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Why is this site so sloooooow?


Alcazar
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Even on UK broadband 750K, it takes up to 20 seconds to load a page, (although it's instantaneous when pressing "back").

Another BBS I frequent is instantaneous in both directions.

If it's not our fault, I'd HATE to try this site with a dial-up modem 56K

Alcazar

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[quote]Even on UK broadband 750K, it takes up to 20 seconds to load a page, (although it's instantaneous when pressing "back"). Another BBS I frequent is instantaneous in both directions. If it's not our f...[/quote]

Hi,

The back button will be instantaneous because you will be seeing a cached version of the page, and it won't have to be called from the server again.

The server is running slow, but it seems that the BB users (like myself) are being effected more than the dial-up users for some reason.

There are plans to move to newer Archant servers, not in the very near future but it is planned once the shop system has been changed.

 

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I am told it's due to the design of the program - and this if from a 'nerd' who does nothing but program ... I'm on high speed broadband, use a lot of sites for work and this is by far the worst.

Soory, we think Living France needs a new nerd!

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Whilst the speed of servers will be a contributing factor, there will be others also.

In this paticular case I'm inclined to agree with Janb's 'nerd' freind. The server-side code (or software if you will) is written in asp.NET, which is notouriously slow to load when compared to other codes, such as PHP or even cgi-scripts.
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This Forum is very slow.

Despite numerous postings, Forum Admin seem unable to explain why.

I cannot understand why it should be slower for broadband users than dial-up users.

I am unable to send private messages and despite having given details of my ADSL router and firewall, no suggestions have been forthcoming on how to resolves the problem.

Out of curiosity I took a look at the Total France site tonight - all of the pages load instantly!

Going back out of a Forum can take up to 30 seconds, and more often than not goes straight back to the initial Forum sign-on screen.

I also get an increasing number of screens coming up with 'Server Error in '/' Application. This is followed by half a page of text that the end-user is obviously never intended to see.

Bob Clarke
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/grindoux

 

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[quote]This Forum is very slow. Despite numerous postings, Forum Admin seem unable to explain why. I cannot understand why it should be slower for broadband users than dial-up users. I am unable to send p...[/quote]

I sympathise and agree wholehartedly with BobC. I've  recently converted from Numeris ISDN to 2028 Broadband and have noticed only a slight increase in speed here on this site. There is absolutely NO DOUBT this site is slow and has some problems which need adressing. I am certain that many original forum members can't be bothered to wait and have either left or remain as lurkers. Those of you that are heavy posters must have a lot of free time available !

The TF website is indeed amazingly fast, in fact it's pages load instantly as do most of the other sites as well as search engines and google etc.

I've been around on the forum since it's inception when there where only two other members. I'd like to stay around and hopefully let others benefit from my experience. So come on forum admin, what are you going to ?

Paul

 

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"Me Too" -type posts are always boring so apologies in advance but...

I agree, this forum is extremely slow and I think response times are getting worse. I frequently get +server time out+ messages when navigating around LF and that doesn't happen to me on *any* other site.

quick edit:

forgot to say that I frequently can't even get the home page to load so don't get as far as selecting a forum / thread. That happened to me around 8am-ish this morning and again about 6pm-ish (UK time)

Carole
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Ah................so it isn't just me being impatient then? Perhaps Forum Admin could come back and comment on what, if anything CAN be done, and what, if anything WILL be done?

Looks like I'm not the only one who can't be bothered to visit as often as I did? And I also posted recently that the forums seemed dead since the introduction of the new software.............yet another symptom?

Over to you, Forum Admin................

Alcazar

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[quote]I'm afraid you will have to be patient a little while longer, Forum Admin is taking a couple of days break.[/quote]

Patient? Who me? Never tell my wife that, she'sd think something was going off, she tells me I'm one of the most impatient people she knows

 

Alcazar

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"I'm afraid you will have to be patient a little while longer, Forum Admin is taking a couple of days break."

Being the Forum Administrator of this site is now probably a fairly thankless task given the poor quality of the software.

Paul makes a good point - if you have a lot of time to read and reply to postings then the speed of the Forum is probably not important. If you are working all day and only have 30 minutes or so in the evening to use the Forum then the slow speed is a major factor.

Archant is a fairly large company - I cannot understand why they tolerate this performance from the software that they have presumably purchased.

Regards,

Bob Clarke
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/grindoux

 

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<< Archant is a fairly large company - I cannot understand why they tolerate this performance from the software that they have presumably purchased. >>

You have to carefully specify acceptable response times in all circumstances *before* purchase in order to have a good basis for complaint after purchase. "You didn't make that requirement clear to us" being the permanent cry of many software suppliers... smirking as they prepare the quote for software enhancements which the purchaser never imagined wouldn't be covered in the original version.

Carole
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All

To address the comments raised on this forum, the performance issues have nothing to do with the performance of one programming language vs. another programming language, the performance of the underlying servers, or the quality of the forum software.

For the more technically minded, with reference to the various comments concerning our choice of ASP.NET over Perl, PHP or other CGI scripts, ASP.NET is a compiled development environment rather than an interpreted one (PHP / Perl). This means that the raw high-level, inefficient code is compiled into efficient machine-level code (in this case called MSIL) during the development process, and before it is deployed to a webserver.

In comparison, PHP or Perl scripts are interpreted at RUN TIME (as people browse the site). If a page is viewed 100 times by 100 different people, the ASP.NET environment simply executes the precompiled application code whereas PHP or Perl scripts need to be loaded, parsed for errors, optimised, and then processed one line at a time once for each of the 100 page views. This is somewhat slower, and represents one of the key reasons that most enterprise web development is moving away from scripted languages (PHP, ASP, Perl) to compiled languages such as .NET or Java.

Unfortunately there are many more factors that can impact performance of websites than the environment used to host or develop the website, or the raw CPU power of the servers.

In this case, the site’s performance problems are due to a limitation imposed on its internet connectivity, which cannot be resolved without re-working sections of the website.

As part of a wider project we are in the progress of looking at migrating this website onto a new high-performance hosting platform (driving other Archant websites such as www.edp24.co.uk) which will bring performance improvements across the board, and help eliminate the delays you are currently experiencing with this website.

We are intending to complete this work by early next year, so in the mean time please bear with us.

Regards

Tim Stephenson
Digital Media Project Leader, Archant Group IS.

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Thanks James, and Tim.

I'm sitting here in my clients' Belgravia offices (told you I was a snob, in another topic, didn't I) with a super-fast broadband connection; everything else whizzes along nicely but the forum runs at the same speed as my rural French dialup. I suppose it reinforces my belief that if the list of people on line is more than about five names long, I should go and put the coffee on while waiting for the pages to come up...

Let's hope things can go to this other platform very soon.

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"As part of a wider project we are in the progress of looking at migrating this website onto a new high-performance hosting platform (driving other Archant websites such as www.edp24.co.uk) which will bring performance improvements across the board, and help eliminate the delays you are currently experiencing with this website.

We are intending to complete this work by early next year, so in the mean time please bear with us.

Regards

Tim Stephenson
Digital Media Project Leader, Archant Group IS."

James,

What a wonderfully patronising reply - I was lost by the second paragraph. And what a great job title Tim has.

I was under the impression that the change to the new Forum was designed to be an improvement. In which case why was the 'migration to a new high-performance platform'?! not done then. Now it seems that you are looking at the possibility of doing it. www.edp24.co.uk certainly works at a very good speed.

Given Tim's obviously expert knowledge, I am sure he can explain why I am still unable to send private messages within the Forum. You already have details of my ADSL router and firewall software.

I look forward to his solution.

Kind regards,

Bob Clarke
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/grindoux

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I was flabbergasted by Tim Stephensons reply which was obviously meant to baffle and fob us off with technical ********. No offence intended but that was not really a very helpful reply to what is an annoying problem.

It seems that the LF team just don't seem to care about the forum or it's members needs. It is true in my opinion that since the takeover/merger  or whatever the forum has lost it's homely feel and I think that whoever is at the "top" has probably never even been on the forum and just doesn't care as long as the magazines sell and the profits keep rolling in.

Incidentaly the ADP24 link was amazingly fast so the sooner you can use this platfrom the better!

best regards,

Paul

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Well, as somebody who has had a lot of dealings in the past with corporate IT departments in publishing companies I didn't find Tim's title, or his response, at all surprising.

I'm sure what he says is theoretically correct, but in practice the ASP.NET application here performs far slower than PHP, Perl on other forums or even our own forum which I believe uses CGI scripts. The example given, when I loaded the forum, did indeed seem faster (not a lot, but faster) on a dialup connection. What slightly worries me though is that it is not used anything like as much as this forum; would the speed advantage still stand if there were 20 or so people all trying to use it at the same time, which, if I read between the lines, seems to be one of the problems here?

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A number of members - including me - have commented on the slowness of the site and possible reasons for the problems. Someone from Archant corporate IT has taken the time to reply from a position of knowledge, not speculation. Yes he speaks technical: well... this is a technical issue. You could argue that he just didn't bother to 'dumb-down'. And it does seem they are seeking to resolve site problems.

I'm bearing in mind that currently there's no charge for using this forum, we don't even have to subscribe to any of the magazines in order to access it (which to me would be a minimal and fair requirement).

I do agree number of posts seems to have diminished - but over the past few years there have been a number of occasions when the membership has either been significantly pruned or started from scratch. On each occasion, the membership has rapidly grown to at least the previous levels. Some people may have moved to other forums because of site frustrations - either they'll come back in a few months or others will replace them.

My personal peeve is that the archives are lost - people who posted extensively and knowledgeably on a subject previously don't necessarily bother to re-post the same information to a new variation of the question. But as someone else commented, even life in France evolves so information from a year or two ago isn't necessarily as valid as when it originally appeared.

This forum is very useful - it may be less so for a few months - but as a contact and information exchange point for many knowledgeable and helpful people, it's excellent. Even if I can't understand LF's business case for providing it!

Carole

PS: what's with the comments about Tim Stephenson's job title? It's what he does. For seriously attractive job titles, go to IBM. I have business cards for a man who is an "E-Learning Evangelist" and a woman who is a "Thought Leader" !!

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I think the point Tim was trying to make is that it wasn't worth buying specific forum software to run effectively on the current server when it is planned to move the site to the new servers in a couple of months and it not being compatible, it couldn't be moved beforehand because of some of the software that is used for the shop system. Also Archant wanted to provide the same forum software for all its websites throughout the group (licensing and control).

Also I thought it might be good for a developer rather than myself to explain. Far from being patronising (and I know Tim) he was trying to provide an answer to the questions posed, some of which were of a technical nature as therefore required a technical answer.

There are two issues here, one is of the software itself and the other on the operating speed. The operating speed is to do with the connection, not the software used it would seem. There is a new version of the software that is due out which should improve on the other problems (we'll see ), just waiting for it to be released, and the connection should be improved with the change of server.

 

James Parfitt

Webmaster Evangilist

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[quote]I was flabbergasted by Tim Stephensons reply which was obviously meant to baffle and fob us off with technical ********. No offence intended but that was not really a very helpful reply to what is an ...[/quote]

Paul,

The post wasn't intended to fob anyone off with technical info, and I'm sorry you feel that way.

The LF team do care about the forum and its members, but unfortunately they do not have direct control over the hosting platform, or its performance. This responsibility sits within the domain of our Group IS team, of which a number of people headed up by myself are focused exclusively on the Group's digital media requirements.

The EDP24 link is on the new hosting platform, which is the result of around £90,000 of investement in new servers and higher bandwidth connectivity, for use by all Group websites.

Unfortunately, certain components of the LF website are based on older technologies and have dependancies which cannot be easily migrated to the new platform. When these dependancies are resolved, this site will be moved to the new hosting platform bringing all the associated benefits and hopefully blazingly quick performance.

Best regards

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[quote]Well, as somebody who has had a lot of dealings in the past with corporate IT departments in publishing companies I didn't find Tim's title, or his response, at all surprising. I'm sure what he says ...[/quote]

Will,

The LF forum performance problems are mainly down to the lack of bandwidth available to the server hosting the site. This will be resolved when it's moved across to the new hosting platform.

The example site I mentioned, EDP24, sits on a set of load balanced webservers and is accessed concurrently by anything up to 2500 users.

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[quote]A number of members - including me - have commented on the slowness of the site and possible reasons for the problems. Someone from Archant corporate IT has taken the time to reply from a position of ...[/quote]

Carole - thanks !

A less technical version of the above:

1) The reason this site is so slow has nothing to do with the fact it's running a Microsoft environment.

2) Running PHP, CGI, Perl, Java, or (insert your favourite language here) isn't going to make it any quicker.

3) That doesn't mean that we love Microsoft or that we think it's good / better than everything else. The Microsoft platform / environment is simply what our company is currently standardised on for software (and website) development.

4) The site & forum are slow because there isn't currently a large enough connection between the server used to host the site and the internet.

5) We're (Archant's IT team) working to fix this by moving the site to a newer & faster hosting system that has an extremely fast internet connection, but some bits of the site need to be rewritten to work properly.

6) For a taste of the speed this site WILL be running at soon, please visit www.edp24.co.uk.

7) Job titles.... They get worse as businesss get larger! :-)

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