Surveyorconnect hangtime-

Looking into it... thank you for letting me know.

Noticing any difference now?

instantaneous now- thanks:-)

I still have about a 25-30 second hang up when coming to the site, or going from a thread back to the main page (Back to Forum Index). It's instantanious going from the Index to a thread, though. I think Steve Gardener has the same problem. I'm on Brighthouse (formerly roadrunner) in Florida. I don't know if that's a common thread or not ...

Wendall, What's your email, I can't attach a file to the email system in your profile. I recorded my screen to show you what I'm talking about.

wendell at harntech dot com

From where I'm sitting, there's two possible issues here:

• It could be a server (or servers) between you and the Beer Leg server (or one of your ISP's servers) that is having trouble, thus slowing your connection.
• It could also be the fact that Beer Leg is currently sitting on a shared server, meaning that it is on a server with potentially hundreds of other sites.

When you visit a web site, your connection literally hops from server to server until it gets here. If one of those servers is behaving badly, then it will try to route around it. Sometimes, it has no choice. This is why I will usually suspect this as being the case first, simply because it is happening to only a couple of people (as far as I know).

The second one is not likely the problem, but stranger things have happened. If it were, everyone would be experiencing slow connections here and you can bet I'd hear about it. 😉

Please understand, I'm not trying to say it's all on you. I'm just stating what I think is the problem based on my own experiences and knowledge.

I can further expand on the second item above though... at our current host, which is relatively inexpensive, there's really only two roads into our server. If one is down or blocked by a problematic server (as above), it will try to reroute to the other road. Sometimes, however, both roads can be having trouble. It's sort of like Salem (Oregon) right now, where going from the west end to the east end is nearly impossible due to lack of planning for construction projects.

Anyway, this brings me to the subject of a dedicated server. This is something that I have kept open as an option and I even have a good friend who is the owner of a hosting company that is ready to flip the switch when I give the go-ahead. One of the benefits is that once moved, Beer Leg would not be sharing the server with anyone. The second, and most important benefit, is redundancy. My buddy's hosting company is big on redundancy, which means that there are 5 roads coming into town and they are building more. With that setup, your odds of having a bad connection or even no connection are slim to none.

The big setback here is money, but please don't take this as a request or begging for donations. We have a pretty decent supply of funds to keep us online for several months at our existing host. If we move to a dedicated server, we are talking about 5-10 times the cost of the shared server (over $150 per month, which is about $45 per month less than what our current host would charge for a lesser server). Obviously, this reduces the financial buffer we have. So I'm trying to time this well in order to take advantage of the low hosting price we enjoy now. It does sadden me that there's even one person with a problem and I want to fix that.

As far as our financial situation, yes, we do have some advertisers. However, we cannot charge the typical "industry rates" simply because we have no history to base it on. Yes, the traffic says a lot, but it says nothing about our longevity. I'm not crying the blues or anything like that because I see some very promising things coming up that will help support Beer Leg in many ways. The News page was just one of them and it's still a work in progress. For the record, I built it alongside the forum simply because I don't want to clutter the forum and I want the forum to stay pristine and survive in its native habitat. This is how all of the supporting projects will be built, so as not to encroach on what makes the forum so enjoyable by so many of us.

I hope that helps explains things a little better. 🙂

Wendall,

I'm really not complaining (I can't complain about free services), I'm just trying to figure out what the problem is for me.

I can understand that there a lot of internet links between my computer and your web hosting, and if one is slow, then my response is slow, and it may have nothing to do with you or me. But, like I said, I only experience the prolem when going to the your Main Index Page. Clicking a link to a thread is instant. I'm trying to send you a video that shows I clicked on a long thread with lots of pictures attached, and it loads instantly. But then when I click back to the index page, it's another 30 seconds to get back there. It would seem that if there is a cog in the internet linkage, I would not consistently see fast load times from your site outside of the index page. Am I wrong to think that?

> I'm really not complaining (I can't complain about free services), I'm just trying to figure out what the problem is for me.

I know, and I didn't take it as a complaint either. 🙂

> But, like I said, I only experience the prolem when going to the your Main Index Page. Clicking a link to a thread is instant. I'm trying to send you a video that shows I clicked on a long thread with lots of pictures attached, and it loads instantly. But then when I click back to the index page, it's another 30 seconds to get back there. It would seem that if there is a cog in the internet linkage, I would not consistently see fast load times from your site outside of the index page. Am I wrong to think that?

And I didn't really offer much of an explanation... I got a little sidetracked. :-$

I think that is partially with how the forum software works. When you visit the index page, it is literally loading each of the first 30 threads, PLUS all of the posts within each thread. It does this basically because it gets most of the loading out of the way right up front. Then when you visit a thread, it is already loaded, so it pops open quickly.

The reason it has to do that all over again when you return to the index is because more posts have been posted since you visited the thread, so it has to reload the page. This place is very busy, so it is very likely that posts have been made since you visited the thread.

So, if your connection is somehow slowed down along the way before arriving here, that index page will definitely take longer to load each time. One thing you could try is to use the back button in your browser when going back to the index most of the time, then just occasionally hit the Beer Leg logo to reload it. Then you shouldn't have to wait so long each time. That would be a test though, because I'm not certain that the site wouldn't try to reload the index (because of new posts) even if you did use the back button. It's probably worth a try though.

Further, a lot of this will likely be solved when we move to the dedicated server. Aside from the other benefits I mentioned, I failed to mention one more: it would have a much more powerful CPU and a lot more RAM, none of which would be shared with anyone else. So even a slow connection like you are experiencing should notice a significant improvement.

It sounds to me like the problem you are having is likely a combination of issues as I've explained here. Hang in there though, I'm working hard to fix as many of these issues as possible! 🙂