Site fast connection - threads really s l o w....

Godders

Just to echo what Sue said - some BG's have been posting their issues and as a BG for this particular board I've been keeping a fairly close eye on what people have been saying and keep testing my own connection from both here and work, reporting any changes in my own speed each time I've seen people report it running slowly.

My own results are that I havn't seen much of a slow down in the last week or so and would keep posting it but you'd probably be sick of me repeating how fast it is from work.

However I have an advantage because I work at my ISP so I know exactly what equipment and capacity sits between my workstation and where the traffic leaves our network. From there it's only a few quick hops to the MSE servers. This isn't always the case with home broadband where things like contention come into play, and also if your ISP uses caching of any sort.

As a general rule of thumb if you can access other sites quickly then the problem probably won't be with your connection as such - however that doesn't rule out there being something dodgy between your provider and the MSE servers. To get to MSE you may well go a different route over the Internet than if you want to get to the BBC for example. Your everyday front line support person probably won't have a clue about this by the way, but its probably one of the reasons why people are asked who their ISP is, and where they are in the country.

Your ISP may also have caching where they try to reduce the amount of traffic they pass over their peering links (which can cost them money) by caching images, scripts and other infrequently updated items. Your browser also does this to reduce the amount you need to download over your connection. If your local copy is faulty then you can try to force it to re-load a fresh copy by holding down Control while pressing F5. If this doesn't work then using something like CCleaner to clear your Internet cache may help, as it will force your PC to get a new copy of the site. Unfortunatly if your ISP does caching then it may just be a matter of waiting for them to re-cache.

If you find accessing the site is slow when everything else is fast then it may be worth trying the above. If it's still slow but you can access other sites quickly (generally the BBC is a good test as it's quite image heavy) then post it on this thread that it's still slow. Webby also linked to another part of the main site (not the forum), it's probably worth checking how fast that loads for you. That helps work out if the access is slow to the whole datacenter, or just the servers servicing the forum and post those results.

If you've got one installed then it may be worth trying another web browser when you have problems.

If you get database glitches then it's probably worth posting that you've had them too - the servers may well be logging them anyway but generally the more information the better.

Unfortunatly problems like this on a site with this many users (and I suspect spread over serveral servers), all accessing from different places can be a pain to isolate and you have to be extremely sure that any changes you make to improve things are properly planned and well thought out or you could end up blowing a large part of the site to pieces - that tends to be bad and would make Martin unhappy.

Former_MSE_Webmaster

Hi folks,

Folks, I apologise for any delays or problems with the site. It frustrates me a great deal and I thank you all for bearing with us while we continually try and improve service. I'll now give you an update and also I'll try and explain a few things here.

As you're aware, we have a had some problems with the Forums in the last few weeks but we've worked through most of them and we are running pretty well at the moment. This doesn't mean to say that we won't have glitches/problems appearing, we always have and we are likely to have more in the future. It's part of running a site that's as busy as MSE, I'm afraid.

It may be useful to note:

- This Forum is one the biggest and busiest in the UK but in addition, we have the main MoneySavingExpert.com site and a bunch of other sub-sites all working on the same set of servers (though not necessarily all sharing the same resources).

- We have a dedicated Technical Team but we are small in number (especially for a site this size) and we have a lot to take care of in addition to developing new things for the site.

- We don't work weekends or outside office hours (normally).

- The BGs are not staff members, they're volunteers and in terms of the technical nature of the site, they won't know anything more about it than the rest of you.

Now, more specifically, recent problems.

The slowness we experienced was a combination of greatly increased usage and load balancer configuration. This has been rectified and the speeds, in general, are much better and back to what they should be (approx 5 secs load times during busy periods) for most people.

The sporadic white/blank pages and slow loads we experienced last Wednesday/Thursday we have attributed to the load balancers again (a glitch on one of them was affecting a small percentage of traffic). This has also been rectifed.

Finally, we appreciate the feedback from everyone when things go wrong, it helps narrow down the problem so please feel free to post on this Board in future if you have issues.

I know some of you are still having problems now and we'll try and help where we can but there are so many places where problems may occur that we cannot promise to be able to fix everyone's individual issues, we just don't have the resources.

Clio, those 6+ minute load times are very hard to figure out. If it takes more than a minute to load on a 1Mb connection, then I doubt you are still receiving data. What happens if you refresh after a minute? Does it load from scratch and still get you nowhere? Have you tried using another browser such as Firefox or Google Chrome? Do they make a difference at all?


Webby

Edinburghlass_2

clio wrote: »

espresso
Nope as i use dial up as well, had the problems before i got this new dongle from 3 so i can rule that out. plus why are others reporting struggling on here but not any other place they visit??. I am like them as well - really poor here, really good elsewhere..

Have you read the 3 mobile bb thread and the complaints about speed from users?

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=581924&page=7

Only problems since Friday for me have been the "glitch" message when trying to change pages on one board last night, happened a couple of times then fixed itself.

clio

E-Lass
yeah read that, but don't see anyone complaining about not being able to load the forum up fully here -
they are having problems with everything. I,m not i'm just struggle here. my latest connection show's i'm
getting a good 1 meg connection with a very low ping.

~Chameleon~

clio wrote: »

getting a good 1 meg connection with a very low ping.

You're actually getting a very high ping! I would consider low to be somewhere between 10-30 not 158

This is mine ...






ETA: Just looked back over your last speed reports and the ping seems consistently high, 200+ in one case, so I wonder if this might be the cause of your problems

~Chameleon~

The only grumble I've got about the site is that for no apparent reason all the threads I've read will suddenly be highlighted again as if I hadn't read them, including ones I've just replied to

Has anyone else had this happen or is it just me?








Being slightly OCD means I have to go back and click on them all over again to stop them being highlighted in my control panel

clio

Allright then Low for me..
your ping/connection is good for your isp. I'm 5+ megs behind you, 100 miles futher away than you from their server. so trust me 158 is good for me. you cannot judge your ping against mine m8, yep yours is good, but for me mine should allow me to at least move around this place!!

clio

look at fayraz's connection - and is he complaing about this place being slow. and we use same isp.

fayraz wrote: »

I have had no problems with 3 for 12 months and I have just renewed my contract for another 18 months. I have just done a speed test and these are my results:



The download speed is good but upload is rubbish but I am not bothered about the upload speed.

fermi

Everything seems to be good from this end now..... touch wood.

fermi

~Chameleon~ wrote: »

The only grumble I've got about the site is that for no apparent reason all the threads I've read will suddenly be highlighted again as if I hadn't read them, including ones I've just replied to

Has anyone else had this happen or is it just me?

I think which threads have been read and which haven't is recorded via cookies here. It can be saved in the forum db if enabled, but it obviously isn't here.

vBulletin seems to be not 100% reliable in keeping that info up to date and can lose it as well. Plus if you have had any problems with cookies or have cleared them at any point then that will effect this as well.

There is a "mark forum read" link in the "quick links" drop down menu that you can use rather than clicking on individual threads if you want to mark everything as read.