Ultra slow page load

[davidg]

In addition to what Adrian says about different locations and bottlenecks, and avoiding the temptation to say that you might expect the website to freeze in Iceland, there is another consideration - bandwidth

I have several computers here and the speed of access is different on each one, even using the same broadband network in my home. That is simply down to the different versions of browsers I use and it is ALWAYS Windows and IE that are the slowest to access, with the newer versions of IE being the slowest. However, on the slower PCs at busy times of the day the bandwidth available to me drops and can make those PCs impossible when accessing the forum. That is called the contention rate, where a certain bandwidth is available to be shared between everyone connecting on that node. When more people use the network, less bandwidth is available to you personally and you notice the drop in speed

All of these things, including what I said about IE and various anti virus softwares checking you against phishing lists in another thread, can slow you down to a crawl or even prevent access altogether

There is also yet another bandwidth problem at busy times where a particular server hosting a particular website has too many people making requests on it and it can't service them all quickly enough. Here in the UK our daytime access is usually noticeably faster before America wakes and things can get decidedly slower for us after that. It can literally make the difference between a large file being transferred within a few minutes or taking all night to transfer

My Mac using Safari consistently gets to this forum fast and has little difficulty. My other Windows PCs constantly struggle especially in busy periods. There's a moral to that but I'll not state it and, of course, everyone's mileage varies quite considerably so some will notice no problems at all

[Dale-of-Cedars]

I'm using Firefox on a Mac, and for the past few weeks XMTS has been one of the slowest-loading sites I visit regularly.

When it's really slow, the last thing to load is the background image...

But I'm willing to bear it. As my mum used to say, "Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can, seldom seen in women, and never seen in men."