WOW! I didnt know that even one person had such a large effect. I can see how even a dozen or so people could severly slow down a server.

 

i think you are blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Prefetching can slow things down overall but not via a few people. What are darens stats on the firefox users? If I had to guess ..i would say it’s a lot less then 35%. All you need is a software firewall and antivirus and your windows patches. Nomatter if you are using firefox or IE, there is still risk….. if you stick to going to webpages you know and getting your **** off limewire with media as your filter, you are good to go. Like I said before, I think your leading people to assume worse things then what is really happening in reality.

Just my 2c.


----------- getting someone to rework some of the code is where the site needs help, not the browser.

 

Justin, prefetching is not exclusive to Firefox plug-ins, it is showing up in all sorts of areas, including the cheapo ISPs that promise dial-up as fast as cable (yeah, right). (Even AOL uses it to some extent, but they balance that by saving what they get in their proxy servers so that the load doesn't hit for each and every AOL user on every query.)

Conflating the number of Firefox users, the risk of viruses and worms and where you get your pr0n with a slowdown of sites dependent on SQL searches to manufacture pages on-the-fly when they are asked for makes no sense.

Prefetching is not usually that serious a load on bandwidth, but can be a serious load on server CPU cycles.

Since that may be what is slowing down the display of pages at ScionLife, it is worth considering. Whether one is using MSIE, Firefox, Opera, Camino, Safari, iCab, Netscape, Konqueror, or some other specific browser is almost inconsequential to the question being discussed.

The jam is in the number of complex SQL searches being demanded, and prefetching can drastically increase that load. That's a given and that's why some folks with prefetching apps are being banned from some sites...

As to the percentage of Firefox hits, those figures are not mine, nor are they just made up - they are from the monthly reports of browser usage in respected journals. If I was just to use server stats readily available to me, the numbers would be even worse. Here's the last 24 hours at my main server:



Bottom line, I don't really care who uses what OS or browser. The only reason it was even brought up was I was using a SPECIFIC example from my system, and that happens to be what I was using.

Now can we please get back to trying to help ScionLife serve pages faster?

Thanks!

 

firefox users are not the only ones with prefetching, google also has a program they call a "web accelerator" which is basically the same thing and will work on basically any web browser.

Im not a web designer or expert by any means, but i was reading some stuff, and it was saying that making the pages with the most traffic (i would think the homepage) cachable takes strain off of a server and helps load the site faster.

Another thing i was reading about was to compress the html code so that pages load faster.

http://www.softforall.com/WebAuthori...ct10010003.htm

The compression is also suppost to work for SHTML files, ASP files, PHP files, JSP files and external java script files(.js)

 

Tomas - are you helping w/ the coding of this site?

 

I'm not a programmer, Justin, I have just administered servers since 1985 and designed web pages since 1996. My only association with ScionLife is as a moderator - the inner workings of the site are in Darren's capable hands.

I do try to keep up with the latest trends and problems on-line, but don't try to tell others how to manage their software and hardware.

I will occasionally bring to someone's attention a potential problem, and if I'm aware of any possible fixes or preventatives I will suggest they might look at them, but that's about it.

Bottom line, I'm just another user here with some additional priveledges and demands on my time from being a moderator.

 

i wasnt comming at you. i was asking because I was going to pm you with some other possible solutions to the slowness issue.

 

because ppl like you put in random questions like these. have a good day

 

awwww. dont cry ...its ok.

 

Did I miss something?

 

ban "pre-fetching". there- problem 5% solved. we should notify all users to disable pre-fetching... a dozen people might not really show significant, or noticable improvement, SEVERAL dozen firefox users might! nay? yay?

 

I think thats whats being worked on right now. Except we dont have to tell everyone to turn it off, it can be written into the code of the website to not allow prefetching.

 

OK, I'm going to get on the prefetching thing right now...

FYI: we are about 70:30 (IE:Firefox)

 

OK, robots.txt has been uploaded with commands to prevent prefetching. I wonder if we will see a difference. Hmmm...

I also wonder if that percentage of IE and FF users is screwy because of prefetching.... if one person looks at one page on ScionLife with Firefox, then prefetches 40, it would probably look like 41 pageloads from a Firefix browser to the server, no?

 

I dunno about the numbers from prefetching, and I can't tell from my server logs since I have had prefetching banned from my sites for a while.

Something that can definately affect browser counts, though, is the ability of many browsers to "spoof" what they are in order to get flakey MS Windows centric sites to cough up info: Two of my browsers swear up and down that they are MSIE, even though they are not, just so they can view crappy sites.

Heck, one claims to be the latest MSIE running on Windows even though I have NO MS software on that machine. :D

Just for interest, here is a snapshot of some of my server info from, uh, "right now"...

________________

Or for those who prefer pictorial supplements:



(Information condensed from server logs.)