Is anyone else experiencing problems accessing the forum?

[AlanPerkins]

From my office the forum takes absolutely ages to load. I get the banner at the top and nothing else for about 4 minutes. It is completely unusable. This has been since the switchover to the new forum.

I have tried different browsers - it is not that.

Anyone else experiencing this?

(If you have you probably given up visiting).

[rwayland]

No such problems here, even with my slow connection. Maybe you could make use of a utility such as CC (Crap Cleaner), which is helpful.

Richard

[swinkler]

I've noticed it is a little slower than it used to be but nothing like what you're describing.

Is it at home too for you?

steve winkler

[rbowser-]

Alan, I've had my issues with the new Forum, but as with the others responding here, I'm not experiencing the extreme kind of difficulties you're describing. The pages load in an average amount of time for me, which is pretty fast.

But oh dear, what if what's happening with you is happening with other users? - it could help explain the absolute snail's pace of posts we've ground down to---

Randy

[rwayland]

There certainly has been a low level of activity here lately. But that is also the case at Sibelius Music. Perhaps it is the season of the year? Too much twitter, facebook, etc?

Richard

[Tim Perry]

Is it just this forum, or do some other pages show the same problem? It could be that the browser needs an update, or the internet settings need to be changed (a utility called Tune Up Utilites can probably help speed things up. I believe that there is a trial version).

Completely out of the blue, maybe your workplace automatically routes selected sites through a proxy server to make it "inconvenient" to visit them. It could be a nice, tricky way for a grumpy manager to enhance productivity without giving the impression of being a dictator by physcally blocking sites. But then, this certainly would not explain why the problems suddenly happened when we changed to a new forum.

[C J Pro]

I have had no issues accessing this forum. Then again, I haven't been here in a while.

[rbowser-]

...Then again, I haven't been here in a while.
That, alas, is so true. Allow me to say - it's very good to see you here again. Come back soon?

Randy

[reberclark]

No problems here...extremely routine and I visit at least 5 times a day. I hope you get the problem sorted out soon - we need guys like you active here!

[Raymond62]

No problems overhere, may be you should use this:

http://www.jamestowndistributors.com/userportal/woeimages/CleaningPolishing/14781.jpg

Raymond

[sonata5920]

G’day Alan,

No problems here, just north of Sydney, though the new forum is a bit slower and cluttered with lots of what I don’t want to see. The very slow response at your site would be local, either the PC or the network etcetera.

You said:

“Anyone else experiencing this?

(If you have you probably given up visiting).”

My plea is, if you no longer read this, please come back and participate in the new forum. Randy and Richard are getting really worried about you and the lack of participation generally. I personally would blame my very good friends Raymond and Randy for having become so tame lately. Where is the spirit Raymond? Where is the spirit Randy? Where are those interesting questions we could argue about forever?

Best wishes,

Herbert

[AlanPerkins]

Hi All,

Thanks for the responses, they encourage me to dig deeper.

Let me point out that:

- I can access the system fine from home
- I have a brand new computer at work (it affected the old one and the new, which means it is an issue between the interaction of the site and my company infrastructure)
- My office has a 100Mbps connection and is not bothered by any other sites
- It is only happening since the change to the new forum.
- I am a CIO for a public company - I know what I am talking about when it comes to computers

Since no-one else appears to be having issues, I will have one of my guys look into what is causing it. If it is, as I suspect it to be, something happening at the forum end, then some others must be experiencing it, if not then hopefully it can be dealt with at our end.

I will report back here if I can find out more.

Cheers

Alan

[DarwinKopp]

Hi Alan,

Sorry to read you are still having problems.

The first suspect would be a low RAM machine (500mb and under) or a higher memory machine with lots of stuff already loaded (which is typical of a business box). The new forum software plainly uses a lot of memory. As I type this, I have only two tabs up and the memory footprint in Task Manager is currently over 120mb, where typically this was more in the 40-50mb range. I wouldn't call it bloated by current hardware standards, but lots of older/low-RAM machines may experience problems with this specific chatboard. As an aside, I do a fair amount of browsing from my local internet cafe and lately I come across only two frequent sites where the browsing pc drags to a near standstill - this site and one other, with this site being the worse of the two. Further, opening multiple instances in multiple tabs will stop the session dead, sometimes crashing the browser. The point being that these particular coffee-shop pcs are right at the edge of usability for the gamut of today's browsing, but that may or may not be the situation in your case.

Another possibility is if you are using the latest Firefox. Mozilla added something called a plugin-container starting with release 3.6.4 that spawns a secondary process whenever a site with flash content is loaded (garritan.com uses flash). For a variety of reasons, more than a few Firefox users have had their browsing session basically slow to crawl related to this upgrade. You may either look up solutions/workarounds over on Mozilla support if this might be the case, or pm me for the quick fix.

[marce]

Hi All,

Thanks for the responses, they encourage me to dig deeper.

Let me point out that:

- I can access the system fine from home
- I have a brand new computer at work (it affected the old one and the new, which means it is an issue between the interaction of the site and my company infrastructure)
- My office has a 100Mbps connection and is not bothered by any other sites
- It is only happening since the change to the new forum.
- I am a CIO for a public company - I know what I am talking about when it comes to computers

Since no-one else appears to be having issues, I will have one of my guys look into what is causing it. If it is, as I suspect it to be, something happening at the forum end, then some others must be experiencing it, if not then hopefully it can be dealt with at our end.

I will report back here if I can find out more.

Cheers

Alan

You can try acces to the forum trough www.anonymouse.org, that is a anonymouse proxy. If you can acces ok trough it, maybe can be some issue with your DNS server at home. You can try OpenDNS, that is free, faster and secure.

[Raymond62]

I personally would blame my very good friends Raymond and Randy for having become so tame lately. Where is the spirit Raymond? Where is the spirit Randy? Where are those interesting questions we could argue about forever?

Best wishes,

Herbert

My spirit has other things to do.... I must stay alert to new developments,,, haven't got time to set up some threads.... Disappointed, pity, but there is no refund possible....

Raymond

[rolifer]

I have no problems with the speed the pages load but I do have an interesting problem which I don't understand.

I am a member of a number of sites like this one where some are musically inclined and some are for teaching. On some of the sites, each times I open the site I am already logged in and on others I have to log in each and every time I pull up the site. I use Firefox and always check boxes adding cookies or saying keep me logged in and that will sometimes work as long as I don't close the browser. In other words, if I log in, go to another site and come back I am still logged in but if I close Firefox and open up NS again, I have to log back in again. This is something that started about the same time the new site opened.

Any ideas?

Ron

[Styxx]

Wow! What happened to this place? :confused:

[snorlax]

No problems with access here, though I have stayed in the background of late.

Randy, sometimes Firefox seems a bit random in its handling of cookies...I frequently have the same issue about sign-ins sticking or not sticking.

[pokeefe]

FireFox has been going through release 3.6 modification levels (or whatever you cal that last digit) pretty fast lately - 2 in the past week I think. Could be they're having problems. While I haven't noticed any major slow-down that effected performance, I did notice that it took a very long time for the spinner to stop turning when I opened this thread. It took a long time for the last bit of data to arrive.

Pat

[AlanPerkins]

I have identified that it is the way the site interacts with the firewall here. Not sure why but the firewall attempts to preload the entire site and do a deep packet intrusion test prior to exposing the page below the banner.

There must be something odd about the way the data is being constructed.

In any event, listing the site as a trusted site on the company firewall has overcome the problem and all is good again.