Pocketpcthoughts.com Slow As Molasses?

[Camp]

I used to like coming to this site, but for the past month or so (maybe longer) it has become slow enough that I would really rather not come here anymore. It takes forever for pages to load. I have verified this problems on more than 4 computers, so I don't think it is happening to just me.

Are the site admins aware of this issue? Does anyone have any other comments/flames?

[Edgar_]

Interesting, I hit this site 5-6 times a day from Comcast in San Francisco - no problems what soever - except COMCAST DNS goes up and down regularly (verified by Comcast - not a PPCT issue). No issues in the last 45 days at least. Where are you located?

Have you run Ip Traces to see if the issue exists in your region, perhaps a handoff from one carrier to another or a local IP problem? Are the traces showing drops at all?

[Jason Dunn]

We had an issue for several months where a mis-configuration in our ad server led to really bad performance - you probably saw it where the page was loading and a banner would load in the middle of the page, hang there for 10 seconds or so, then pop over to the left? We finally fixed that problem about a week ago, and things are much faster since. The banner still loads in the middle and pops over to the left in Firefox, but it's been fixed in Internet Explorer.

phpBB is also a bloated pig in terms of performance - we're on a dedicated server, dual 2.0 Ghz Xeon processors with hyperthreading, RAID drives, 4 GB of RAM...and we're almost always running at a high server load, which makes thing slow. We're moving away from phpBB towards a different forum software solution, but it's been a very slow process because I have one developer and he has to do a huge amount of coding to re-integrate our CMS into the new forum software.

When our site is "fast" and not bogged down, most page loads happen in 3-4 seconds, which I consider acceptable for a site that's mostly dynamic content. We cache as much as we can, but there are limits to that.

One option if you're really frustrated is to become a subscriber (http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/subscribe.php) and turn all the ads off. That would speed things up for you.