It took

nearly 5 minutes from clicking on the title to reading this post, other US based sites are behaving normal as far as I can see from here.

Guess something isn't running as it should be ...

cheers, Leo

I have to agree. Apparently

I have to agree. Apparently it isn't a problem with all providers however. Which suggests that it may be issues with peering or maybe filtering. For example, I almost never have any problems from Verizon FIOS at home. And usually don't have a problem with Verizon Wireless on my phone but sometimes I do. And I often have a problem accessing it through the work "public" internet framework which is Comcast.

However, I'll happily keep trying to access MRH until I find a route that works! It's worth the effort!

John

I believe it's the serves, again

MRH is as slow as it was during the storms and behaving in the same manner

Steve

Molassas slow...................

...........glug,......... glug,....... glug.........................glug!  What's up with that?  I thought it was our Road Runner-guess not.

Peter

The sky is falling ...

Oh no the MRH site is slow!  I think I'm dying....

Seriously. it's working reasonably well for me

IN fact...

It's verging on snappy at the moment.

If it's that slow for you and driving you that batty, go work on your layout...

Really though, two separate threads on the subject?

Right now its slow, and I'm

Right now its slow, and I'm on my home Verizon FIOS connection. Very slow (but operating)

John

Cold up der, eh?

Wires are colder up where you live Kevin. Less resistance.

Website slow

I have to agree with the earlier comments. It seems to take forever when I want to return to the list of recent posts. I am left looking at a black screen with just the MRH name at the top. I live in Canada so I doubt that it is the local service providers.

John Slean

It's the ads, or one of them anyway

I can see in Chrome that the site gets stuck waiting on "http://model-trains-universe.com/".  I blocked that domain in AdBlock, and now the site loads incredibly fast.

I've been on throughout the day..

...and haven't had any issues.  But that's just me.FWIW

Ken L

It takes 30 seconds or more to load a page

Yes, up in Edmonton AB my high speed internet is not too speedy.

Hope they can get it resolved soon.

Randy

While I agree, I'm constantly

While I agree, I'm constantly amazed the amount of complaining people do over things that are free.

filtering out model-train-universe works, but...

Then the advertisers are not getting what they pay for - our eyeballs. It does make the site lighting fast though. It also probably blocks the list of advertisers and I have been know to use that. This is not a good iption for MRH!

Complaining about things that are free

Actually, the point of this thread is to bring attention to an issue with the website so that the MRH guys can hopefully solve a problem so new people coming to the site won't be turned off of it.  If there is one thing that drives people away from a new website its slow load times.  I will be here no matter what, but hundreds or even thousands may not stay around for another look if its their first visit, and that wouldn't be doing MRH or their advertisers any good, either.  

Complaint or help?

Strength in Numbers

I agree with Rick on this.  I've had delays myself, but that isn't going to deter me from visiting the forum every day.  However, if quite a few people write in about the problems they're having, then Joe can conclude that the problem is indeed widespread, and it might give him extra ammo when he consults with his web hosting site on the issue.

-Jack

It's intermittent at best

Once or twice today it has taken a little longer than usual to load.  The rest of the time it has been fine.  But that's on my bleeding edge connection here in rural Saskatchewan...

I imagine Joe already knows there is some lagging, it's not like he has a big fat pipe connected to the MRH servers he is likely seeing it if it exists.

The bottleneck is easily

The bottleneck is easily detected with http://tools.pingdom.com/

I am sure the developers have there own waterfall tools, like Firebug for Firefox.

Either it's the model-railroad-hobbyist.com server or it's a problem in the serve.php script.

However, detecting problems is easy. Solving them is a whole different ballgame

Yes, we've noticed it's slower than usual

Yes, we've noticed it's slower than usual, and that model-trains-universe.com, our ad server, is the source of most slowness.

The basic problem is model-trains-universe.com is hosted on a relatively inexpensive shared hosting service. We were fine as long as the website traffic was down in the 200's online at a time, but we've grown to the point that we're regularly in the 500-600 range during the North American waking hours and the shared hosting on the ad serving is slowing things down considerably.

We're looking into moving model-trains-universe.com to more expensive dedicated hosting - it costs more but it's also a lot faster since it doesn't need to share cycles with anything else.

In the meantime we've turned off the featured sponsor logo in the right hand bar. That tends to serve the slowest, so this change should speed things up somewhat.

If you find a web page load spinning more than 15-20 seconds, don't just sit there and wait, cancel the page load and click the refresh button. Generally the page will load right up on the second try.

If you're sitting there 5 min like some say they have been, then stop doing that! Cancel the page load much sooner (30 seconds max) and then click refresh. The second attempt almost always loads faster. No way should you be waiting more than about 15 seconds for a load. Cancel it and refresh.

Cookieless subdomain?

Why not use a cookieless subdomain? http://ads.model-railroad-hobbyist.comor some such? Same cost, more speed.

Not trying to start a technical discussion. Just a suggestion. A "not possible" will suffice

Looking at many options

spark:

We're looking at many options, including a subdomain of the existing site.

It's funny.........

..............that what we consider "slow" today, was light speed fast not so many years ago!  That said, it is a bit annoying when you get used to a certain response time with sites and then they slow down.  I sorta thought the increased traffic was slowing things down, kinda like the speed of traffic between 6:30-7:30AM and 2:30PM on your favorite road to work.  Looks like Joe (God?!) is going to build a few extra lanes on our highway to cyber railroading bliss!  Gotta love it!!  Kidding aside, thanks for trying to fix things, Joe, we all appreciate your efforts every day.

Peter

Attn Firefox Users

I just disabled the latest Flash update 11.6.602.171. Now MRH is zipping right along. No page load delays at all. When I re-enable the Flash plugin MRH goes back to random page load delays.