Performance of this site

[Liberty]

I've been having intermittent problems with this site loading very slowly, pages half loading, needing to be reloaded many times. I don't know if it's just me or everybody, so I thought I'd do a poll to see what the experience of others has been with the performance of this website.

 

It's weird because for days it's fast, and then it gets slow and that can last for days too..

[Parsad]

Hi Liberty,

 

About a year ago, we switched to unlimited bandwidth and data, and since then the performance has been pretty good.  A few months ago, I had my site host move the website onto their grid system, which made it even faster. 

 

You get the occasional slow loading day or period...usually it's your own internet service provider causing the slowdown.  If they are doing work on their network, it can slow down access to certain pages.  Once in a while, the website host also does network upgrades, etc on their system, so you could see slow-loading pages when they are doing that.

 

Finally, it could also be related to your anti-virus software, in particular if you are running a firewall, or high-level monitoring or scanning of sites.  Sometimes, updates to that software can also cause slowdowns.  The best way to check is to turn off your firewall or anti-virus software for a few minutes, and see how the pages load when the software is not working. 

 

Cheers! 

[Smazz]

no real problems here..

[cwericb]

Like Liberty, I find that the site normally loads quickly, but a few days ago I found that there were several times when this site loaded very slowly or not at all. All other sites loaded normally except this one so I don't think this was a local problem. But compared to what things were like a few years ago the site runs much better.

 

On a similar subject, about a year or so ago there were a lot of negative remarks made about a certain Mr. B and his business ethics, or lack thereof. Coincidently this site went down for a day or so at the same time. I also acquired a very bad virus that I am 99.9% sure came from this site at that exact same time as the site was experiencing difficulties. Now to be clear, I don't blame anyone here for that, but I have often wondered if the reason why the site crashed was ever determined? I mean, it didn't just crash for no reason and the timing was rather coincidental.

 

 

[Liberty]

Hi Parsad,

 

You get the occasional slow loading day or period...usually it's your own internet service provider causing the slowdown.  If they are doing work on their network, it can slow down access to certain pages.  Once in a while, the website host also does network upgrades, etc on their system, so you could see slow-loading pages when they are doing that.

 

This makes sense, but I don't think it's the case. All other sites stay fast during the time that I'm having trouble with this site, and I'm with Teksavvy, who are pretty good about letting me know when they do maintenance. My package also gives me access to PEER1, a pretty fast internet backbone.

 

Finally, it could also be related to your anti-virus software, in particular if you are running a firewall, or high-level monitoring or scanning of sites.  Sometimes, updates to that software can also cause slowdowns.  The best way to check is to turn off your firewall or anti-virus software for a few minutes, and see how the pages load when the software is not working. 

 

 

I'm on a Mac and don't have anti-virus software or anything else that could be slowing down this particular site, and when I get the slowdown, I get it on both my desktop and laptop.

 

Your theories were good, but I think it must be something else, unfortunately  :-[

[Parsad]

On a similar subject, about a year or so ago there were a lot of negative remarks made about a certain Mr. B and his business ethics, or lack thereof. Coincidently this site went down for a day or so at the same time. I also acquired a very bad virus that I am 99.9% sure came from this site at that exact same time as the site was experiencing difficulties. Now to be clear, I don't blame anyone here for that, but I have often wondered if the reason why the site crashed was ever determined? I mean, it didn't just crash for no reason and the timing was rather coincidental.

 

The exact reason is not known.  All that is known is that the site's database was hacked and a virus file was added.  I subsequently had to delete the database and restore a back-up version.  Cheers!

[DCG]

Has this site been running incredibly slow for anyone else the last few days (bordering on unusable)? It seems to get stuck after loading the header, possibly getting stuck waiting for the adservers.

 

ETA: I've even been trying to post this thread several times and the page just won't load. I'm not having any issues with any other sites. It's taken me about 20 minutes just to post and modify this thread.

[given2invest]

yes, been having problems

[Liberty]

Had problem for the past few days, but it seems better right now. It comes and goes...

[Parsad]

Yes it was slow over the weekend.  Sometimes the ISP is doing their own upgrades, etc and you could have occasional experiences of lag.  It's running really fast again today, so I think they were doing some system upgrades.  If the site starts to run slow, they will generally shift assets over to give us increased bandwidth, as we have unlimited bandwidth and data.  Cheers!