Why does this site take so long to load?

Everytime i try to get on this site it either takes 5 years to load or it times out and i get an error?

Every other forum i go it loads up straight away so its not my internet connection.

Is anybody else experiencing this?

I get that problem quite a bit. It'll work fine one minute, then the next it is either really slow or times out. Need to reboot my computer to fix it.

always slow for me too - 30 sec per page usually. Other forums I'm on - 3 secs

Yep,

been like this for weeks

😬

gettin to me too.

thats when it works, sometimes it just doesn't seem to want to load. No real time of the day either just speradic !! Umm ..........

ok cool so im not the only one 🙂

So what is it is it the hosting company?

Im glad somebody got round to posting this. I find it very slow and couldnt get on last night at all.

Shit.. Me too

oh but it is a free host 😂....................won't need a host when nobody wants to log onto the site 👍

Yes,

i have the same problem...

Maybe because of how many are on here ???

it just worked perfectly... but its 12.39am..

sometimes I can't get on at all...

Lee

slow from Dallas to host, why not host in Australia?

Way too slow.

There's several things affecting our performance:

Location of server which causes a latency issue. Usually, for sites hosted in the USA, around 200-300 ms is typical latency of the first request. The forum is heavily cacheable, uses HTTP 1.1, and works in short bursts once the request is made (see the images below), so basically, latency is simply not an issue, and probably the main reason we will be staying with cheaper hosting in the USA. AVDS is not an online game. In my testing right now, the three most common accessed pages, representing about 92% of all page requests, all complete in less than 1.2 seconds (see images). For folks in Australia, that's worst case 1.5 seconds to add on the cross-Pacific latency. It's not a huge difference, really. So let's keep looking at problems we can solve.

Server capacity. We are on a virtual private server. This is like a shared host, but instead of just a shell account, we have an entire machine image to ourselves. Sometimes, this can be slow due to what the other users on our physical hardware are up to. However, they are active when you're not, and vice versa. The slowness may be due to our configuration. We only have 768 MB of RAM without using bursting. We have bursting to 2 GB of RAM, which when it ends means we are running from disk. I've optimized the site to run in 768 MB of RAM and not burst at all. However, this does mean that some subsystems like our cache engine are a little starved. I'll look into optimizing things further, but I think the only solution here is for more RAM.

Site load. We have a very active community, and at a certain point, nothing beyond two servers will do. I will check to see if our usage logs are in that category yet. However, if we are, we're sort of stuffed, as the software doesn't support two servers in a meaningful way.

We've been skirting with scalability and slowness problems for a while now, and unfortunately, we can't really afford to do much more than we already do. Cost of hosting what have today: $48 USD / month (VPS, no CPU limits, 768/2GB RAM (guaranteed/burst), 500 GB per month, 40 GB of disk (we use 10 GB).

The cheapest Australian VPS plan I can find with just 20 GB per month of transfer is $80 AUD per month. And there's no guarantees that these servers although sold in Australia would not be hosted in the US or some other country which has no per-GB transfer costs. We use about 50 GB per month at the moment.

However, if we've outgrown VPS hosting, we need to go to dedicated hosting. We've done dedicated before, but always on someone else's terms. We've moved twice because of "free" services being extremely sub-standard or being run primarily in spammer's net blocks. It cost a lot of good will and grief. So we are going to pay for our service on trustworthy hosting providers. Dedicated hosting in the US ranges from $99 USD per month on up, about twice our current budget for hosting. Dedicated hosting in Australia is simply cost prohibitive.

I'll do some more analysis and tuning on the weekend, but there's only so much we can do with our current budget.

thanks,
Andrew

well that is just a little bit more detailed than what I was going to say ....

We just need to ban more people, to reduce the load on the site 😂

my comments re latency are based on the fact that I quite often get time outs in which I can not access the site at all. I will get you some more facts when this occurs again 🙂

The maximum latency of a connection anywhere on the planet is approximately 300 ms, 600 ms if it's via geo-stationary satellite. That's less than 1 second in the worst case. If you're experiencing time outs > 1s, that's not because the server is here in the USA, but due to the server having a bad day.

Does it let you back in say a minute or so later? I now have the system sending me e-mails when timeouts to the database happens. I have not had any of these since Feb 19, and have a total of approximately 20 of them in total since the beginning of February.

I'm not doubting you're having issues, just that the site has been a bit more "up" recently.

thanks,
Andrew

It took about 5minutes to load the forum just then. It didn't time out, just kept on trying to load until it finally did.

Same, but it is frustrating!
-Staggers.

just waited from around 9:45 to 9:50 for the forum to pop up. I will be more careful with my language, the page did not time out, it was eventually returned. As you have previously mentioned the trace does not vary particularly during this "wait" time. Hope this assist 🙂

Have the same problem here where it seems to take an eternity to load a page and yet other forums that I am on from the states are really quick.

damm computers cant live with them or without them...

Ohwell still happening. Took 5 mins to just get on.

yep same here 😬
thought i was on dial up for a mo..