I use a dial-up connection when connecting to the Internet. In order to post this question, I had to go out and find a WiFi hot spot with faster speed than dial-up.

The programing for this iteration of the DhO, as compared to other php based forums has always been a bit slower loading (usually one to two minutes or so for a page to load). Although it took a little longer to load pages than other forum software, I learned to adjust and just accepted it.

However, recently (last week) I began to experience 15 to 20+ minute waits for the "recent posts" page to load, and then an extra 15 to 20+ minutes whenever I clicked on a thread to read. As far as being able to reply to a thread, that ability is gone, for all intents and purposes. I click on the "reply with quote" link and the system loads and loads for 20 minutes or so and then comes back to the opening of the thread without entering the "Add Message" page. A bit frustrating.

I was wondering whether someone had made some recent changes to the program (updates or whatnot) that has caused this change. Just asking.

Not sure what is going on on your end. The site has never been faster for me.

Well, this is a change. I actually got in to write a reply. And this on my laptop which I used at a WiFi hotspot.

I have three computers, one running XP, the laptop running Vista, and the third running Win 7. All three have been having trouble on my dial-up connection. This is the only forum that I'm having that kind of trouble on.

Methinks it may be spirits? Or something.


Are you using a dial-up connection too? Otherwise we're talking apples and oranges.

Is it still happening now? Apparently there was some recent troubles with Bing hitting the site too often (see here).

I guess Mara finally figured out how to use a computer.

Yes, it's still happening. I still don't have total access to the forum (can't access PM messages). Someone sent me a PM but I have not been able to access it yet! (BTW, I'm composing this on my laptop. Still haven't had an opportunity to attempt the same using my desktops.

I'm somewhat surprised that today I am able to reply to your post, but here I am, replying. It allowed me to enter the "Add Message" page and post this reply.

It took twenty minutes just to see the preview of this post before saving it for posting.

There may be some instabilities as some upgrade things are done.

Sorry about that. Also, see the sticky about the either distributed attack or a hyper-agressive Bing indexing crawl that basically shut the place down for a while.

Hopefully, upgrading to the Epsilon class service on Omegabit will make this place faster: will have our own dedicated CPU.

If it doesn't get better let me know and I can try to track down what is going on.

Daniel

Daniel, thanks for responding to this. I have been waiting for you to reply.

I haven't been able to access this page (Add Message) until now. So, the problem, at least from my end, it still on-going. Took over half an hour for me to get to this page to reply to this post.


Does this mean that there are upgrades on-going at present? Your sentence is unclear about current circumstances.


Yes, I recall two or three weeks ago that the site was not even coming up at all during the "attack" and "index crawling." I do not believe that these are what is causing the present circumstance that I am facing with regard to the slow loading of the website forum.


Any idea when this upgrading will begin. Best guess will do.

Well, I'm effectively banned from using this forum by the technology. I've ruled out this being caused by my computer because it is the same on three different computers I have, each running a different OS.

It continues to take 20 to 25 minutes to load a page on my dial-up connection. This condition is not acceptable, and a waste of my time. So, I have not been able to come here and keep up with what is going on. If I post here at all in the future, it will likely be when I have access to a high speed connection on rare occasions. (This post is being made from my dial-up.)

It is interesting how more is often times less, somehow. Pay more to upgrade your product, but receive less in the way of overall ability to access it. I guess it all depends on where one's priorities are.

What if you try accessing this site from another site that simply loads this one? E.g. zend2.com. Try browsing to dharmaoverground.org from that site and see if it works!

Currently a full page load of the recent posts page equals approximately 500 kb of data for me. Using a 28800 baud modem that should give a transfer time of roughly 2-3 minutes.

If you are using the chrome web browser you could try checking the network section of the developer tools:

tools -> developer tools -> network -> (re-)load page.

That might give an indication what's happening that is taking so much time.

Simon

where are you located that you have dialup and not dsl or cable or something like that?

i haven't heard reports about others having this problem, so it still may be something on your end somehow. could it be something about your dialup provider? could they be limiting or throttling this site for some reason? have you talked with them about it?

we are actually on a new server that is pretty fast, I think.

pages load nearly instantly for me, but I have 18MB del, so that is not a fair comparison.

i am very sorry that somehow you can't access this place easily.

any tech geeks out there able to offer some assistance?

considered using a cell-phone or ipad or something like that over the cell-towers, if such things are to be found wherever you are?

i routinely use this place from a mobile device, and so long as I have a reasonably good connection it works just fine and is pretty fast, much faster than what you describe, with pages loading in about 10 seconds from 3G and very fast on 4G.

Thanks for the suggestion, Beoman.

That seems to work for the time being.

I'm not a techy, so I have absolutely no idea what might be causing this (aside from outside interference). I use the Firefox browser and have had no problems with this site up until the recent changes. I've experienced a lot of freaky things (especially on my laptop) while accessing the Internet. Losing messages after I've typed them out (then having to remember what I typed to re-enter it) when all I've hit is a shift key or a back key or whatever. This phenomenon is just one more freaky thing that has occurred.

Woot! Seems my techy-intuition worked. Note that I have no idea why it worked. It seems to be an interaction between your modem & this server, so I figured putting another server between you two (zend2) might help...

Thanks for your reply, Simon. 500 KB of data loading does seem to equate with the loading times that I was experiencing before the change over.

Actually, what is occurring now (since I have tried logging in using the proxy site on both my XP desktop and Vista laptop) is that I now am able to access the site logging straight in without it taking 20 minutes to load. This is a very strange phenomenon considering what has been occurring during the past few weeks when this has not been possible.

If I were to say what I really think is going on, some here might think me crazy! So I won't. Even though there are others here who have experience similar events in their own lives (Daniel included, as revealed in a recent post of his that I read last night) and might be able to corroborate my speculation.

For the time being, I'm experimenting with logging in straight (rather than from the proxy site) to see how long this kind of access speed might last (i.e. whether it may slow down anytime soon or not). So far so good on two of my computers. Have yet to have time to try this on my other desktop (Win7) computer.

One thing that might be of interest. A large portion of the bandwidth used when loading the forum is from loading each members personal image, the one seen both in the left column of forum posts, and also next to each name in the chat window that opens via the "Online Friends" button in the lower right hand corner.

This means that the amount of data downloaded for each page view can vary quite a bit depending who is currently logged in to the site and how large their profile image is. If the problem you are having is bandwidth related, this could possibly explain why it sometimes works and other times not.

An interesting test could be to block out the user profile images in your browser, with firefox you could do something like:

* Install the blocksite firefox addon here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-se/firefox/addon/blocksite/

* Configure the addon via:
tools -> addons -> extensions -> block site -> preferences

* Uncheck the 'enable warning messages' checkbox.

* Add the following urls to the blocklist using the 'add' button:
dharmaoverground.org/image/user_portrait
dharmaoverground.org/image/user_male_portrait

* This should have the blocksite addon settings looking something like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/9rzlgxnwsn34bgk/Screenshot%20from%202013-08-13%2022%3A21%3A38.png

Reload the DhO forum page and see what happens. If the addon is working correctly you should no longer see the user profile images, and perhaps the page load times will be improved.

If it doesn't help, just remove the addon again from the addons manager.

It's unfortunate that there are always such distances involved, diagnosing an issue like this locally would likely be quite straighforward.

Good luck,
Simon

In Firefox,
Options>Content> uncheck Load Images Automatically
if that's what you're looking for