower!

[Gramphos]

Well, maybe not 100% true, I think that attachments, and other files handled by the database (ie custom Avatars) might be slightly slower, but not very slow, as they sometimes were in the past. Now it is the sam speed all the time.

[Asher]

Before Civ3 was released, on the old server, it was at least 5-6 times faster for me for avatars, images, and posting. I'm not exaggerating.

Go figure.

[Gramphos]

Well, as the old server were located closer to you it is easaly explained, but the new server is closer to me .

[Asher]

I don't see how a server's location affects how slow database access is.

It just appears that this server has a weaker CPU or less RAM or something to that effect.

[Gramphos]

It is not the database access that is slow, it is the traffic over the Atlantic, the only thing the server seem to handle bad is files, it doesn't seem to get them mime-types correctly, and therefor it is harder for the browser to know how to request the files.

[Asher]

The speed's fine. I have acceptable ping, and the actual text pages load the same as always.

The only thing that gets slowed up is waiting for the images to start loading, which leads me to believe the CPU/RAM is a bottleneck since VBB actually treats all attachments as PHP files and has to parse them all to send them out with correct content headers. Seems like a really inefficient method to me...

I seriously doubt transfer speed is the problem, since once the files in the Civ3 file forum start downloading they go fast (118KB/s).

[Locutus]

No, Gramphos, Asher is correct. Overall everything is faster but avatars and graphics etc are indeed much slower now. It's got nothing to do with distance to host 'cause I'm experiencing the same thing and I'm even closer to Greece than you

[MattHiggs]

Tracing route to apolyton.net [155.207.18.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 23 ms 29 ms 29 ms

Hmm, strange, it will only give one result then stop.

[Hydey]

seems to be working fine for me, must be good Australian cable .