Is this site slow to load for me? It all depends on which pages I am attempting to load.

On a slow day both the homepage and the interchange (flat view) both take about half a second to load. If I view the interchange in threaded view though, the time it takes to access the topics index generally increases to at least five second to load the page, if not more.

Personally I would assume, at least with the interchange, is that the reason it loads so slowly on threads view is that it has to find not only the first thread, but all of the children as well. With flat view, only the threads parent information is needed once the most current child has been discovered.

David Collison

Edit: After taking a look, I found that the majority of interchange users that posted in this thread that were having problems, but not all, were using threaded view. Back when the interchange was converted into the phpbb format, the ratio of users using thread view vs. flat view was nearly 2 to 1. But as time passed we now have over half of the forum users reading the interchange on flat view, which is approximately 631 users out of 1243 total, compared to 607 using flat view, as 12:30 AM EST this morning.

I find the RYPN homepage loads quickly. the main interchange page is slow to load but the threads load quickly. I have had the same results with comcast cable internet access as well as Time Warner. It isnt a big issue it just seems to take some time for the main interchange page to load.

I have AT&T DSL and prior to that I was on Verizon and the site loads very slow on both.

Later!
Mr. Ed

And yet, I'm on a dial up that runs between 16.8 and 21.4 and the home page and forum both load within about 5 seconds. I don't know if that's slow, but it's fast enough for me.
I have heard similar complaints about slow loading on other phpbb forums I visit from time to time. Yet, I seldom have anything take longer than maybe 10 seconds.
Might have something to do with security settings on individual computers, and the amount of spyware people are dragging with them. Just a guess.
I don't allow nuthin' in my computer except what I want.
Mark D.

I wish that I could reproduce this problem in one of our test sites. The only weird issue I've been able to identify is that some ISPs are limiting the number of open connections you can have to a specific IP. The webserver that provides the interchange portion of the service will cheerfully use as many connections as it can get (up to 20 or so per request, usually), but if your end restricts the number of open connections, then it'll load slowly.

Unfortunately, I don't think that that explains more than about 10% of the reported issues.

Our bandwidth (and the server itself) is extremely lightly loaded, and our upstream providers (OC12s and OC192s) also are loaded less than 50% on average, so bandwidth congestion/latency doesn't seem likely.

Profiling what is going on internal to the interchange's server there do seem to be load spikes between the webserver itself and the database server (both reside on the same machine).

We're looking into several solutions: first, we may decide to donate a complete server and software to RYPN. This will let me configure it in ways to optimize the system performance.

Secondarily, we're going to look at shifting the RYPN database from MySQL to one of our big Oracle servers if we can convince ourselves that database response is the issue.

Meanwhile, we're going to create a test copy of the interchange on a dedicated server (Dell 2850 Poweredge, dual 3.2GHz Xeons, 4GB ram) and see if that performs any differently.

Regards,
Doug

P.S. Hume...call me on my cell phone today.

I am on DSL and this is the slowest site when using interchange. I switched to flat view which is a bit faster.

Been having the same problem, using Verizon DSL.

Ed K. cp Laurel Run

Wow! I didn't even think about switching to Flat View, but it smokes now. Thanks for pointing this out.