When the Forums (or a Website) is Slow

[Cloverfield]

I have recently been experiencing the forums being extremely slow through my work connection for over a week now. At home they are fast, but at work it is not uncommon for the index page to take over 30 seconds to load, and a longer topic even longer.

So I got to wondering what was going on and asked Justin about the server last week and all was fine.

You're probably all wondering the point of this post. I wanted to share some information with people, that if the forums (or even other websites) are running slow it might not actually be the fault of the slow website.

Those who are familliar with how the internet works will realize that to get to a website you may have to pass through many gateway servers. If one of these is down or experiencing difficulties, it could serverly affect your connection to the site you want to visit. And the worse thing about it, there's nothing you can do about it. You can't contact your ISP as it's not them either. You just have to wait (and hope) that it will be fixed.

So if you experience this one day, you might want to try going to MS-Dos (or the command prompt on some computers) and typing the following:

tracert www.oddworldforums.net

(replace www.oddworldforums.net with the site you want to check. Not only does this give you an interesting view of how you get to a website, it can help you see any problems.

When I currently try this from work, I can see that the 9th gateway comes up with Request timed out which tells me there is a problem out there.

I'm sure this post is really boring, nerdy and irrelevant to most people. But I just wanted to share this info and point out that if the forums are slow, in some cases it may not be us (of course there might be times it is too... but that's another issue.

Abe Babe...

[paramiteabe]

Yea it's a good thing to point that out Kriston. I dident expierence any slowness yet but sometimes it does happen. I get my internet service through a college University and believe me my Internet is slow! I can't stand it that now I want to get a faster service. But I get my service for free so I guess I will just have to live with it. It really isnt that bad though. But yea thats a good point there.

Paramiteabe...

[Joe the Intern]

30 seconds... That's a typical load time for me. :P

[Al the Vykker]

Yes I too have noticed occasionally on both my computers at home, the main page will sometimes, load very slowly as you have said. Though most of the time, I have no problems at all, I maybe thought it was the server, or my DSL. But if it just happens occasionally its not something Im going to be upset about because 98% of the time it seems to never load slower then five to ten seconds.

-Al the Vykker