I have broadband and this site is the slowest of the 6 other websites that I visit. Is there a setting to simplify how much loads up for this site?

 

because it's powered by scion, that's why it's slow. LOL

 

I am trying to keep up with demand. Three weeks ago we added a second server to get things sped up. Load times have increased, but it looks like we may need a third server ALREADY! Sorry guys, it's simply because we have a ton of people visiting the site.

 

I was just thinking about this yesterday, i could have sworn you added a second server, but couldnt understand for the life of me why the site seemed even slower than usual. This site sure has grown since i joined.

 

I agree with that... quit whining its hard enough to find this kind of sites to have fun on and ask questions about the coolest cars ever made...

 

It's good news, sortof, to have it get lagged up... means a lot of people are accessing the pages and that it'll keep growing! Which is GREAT.

 

(This may not apply to anyone else, but the new version of my default browser had a 'feature' selected that 'pre-downloaded' all the links on any page I loaded.
Something like that has to be a Hellish load on a server!!! I shut down that option and I'm getting a lot lower bandwidth requirement and a lot less hard disk activity... I was totally filling a 6 Mb/s pipe sucking pages I was never going to look at...)

 

Hey tom...

are you useing, firefox ?? if so
how do I get to the page to also shot it down..

Thanks...
Keith.

 

You may or may not have that 'optional' feature installed in your version of Firefox. There are versions of similar things for most browsers and platforms. Most of those ads you see to 'speed up your internet' do similar things, which puts a big load on the target servers. I'm wondering if there is any way for the servers to limit that sort of thing.

Anyway, on my system (not MS Windows) it is in the 'Preferences' for Firefox, listed as 'Fasterfox.' One has to go to the custom settings of 'Fasterfox' (if installed) to shut down that individual part of it...

(For me it's a part of the same plug-in that keeps me from seeing advertising and pop-ups that I didn't specifically ask for. Well, actually it only closes some of the doors - there are other plug-ins that close the rest of 'em.)

 

i think some of the code needs to be reworked. but thats my 2cents

 

Thomas, your answer is close to what I was looking for. I tried Firefox and some things did not work as good as XP so I am back with XP. This site just loads and works slowly for me.

 

if you use FF... tools, extensions, get more extensions. FasterFox is on the first page. once installed, it creates a tab in the options menu. click on the tab, then the fasterfox tab to get the window Tomas pic'd in for us. Once I unchecked the button he marked, this page loaded in 4.469s (per the timer in the bottom right of FF).

 

Keep in mind, folks, the reason I even mentioned the "pre-fetching" that a lot of 'speed-up' apps and plug-ins use, is not that it affects the D/L speed of the pages for me.

If even a few of the many visitors to ScionLife have something like this turned on, the server load - especially the SQL server load, might get really bad at peak times...

If a an appreciable number of folks are using apps that pre-fetch, it is going to affect the speed of the site for everyone.

All it took for me to probably affect the site for others, was for me to load any page that listed 25 topics and a whole bunch of other clickable thingies - like all those buttons at the top of the page... I could watch my 6Mbs pipe run flat out until it got a copy of every one of those links - not just the URL, folks, but the entire page the link went to...

This has GOT to be killing servers in the real world.

Oh! Look! The server seems to be curled up fetal on the bottom of the rack right now. Good job guys.

 

Can you better explain why you think this? Support it? That way I can move to improve the site.

 

I think that some of the algorithms need to be reworked so the queries can be performed faster. Also, you need to find out what parts of the page draw the biggest load an split them up on a few different servers. I know you have a lot of people but with a few high end servers, there shouldn’t be any issue w/ speed. There must be more going on that Im not aware of because something doesn’t sound right.

 

Yeah, we really need a third server to optimize things... then we would have one for the wbserver, one for SQL writes and one for SQL reads. The bottleneck really is the SQL server. Now that we have a second SQL server things are better, but until we get to that third server things are still going to be sluggish. It all comes down to money.

Advertising has been really sluggish lately and we barely broke even last month. I am hoping that things will pick up in thenext month or two and we can add another server.

 

you should run a crossover connecting both the SQL servers - that should help the performance.... if the place you get your hosting will let u do that. Whats your ram situation?

 

Hehe.. I forgot what I am running for hardware... I'm not really a computer guy tech guy so a lot of it makes no sense to me. I can do anything I want as far as hosting goes... I am using turnkeyinternet.com and Adam is super cool.

 

you could run 2 Nic's and should be able to connect 2 servers together to process your sql. If you run them with the crossover you will be saving bandwidth and speed up your results. Also, maybe think about putting your pictures on a different server??? Maybe you should think about that since downloading pictures from different servers will help a lot since there are many small graphics all over the site

 

I hope you're not using them, they appear to be selling their business.