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no question it is a great site. that wasn't the original question.

so to answer the question. yes it has been slower than normal lately.

when i first found the site it was normal, but it has gotten slower over time, much worse lately.

i am on a 6 meg pipeline too....which for those that don't know is pretty much as fast as you can get at home from DSL right now.

i download at 650k too....;0)

i don't really care though, i just keep using the site. ;0)

I just ran an optimize on the database. So hopefully this will help to load some of the pages quicker. Remember that the entire website is driven from a backend database. So all the "Recent Pictures", "Recent Forum Topics", "Chat Users" and which ever section your are in ("Articles", "Forums", etc) has to make queries on the database to dynamically generate the pages. As this forum grows, there become more data in the database, and as such more to search through for every page load.

Currently the website is hosted on a "shared" server. Who which means that I am sharing server bandwidth with what ever other websites are also sharing that server. Both Howard and I have been seeing these mysterious "500 Server Error" pages that are loading and I have the provider running traces to figure out what is going on. It appears to be a packet routing issue with one of there other servers so it is random, and all most impossible to trace.

I will at some point have to move the website to it's own dedicated server once it gets to big for it's britches so to speak. Once I do that then the website will have it's own dedicated bandwith.

Until that happens, I will keep trying to keep things cleaned up on the backend and keep my hosting provider doing what they are supposed to be doing.

Thanks,

My comment on the speed was not meant as a complaint . All of us who use this site are spoiled by the great work that BigKev does Faoults are so rare they are not expected near perfection the norm and when not here I think we are all worried we may have to suffer from shortage of Packard info . Thanks again to BigKev and we all appreciated his time and work he puts into making the best site on Packards and cars in general

My comment on the speed was not meant as a complaint . All of us who use this site are spoiled by the great work that BigKev does faults are so rare they are not expected near perfection the norm and when not here I think we are all worried we may have to suffer from shortage of Packard info . Thanks again to BigKev and we all appreciated his time and work he puts into making the best site on Packards and cars in general

Thanks I appreciate the kind words!

I just made a few adjustments to what content gets cached, and how often the cache is refreshed. So what this means is the stuff that doesnt change that often wont have to make a round trip to the database everytime. So thinks like "Whos in Chat" is only refreshed every 5 minutes instead or every time a page is loaded. So when I do this for alot of the various "parts" of the website this adds up to much faster page loads. You will also notice this in the "recent picture" along the right hand side. If you add a picture, it will show up in the picture section right away, but wont show up in the "Recent Photos" area until the next cache refresh (5 minutes).

Let me know if you folks see any difference in load speed.

Quote:

Just to clarify something, I have never posted anything to the affect the the website is "Free For Now". It is, and will always be free. I just don't want anyone from be discouraged from donating content thinking the website is going to turn into some kind of a pay website.

Thanks,

It seems to be off and on working for me. One minute it's fast as heck, the next it takes a little to load. It's always been that way for me though, and I've tried cleaning out cookies, clearing my cache, using a different browser, computer, etc. It's still pretty much the same for me but I really don't mind that much.

BigKEV,

It is quicker on my end today. I thought maybe it was slowing down because of all the great info and post here.

I've not personally found this site to be that slow. Though I've only a dial-up connection from home, I do check in, occasionally, from work with high-speed access. When I'm in via dial-up, and page loading involves a lot of images, I usually click on the "Stop" button or hit the "Esc" key. Of course, that approach doesn't work well work when I need to click on a graphic button.

In recent weeks, however, I have experienced an Internal Server error - whereupon I simply back out of it (one page) and try to go forward again. The only problem with that was when I was composing a post; I'd go back and my text was gone. So, when a post involves anything more than a few sentences, I've been forcing myself to compose it, first, in Notepad, and then cut-n-paste it to the online form.

Perhaps this problem of bandwidth is more pronounced when so many visitors are on the site, all at once, downloading large files from this most extensive (and still growing) archive.

Now only in its third year, I expect few growing pains with such a dynamic site, but any problems have been much less than others I've visited.