Very long page load/refresh times

[Chick]

..... I did find the time between eating bon-bons and and watching Robot Chicken reruns today

Well, at least I'm glad to find out you have a sense of humor!

Seriously, thanks for getting all this stuff fixed. It had become quite annoying and frustrating.

Cheers,
Cornelia

[Mark Oliva]

I am not going to apologize for the amount of effort all of the admins, myself and the community leaders all volunteer to put in here. It is not a lack of interest but a lack of time for those of us who have very busy lives. Any bit we give is something more than nothing, which is all one should ask for in making a good community.

I certainly hope you don't apologize for anything, Robbie! I think the great majority of us here are 100% thankful for the job you're doing. As long as I've been a guild member, I've been impressed with the way that you jump in and fix things as soon as you have time. Many of us probably would have to go into a post-addiction program if you didn't do that.

I run five gratis websites myself - ranging from our Vintyri RPG site to a small site for my wife's hairdresser. I'm always astonished at how some people who are getting something for nothing can get quite demanding, insulting, etc., when one doesn't immediately fulfill their demands or solve their own homemade problems for them. Really amusing is their tendency to start declaring in detail what one's responsibilities are and then announce to God and the rest of the world how one is not fulfilling them. I'm glad you still are able to understand that keeping the bread and butter on the table is a higher priority than repairing broken things on the website ... which kept giving us new forum posts, maps, etc., all the while the sky was supposed to be falling.

A long, long, long time ago I was forced to take Bible classes. From that time, I still remember a passage about folks who swat at gnats while swallowing camels whole. So ... grin, carry on and ignore the camel-swallowing gnat swatters. I think some 99% of the guild members will join me in saying that we have no complaints but rather endless thanks that you do what you do for us.

[Chick]

This long page load time problem has never gone away. I still experience "Page cannot be displayed" at least 25% of the pages I try to load.

I've talked to my ISP and they said it's the webhost, but couldn't tell me more. I talked to my Best Buy support tech, and he ran some measurements, and told me that the average response time from this IP is below their measurement scale. He said he couldn't tell me why, but most likely it was inadequate bandwidth for such a graphics-heavy site.

[Redrobes]

I know this isnt the fastest site in the world and it does have a lot of bots and crawlers siphoning down lots of images but the site works pretty good for me. Occasionally I get a bad page and we have had some forum issues with the PHP which seem fixed now. So if your getting 25% of page fails then there is something wrong but it cant *just* be the web host since it works for almost everyone else. Its possible that this website from your location could be slow but its not necessarily true that if the path to and from this site was fast then the site would be slow.

I have looked at the list of items which are not coming from this site in case you have an issue loading something from someone elses site but there are only two that I can see. One is your skype logo link and the other is my sig image. Now presumably your ok with skype else you wouldn't have put it on your page. So I wondered if your having trouble with my image. If you see my Witchlights status image in my sig ok then its probably not that. If what I just typed makes no sense then post back saying so !

If you open a CMD prompt and type:

ping http://www.cartographersguild.com

or

ping 67.205.21.88

(in fact check if the number is the same...)
and see what responses you get. I am getting around the 180ms sort of range which is somewhat typical from UK to US. Yours will be different but it would be interesting to know by how much. For example network tools say:
Traceroute, Ping, Domain Name Server (DNS) Lookup, WHOIS ping 67.205.21.88
about 40ms which, if they are hosted in the US, is more typical for them and the reason why the whole world sucks at playing first person shooters when the servers are located in the US.
Ping.eu says 160ms
Anyway - 40ms is not slow. So the web host is returning pings pretty fast.

[johnvanvliet]

I have never had a issue with this site
NOW
a few cravats ( i am running OpenSUSE 13.2 -- "linux" and firefox using "no-script","Ad Block Plus"," and " Ghostery" )

chick forget about best-buy
they fired all the good "geeks" and replaced them with "i know nothing " sales people

a few guesses here
Microsoft windows -- guessing win7

as to what your ISP
time warren or comcast or wow

i am guessing it is a cable or dsl

try this

unplug your modem for 30 sec ( xfinity NEEDS !!!!! 5 minutes )
100% no power

plug it back in
then power up your computer

your modem is normally the MOST likely culprit

then
do NOT use internet explore
firefox is my choice ( googles chrome -- the jury is still out on this )
install "ad block plus" and "Ghostery"
( No-Script TAKES A LOT of work on the users part to train it -- a LOT of work )
so for now do not worry about that

and see if that solves your problem



just a thought i had and checked on

this site is RATHER GOOD about not having a ton of thirdparty scripts running
-- oddly GOOD --
but their is ONE

Facebook.net
that WILL slow down page loading

so is facebook something you use ?
-- i really do not use it so i block all the tracking cookies and scripts they want to run ON MY hardware

[Chick]

I tried the pings, they came back at 85 ms both when the site was working normally and when it was not.

I have tried different browsers several times and every time, IE, FF, and Chrome all the same, working or not working, same for all.

My modem is fine, I've reset it many times in the past several weeks, but just to satisfy here, I left it off overnight. This morning, same thing, CG loads pages for about 3-4, then refuses for about 5 minutes, then suddenly works fine again. Repeat.

I have Win 7. My ISP is Charter using cable and I have their largest bandwidth and highest speed.

I do not use Facebook at all, and I have all the popup blockers on.

This problem does not occur on any other site that I use, ever, including other graphics heavy sites.



I still believe this is happening when something on the server takes excessive time for a few minutes, such as a big upload. But the only way to find out is for their support people to look and see what is going on.

[johnvanvliet]

for a test on windows 7
there are HIDDEN folders
for firefox
C:/Users/"YOUR-USER-NAME"/Application Data/Mozilla/

rename the "firefox" folder to "firefox.backup"

then relunch FF and see if there is a change here

( you WILL need to relog in and manually navagate to this site

BUT
if it works
i can show you how to reset everything

for Internet Explorer
C:/Users/"YOUR-USER-NAME"/Application Data/Microsoft/Internet Explorer