Painfully Slow

[gamerjoe]

I have been trying to access this website for the past couple of months, but it has been so painfully slow and unresponsive that I get frustrated and leave. Sometimes I get the dreaded Page Cannot be Displayed timeout message. It took me 5 minutes just to get to this point in the forum so that I could post the comment.

I really like the changes in layout, posting of pictures, and the clean presentation. I just wish that I could bear with the loading times.

[SVO4PWR2]

I have Comcast and all my favorites load up fast and i'm on a hand me down Gateway laptop.

When my Dell "newer than the laptop" was running my favorites would up even faster.

-RICH-

[Ken Potter]

Are you wireless or on a cable modem or dial up?

I'm on Comcast with a cable modem. While I'm no computer guru by any means I found by re-booting my cable modem things speed up quite a bit.

Every couple of weeks I unplug the power supply and cable. I then repower the modem with the cable disconnected and count to ten. I then disconnect the power and reconnect everything.

I then restart the computer and zip... it makes a big difference.

Also clear your cookies and run your de-frag program helps.

[gamerjoe]

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate the diagnostic and troubleshooting steps that you offered, but I can definitely say that my Internet connection is super fast and that any other site loads immediately. I am a technology director and this is the kind of thing I work with for a living, so I can say definitely that my desktop PC is clean and fast. I have Time Warner cable with 10mbps download and 1mbps upload speeds.

I will work some more to figure this out, but I can say that my laptop at the office has the exact same issue and we have 4 T1 lines that provide me with 6mbps at that location.

I was thinking that maybe the bandwidth was recently reduced for this site, and that the administrator is throttling the bandwidth so that members get fast access and non-members get slow access. I'll keep working at it and see if I can figure something out.

Thanks.

[SVOeric]

when doing the upgrade, I enabled debug on the forum. Page generation times were along the lines of .19 seconds, on the slowest loading pages, most were.05 ish.
I also manually downloaded a copy of the forum database (about 1.4 gb) which had a sustained throughput of 1.1 megabytes a second, with bursts as high as 1.7megs a sec

When we set this server up, I did a lot of homework on bandwidth, and the provider we are using is one of the fastest in the nation.

Last time someone had this complaint, it ended up being some 'accelerator' software they had on their computer.

Sorry dude, but I'm betting your slow response is not us.
post up some traceroutes, with times.
try another browser (do you have 9 toolbars loaded on your browser?)

OR!!!!
It could be that I've turned your connection speed down to nothing for not having city and state in your location information.

[adamgb]

I have never had an issue loading pages on this site (well barring that one time I had a virus). I have even logged into the site on a slow work PC and it loaded faster than most other pages. Check out your PC/firewall or whatever else is between the browser and the webpage. I doubt it's on the server. Might be a setting somewhere if your internet is fast everywhere but here.

[gamerjoe]

Do some *NIX TCP traceroutes and see where the response delay is. I don't have any latency issues with this site from any place I've connected to it from. Granted I have about a hundred times more bandwidth than most, but still it's just loading simple webpages.

If that's your car in your avatar, I'd say it needs a bit more wing.

Here is my tracert... The worst part of the route is when it hits the Chicago area. The timeout after the roadrunner hop is typical since anything on the other side of their external firewall will be blocked from the trace.

C:\Users\Kevin>tracert www.svoca.com

Tracing route to svoca.com [67.225.160.19]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.150.1
2 8 ms 9 ms 9 ms 76.89.232.1
3 28 ms 9 ms 9 ms 76.167.1.201
4 20 ms 27 ms * tge4-0-0.lsanca1-rtr1.socal.rr.com [76.167.2.56]

5 * * * Request timed out.
6 18 ms 18 ms 19 ms te-3-1.car1.Tustin1.Level3.net [4.71.104.149]
7 29 ms 18 ms 22 ms ae-2-3.bar1.Tustin1.Level3.net [4.69.132.218]
8 92 ms 20 ms 18 ms ae-0-11.bar2.Tustin1.Level3.net [4.69.136.198]
9 64 ms 53 ms 53 ms ae-10-10.ebr1.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.69.136.206]

10 53 ms 51 ms 54 ms ae-71-71.csw2.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.69.136.126]

11 51 ms 89 ms 71 ms ae-72-72.ebr2.Dallas1.Level3.net [4.69.136.141]

12 67 ms 86 ms 71 ms ae-2.ebr1.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.105]
13 79 ms 71 ms 71 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4.69.132.38]
14 88 ms 113 ms 89 ms ae-3.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.69.132.62]
15 89 ms 88 ms 89 ms ae-6.ebr1.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.69.140.189]
16 273 ms 210 ms 215 ms ae-11-55.car1.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.68.101.130]

17 98 ms 97 ms 98 ms WBS-CONNECT.edge5.Chicago1.Level3.net [4.71.182.
14]
18 95 ms 108 ms 94 ms lw-core3-ge10.rtr.liquidweb.com [209.59.157.133]

19 95 ms 93 ms 92 ms lw-dc2-dist3-po1.rtr.liquidweb.com [209.59.157.2
22]
20 103 ms 101 ms 108 ms dc2-vps1-310.liquidweb.com [67.225.163.253]
21 98 ms 101 ms 95 ms 67.225.160.19

Trace complete.

There may be an issue with a router in the Chicago area which would explain why I get very fast access to other pages except this one. I probably just do not route through that pathway for most other sites.

That is not my car flipping, but actually just a snapshot from a video game called Burnout Revenge.

Thanks everyone for offering your suggestions. Hopefully the routing issue will be resolved soon.

[SVOeric]

215 ms ping is a bit slow-- but not your problem. Most circumstances, you won't notice a difference on a website between 100 ms, and 200 ms.
(you might in an high-speed on-line game)
if you just do a straight ping, what's the time on that?.

Our service provider actually has 5 backbone links, 2 with ATT, 1 mci, 1 to Level(3), and one to savvis.
Looks like you're coming in through Level3. I come in through ATT.

Anyone else coming in through level3 ? Mike?

[caroth]

My work connection appears to be running into the same Level 3 router in Chicago and I don't have any issues:

Tracing route to svoca.com [67.225.160.19]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms ftclcomads0rm01-fe0-0.mcleodusa.net [63.253.91.113]
2 42 ms 52 ms 15 ms dnvtcouzh00jp01-t1-1-2-3-5.mcleodusa.net [63.253.92.65]
3 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms dnvtcouzh17jc03-ge3-0-0-1.mcleodusa.net [64.199.48.65]
4 22 ms 22 ms 23 ms kscamo54h00jc01-so2-3-0-0.mcleodusa.net [64.198.101.89]
5 28 ms 27 ms 28 ms stlsmogzh00jc03-so3-1-0-0.mcleodusa.net [64.198.100.169]
6 43 ms 42 ms 43 ms chcgilwuh53jc03-so3-3-0-0.mcleodusa.net [64.198.101.85]
7 42 ms 42 ms 43 ms chcgilwuh53jc04-ge3-2-0-0.mcleodusa.net [64.198.100.206]
8 58 ms 59 ms 59 ms ge-6-19.car3.chicago1.level3.net [4.71.100.9]
9 59 ms 59 ms 60 ms ae-11-51.car1.chicago1.level3.net [4.68.101.2]
10 67 ms 67 ms 68 ms wbs-connect.edge5.chicago1.level3.net [4.71.182.14]
11 85 ms 68 ms 67 ms lw-core4-ge10.rtr.liquidweb.com [209.59.157.137]
12 66 ms 67 ms 147 ms lw-dc2-dist3-po2.rtr.liquidweb.com [209.59.157.232]
13 67 ms 67 ms 68 ms dc2-vps1-310.liquidweb.com [67.225.163.253]
14 67 ms 68 ms 67 ms 67.225.160.19

Trace complete.

Work connection is a 3mbps bonded T1 circuit.

[SVOeric]

do me a favor, tell me how long it takes you to download this file, and what kind of throughput it shows. it's a little under 1 meg file.

www.svoca.com/testfile.tst

took me about 8 seconds.

[gamerjoe]

do me a favor, tell me how long it takes you to download this file, and what kind of throughput it shows. it's a little under 1 meg file.

www.svoca.com/testfile.tst

took me about 8 seconds.

From click to load it took 11 seconds. It actually took about that same amount of time from when I clicked on Reply until I was able to type.

At Speed Test (http://www.speedtest.net/) I get 9704kbps down and 967kbps up. Plus, as I stated before, every site that I go to besides this one will load nearly instantly. When I go to www.svoca.com the home page takes nearly 30 seconds to fully load, and each page I try to load after that takes nearly 20 seconds with each click. It is nearly unbearable. It has been like that for a while, but I kept assuming that one day it would clear up, figuring that there was a known issue with the server or a circuit or whatever.

[SVOeric]

If you can download that file in 11 secs, you don't have a bandwidth problem. The total bandwidth required for the front page of this site is about 25,000 bytes, so following the same formula that took 11 secs for 1.0 megs, should take .4 seconds for you to load the front page...

I'm going to go back to the original thought.... Try a new browser. What browser are you using now, and what tool bars/add-ons do you have loaded on it. I've seen 'phishing filters' cause some sites to just crawl, because every time you load a page, it goes out and checks your url against someones database.

[SVOJames]

I travel quite a lot around TX, MS, AL, NM, OK, and LA, sometimes I even have to use a dial up connection, but the few times this site has loaded slow has been to heavy local usage.

What Browser are you using?

james

Dang, Eric posted about the broswer while I was typing mine.

[caroth]

If you are using Internet Explorer, download a program called "hijack this", do a system scan and clean out all of the garbage attached to IE and startup.

[Otto Man]

Another thought would be to a thorough clean-up.
Get something like THIS
and run all "chapters" of it.
Made a world of difference for me.
Just read instructions and when in doubt don't delete something without semi-pro help.
Just trying to help.