From slowwww to stop!

[Liz]

For the past 4-5 days I've had a problem with the time it takes to view a post. It happens erratically - but often. No telling when it's going to happen. It happens at least one time each time I'm on the forums. When I click into a post, sometimes it comes up right away, mostly it's much slower - and sometimes it starts to bring up the post, then the screen freezes.

I'm not having this problem on any other websites - and nothing is slower than normal except on the forums here.

Liz

[walterick]

Liz, I've been having the same problems. What I do is hit the "refresh" button as soon as I realize that the page isn't going to load. It usaully pops right up the second time.

Hope this helps!
Rick

[Photo-John]

Thanks, Rick. But the real problem - whatever it is - needs to be addressed. I hate hearing that the performance here is worse than other sites our members use.

[zrfraser]

I have the same problems on my work computer, but not at home. Since I used the firefox hack that Smart Wombat gave out about 3 weeks ago I haven't had any problems on my home network. The specs on my work computer and my home are nearly the same so I don't know what the issue could be. I do the same thing Rick does and the page generally loads right the second time.

Z

[Photo-John]

I used the firefox hack that Smart Wombat gave out about 3 weeks ago I haven't had any problems on my home network. The specs on my work computer and my home are nearly the same so I don't know what the issue could be.

Sounds like some more info on what that hack does might tell us what the problem is. Mr. Wombat?

[SmartWombat]

OK, basically it bypasses the bottleneck in your browser.
Making some things faster (e.g. the initial paint) slows other stuff down, and the ideal settings depend on the speed of your computer, the speed of your connection, and what web sites you are using. The defaults are set to strike a balance which should be ok for everyone.

nglayout.initialpaint.delay
This makes the browser paint each bit of the page as it receives it, instead of waiting until the last piece of information is received before even beginning to draw it.
It causes the page to be redrawn earlier (so perceptually seems quicker), but the extra CPU load will slow the rendering down (potentially increasing total load time). Set it to 750 or 1000 on older computers or slow connections.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
This allows the browser to open many requests at once, so if there are 4 <img> tags then it will fetch all four at once from the server, not one at a time.
Typically this is what makes the loading much faster as your bandwidth is enough on broadband to fetch everything in parallel, and today's CPUs are more than fast enough to cope with drawing it as it arrives.
I would not try this with an ancient 386 machine

[SmartWombat]

So if we have a slow-to-load advert, the hacks will work around it in two ways:
1) paint the page as soon as possible
2) fetch other images in parallel and not wait for the advert

My other tools from mshiltonj are about reading the HTML and blocking the fetching of adverts (Adblock, FiltersetG) and blocking the of playing of Flash, all of which will improve speed by not loading anything but messages and image from the site

[Liz]

Hey there Rick!

I've used the refresh - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - but it sure is slow when it does work.

I also still have the problem with read/unread posts - no differentiation. Most of the time I have no way of checking which ones I've read. Some days it works, but for the most part, it doesn't.

Thanks Rick.
Liz

Liz, I've been having the same problems. What I do is hit the "refresh" button as soon as I realize that the page isn't going to load. It usaully pops right up the second time.

Hope this helps!
Rick