Why is this entire website so slow?

[head_spaz]

Why is this forum so slow?

We buy big fast computers... have high bandwidth connections... and this forum runs like it's hosted on a i286 w 16MB RAM running on DOS in real mode.
Everytime I visit, I leave with the impression that this site is slower than evolution!

I'm trying to ruffle any feathers... honest... I'm just pointing out the obvious... someone's got to.

[tboy]

this forum runs like it's hosted on a i286 w 16MB RAM running on DOS in real mode.

Amazing! You nailed it right on the head. That's exactly how we're running it.

[Steve Conner]

*cough* the Donate button at the top of the page... spare a penny for a po' blind Pentium II...

[Enzo]

It may be slow, but it still runs faster than I can think.

Whatever happened to that nitro-methane server you posted a photo of?

Steve may be on to something here. That DONATE button is glowing green.

I need to donate something myself. I wonder if it changes color.

(There's an incentive, tboy, color levels. And after a certain amount it becomes invisible.)

[Mark Hammer]

Patience, my son. Patience.

Actually, my sense is that for anything that relies mainly on text, 1998 technology is probably about as good as you need. Everything since then has been really tailored towards running bloatware with too many options and too many graphics.

[Old Tele man]

...heck, I was gonna blame it on "Union Electrons" getting ready for a strike (wink,wink)!

[cminor9]

While it may be a bit gauche for a new guy to pop up and gripe about slow response ... in all fairness, I have noticed that the site runs slower than before. It happened all of the sudden, too, which points to some kind of change that took place somewhere.

I don't think it's about cash either. Sure, tboy was talking about a new box. That's cool. But the site was running fine on the old box up until recently. Again, this points to a recent change somewhere, not so much an issue of insufficient hardware. So while buying tboy a beer would be a nice thing to do and would probably appreciated by him, I don't think it'll make the site run faster. As someone else said, a forum like this one should be a relatively trivial matter for old hardware. Unless a recent software upgrade introduced an inefficiency? That's certainly possible.

tboy, I don't know how geeky you are (and if you are I don't mean to be insulting), but if you are interested in troubleshooting I can offer some help. You have everyone's email addresses here, so you know how to get ahold of me should you be interested. saidar and mtop will tell you a lot if you are so inclined.

Oh, and tboy...it's probably not said enough: thanks for running the forum!

[Enzo]

You may recall the big system crash of a couple weeks ago or whenever? It was coming back from that that left us half-speed. Pretty sure tboy is on top of the system, whether we out here know what the deal is or not.