Search engine rebuild finished

[Steve St.Laurent]

The search engine just finished the rebuild process so everything should be in the database. I rebooted mysql after it finished to clear out all the cache tables, etc. Things should speed back up close to normal again. Keep in mind that because of the size of the pages it will be somewhat slower than the old forums which will be most noticeable by dial up users.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[Bill Lins]

Thanks, Steve! Oo.

 

[swexlin]

Hooray! Thanks for your EXCELLENT work, Steve. The site does seem a bit faster today.



And you dial up guys - get CABLE!! Oo.

 

[Paychk]

It's really starting to crank now, THANKS STEVE!

 

[paccool]

Steve, the speed is WAY slower than with the old setup. (I am using dial up modem) This morning it was taking about 10 seconds to switch from forum to forum and 20 seconds to load an individual thread. I finally gave up and went to a different site to see if it was as bad. It worked OK(was the NWB site)



Came back to here and it still is the same. I turned off the pop up blocker last week and that helped a little. Is the only answer to go to a high speed line? I told you before that I don't know much about computers, is there any way to configure things to help with the dial up or is the new system just overloading things due to all the additional things that are going on?



Thanks for all the hard work to get the new system up and running. Please don't take this thread as a complaint, I'm just looking for suggestions as to what needs to be done on this end.



Stan

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

You might try downloading and using firefox as a browser. See this thread - https://www.turbodieselregister.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109159 . I'm on a high speed connection and I'm not seeing any noticeable difference between the old site and the new site now. The pages are about 40% larger so it should take about 40% longer on a dial up connection (same on a high speed but it's fast enough that 40% isn't noticeable).

 

[John - K5AWO]

Stan,



If you are using IE 5. 5 or higher there is a way to make it go faster. The problem is all the graphics that are being loaded. I wish that vB 3. x would store those on the local PC and not have to reload them on every screen. Better programming would have cured that problem.



Now, to help you out.



Click on TOOLS, OPTIONS, ADVANCED,

Uncheck all the following parameters.

* Automatically check for Internet Explorer updates

* Play animations in web pages

* Play sounds in web pages

* Play videos in web pages

* Show image download place holders

* Show pictures

* Smart Image Dithering



What this will do is tell IE not to download those items, just download the text.



If you wish to see what is behind a box or view a picture, all you have to do is mouse over the object, right click to get a shortcut menu and select "Show Picture". I just tried it here and noticed that the main menu tabs at the top still pop up like they always do, so no loss of functionality there at all.



I think you will be pleased with the result.



Also, since you are using a dialup modem/phone line. It would greatly behoove you to download Mozilla's Fire Fox browser. It is 10 times faster than MicroSloth's IE browser.



Get it at http://www.mozilla.org/products/fir...firefox/releases/0.9.3/FirefoxSetup-0.9.3.exe



Hope this helps.

John

 

[paccool]

Wow, fast response guys! Thank you.



I'll try these things tonight when I get home and see how things go. I can usually manage to screw things like this up so we'll see. Good directions John so maybe even I can follow them through.



Stan

 

[John - K5AWO]

Response Times

Hi Steve,



I have an ADSL line at home and usually get something like 57-62 kB rate down.



I can tell you that there is a huge difference between the old site and the new one. For me, the difference is about double what it was before and is "annoying" when you expect a page to pop up in 1 or maybe 2 seconds.



For me, it is 8-10 seconds now. Here at work, where I share bandwidth with several hundred other folks, the response rate is variable. However, when I came in at 0600 which is about 1 to 1. 5 hours before most of the users get online, I was still experiencing slow response.



The top couple of inches of the frames display, and then there is a long wait with the status bar showing "waiting on server".



I just did a request for "new posts". 25 seconds before the page initially displayed and another 10 seconds for the hour glass to go away.



I just tried dieseltruckresource.com forum and their site showed up in 9 seconds and fully loaded in 24 seconds.





So even with my slow response from a (high speed) T1 circuit, there is a good deal of difference with our new vB 3. x versus other sites. I have noticed though, that they don't display as much in the way of banner ads. I do recognize though that without the banner ads, the TDR members would not be able to afford this excellent web site.



I do wonder though if the text could be made to load first and clickable with the graphics loading last? I'm not familiar with the software at all so the thought might not even be workable??



-John

 

[paccool]

John, I figured I could screw this up!



I downloaded Firefox onto my office computer just a bit ago. Got the icon on the desktop and all that, can open the main page ok. Now, what am I supposed to do with it?? I don't see any place where my "favorites" are at even though the help section say's all that will be copied over from the browser that was being used.



I have been using AOL main page to navigate, not sure how that ties into internet explorer on my windows program.



Now that I have firefox, how do I use it? I know I have to use AOL to connect, then I thought all I would need to do is open the program and start using it.



I hate these dam*** computers!



Stan

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

The problem is all the graphics that are being loaded.

The problem isn't all the graphics that are being loaded. This has been brought up several times and simply isn't the case. The graphics are a very small portion of the page and of the increase in size. Here is a comparison of the old forum home page to the new one:



<table border="1"><tr><td></td><td>Old Page</td><td>New Page></td><td>difference</td></tr><tr><td>Graphics files (excluding banner ad)</td><td>22kb</td><td>27. 9kb</td><td>+5. 9kb (7. 9%)</td></tr><tr><td>Banner ad (City muffler)</td><td>32kb</td><td>32kb</td><td>no change</td></tr><tr><td>Javascript for site menus up top</td><td>none</td><td>9kb</td><td>+9kb (12. 1%)</td></tr><tr><td>Javascript for vBulletin menus</td><td>none</td><td>32. 5kb</td><td>+32. 5kb (43. 6%)</td></tr><tr><td>html file for forum home (content)</td><td>104kb</td><td>131kb</td><td>+27kb (36. 3%)</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>158kb</td><td>232. 4kb</td><td>+74. 4kb (47%)</td></tr></table>



As you can see the amount of extra bandwidth used by the graphics in this version of the forums is minor. Almost all of the increase in the page size is due to the increased functionality of this version of the software in the javascript and the html page itself. The increase in the size of the graphics on a 28k dial up connection would take ~1. 5 seconds longer to load. We do take into account the needs of users on dial up connections, older slower pc's, and those running lower resolutions. However, in order to stay competitive we also have to move with the times. More and more users are moving to high speed connections and are expecting to see higher content and more functionality.



It's a fine balancing act between offering more functionality and features and supporting older systems. In this version of the forums for example we've basically stopped supporting people running at 640x480 - the minimum usable resolution on the site is 800x600 now (less than that and you'll have to scroll back and forth). It just wasn't feasible any more to hold back the site to support the few users running at that resolution. I try to do my best to keep the size of the pages as small as possible while still moving forward with the functionality we need to stay competitive and offer more to you the users. Any change we make no matter how small or large will be loved by some and hated by others - it's the nature of change. With this change for example I went through all of the graphics images that were supplied to us and edited the color palettes of them to remove any unused colors so as to reduce the length of time it takes to load - just one of the things I do to try and help out dial up users as best I can. As I move around the net I find many pages that I can't imagine even using if I was on a dial up connection due to their size.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

AOL is your problem. Very few programs will copy your favorites from AOL. You need to connect via AOL and then minimize it (the underline icon in the upper right hand corner of the window) and then open up firefox to browse with. AOL's program is creating the connection. BTW - there isn't a worse browser or one that creates more compatibility problems than AOL's.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

BTW, today is a REALLY bad day to compare speeds. There have been some major problems in the Atlanta area on the backbone. At times I haven't been able to get to the site at all and it was dying in the Atlanta area (the server's are housed in Atlanta).

 

[paccool]

Steve- I think you were right about the AOL stuff. I got Firefoox working and all I can say is Holy Cra* Batman! The pages that were taking 10 seconds to load are now loadiing in about 2 seconds. AND, you say today is a bad day to compare due to problems!



I'm sure I will have a few more questions before I get everything setup, still need to load it in my home computer.



Thanks Steve

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

Hi Steve,



I have an ADSL line at home and usually get something like 57-62 kB rate down.

You only get 60kb down on a dsl connection? That's the slowest dsl connection I've ever heard of - might as well be on dial up, you can get download speeds that fast. As you can see above the page is ~50% larger than it was so if you are on a slower connection (which yours is) you will see approximately a 50% increase in how long it takes pages to load - not much that can be done about that. As you can also see above the graphics are small portion of what's being loaded. Even with the banner ad that was on that page (31kb) graphics represented 25% of the page. Most of what you are seeing the wait for is probably the javascript files. Here on my dsl connection (just tested at 644kb down) I just did some browsing around the site and the main forum page loaded up fully in 2 seconds, going to the 24 valve forum loaded in 3 seconds. Loading the first page of Marco's ECM post (with 30 posts per page) took 6 seconds. That was all on IE6, btw. Maybe there's something else going on on your machine causing it to run Javascript slowly or something using up a LOT of bandwidth. Have you tried running spybot and adaware to see if you have some bots eating up resources?