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2 hours ago, Oldddudders said:

It is at times like this that a minority of the membership needs to remember this is all free, gratis and costs eff all.

 

So if its free we should just put up with it? Is that what you are suggesting?

The issue is not just about current site members. Imagine how a prospective new member might react if they arrive here looking for a modelling community but every page takes 20 seconds to load and each time they post it takes 30 seconds, or the page hangs completely. The current state of the site could well be driving people away.

Bear in mind also that the sites sluggish behaviour is a major reason I haven't bought gold membership. I'm not happy putting up with this for free but I'll certainly not pay for it!

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6 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

So if its free we should just put up with it? Is that what you are suggesting?

The issue is not just about current site members. Imagine how a prospective new member might react if they arrive here looking for a modelling community but every page takes 20 seconds to load and each time they post it takes 30 seconds, or the page hangs completely. The current state of the site could well be driving people away.

Bear in mind also that the sites sluggish behaviour is a major reason I haven't bought gold membership. I'm not happy putting up with this for free but I'll certainly not pay for it!

 

So you won't invest in the site, but someone else should do so you can reap the benefits?

 

Andy Y especially puts in loads of unpaid work trying to keep this forum working, not just from a technical point of view, but in terms to stamping out wildfires in some of the more active threads when they are spiralling out of control and turning into screaming matches. For this, we get abuse. I'm sure where you work is perfect all the time and you are more than happy to work through your weekends, holidays and evenings to keep the wheels turning smoothly - just like we do. No-one wants a slow forum (you obviously believe that this is deliberate), but unless someone is willing to shake a magic money tree to build a really massive infrastructure then occasionally, bad things will happen.

 

Railway modelling isn't a religion and RMweb isn't a church charged with spreading it. If it's putting people off as you claim, there's little that can be done about it other than the work going in already. The numbers joining would suggest otherwise.

 

There are days when I wonder why anyone here bothers.

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22 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

So if its free we should just put up with it? Is that what you are suggesting?
 

Yup! The best is being done, because Andy and his employer have every motivation. 

 

The alternative is in your own hands, of course. Start your own forum, as Andy did with his own money more than a dozen years ago.

 

And see how much thanks you get. 

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23 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

So you won't invest in the site, but someone else should do so you can reap the benefits?

Don't put words into my mouth. That is not what I said and you know it.

What I said was that if this sites code were configured correctly and it functioned as a large web community site should, THEN it becomes deserving of people's financial support. I pay an annual subscription greater than RMWebs to a site I no longer visit because I once was involved in that community and site membership allows me to store unlimited numbers of images on its servers. It works. Therefore I give it my support. There is nothing wrong in this.

 

You might have missed a few posts up the page where I offered Andy my support and testing time. It was turned down, so don't lecture me about people wanting something for nothing.

This is the web presence of BRM magazine. Andy and his team should not be doing this voluntarily. BRM mag should finance it - or should finance it more if they are already doing so. "More" being sufficient to fix any problems.

The fact that the site is not 100% smooth and fast ought to be a problem for one of the premier model railway magazines in the country.

If people are working away for free and its not working right then people need to be paid according to their efforts, or paid professionals brought in.

If RMWeb became a pay-to-use site only I'd happily subscribe, providing of course it worked correctly.

Its the code that's the issue as I think any IT professional would confirm.

 

There are days when I wonder why anyone here bothers.

 

I know exactly what you mean.

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28 minutes ago, Oldddudders said:

Yup! The best is being done, because Andy and his employer have every motivation. 

 

The alternative is in your own hands, of course. Start your own forum, as Andy did with his own money more than a dozen years ago.

 

And see how much thanks you get. 

Ah yes, the old "see if you can do it better yourself" argument. Well done. Very constructive.

If potential users are coming here and experiencing poor page load times, you may well have to eat your words as someone might well go off and do just what you propose.

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1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

The current state of the site could well be driving people away

 

As I said before it is evidently not the same for everyone so you can't really claim to determine what the reaction of others or should be. Telling other people it's rubbish when it isn't for all is just as likely to be off-putting. So don't please. I'm having a bit of a break as it is hopefully without too much tinnitus. 

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24 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

This is the web presence of BRM magazine. Andy and his team should not be doing this voluntarily.

 

Actually, the web presence of BRM is: https://www.world-of-railways.co.uk/

 

Anyway:

 

27 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

Don't put words into my mouth. That is not what I said and you know it.

 

You said:

 

1 hour ago, Martin S-C said:

Bear in mind also that the sites sluggish behaviour is a major reason I haven't bought gold membership. I'm not happy putting up with this for free but I'll certainly not pay for it!

 

Which seems pretty close to me.

 

Anyway, I don't think anyone needs the grief from this, so we'll just ban you from this topic for a while and go back to making things better.

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54 minutes ago, Martin S-C said:

you may well have to eat your words as someone might well go off and do just what you propose.

 

Those with more years under their belts may recall previous instances of that. I can give lists of dormant or redundant URLs if you wish. 

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Andy, I am happy with the site, yes it does have ups and downs in speed. If it's very sluggish I log out and come back a few minutes later when it's usually sorted itself out.

Wonder if it's a particular section of the code that can get bottle necked. Had that when I was testing software way back when. Took a fair bit of sorting out too.

 

All the best in sorting this.

 

John

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Hi

 

Just a thought and might be completely irrelevant. We had a similar issue at work with our third party hosted servers that the hosting company could not find. In the end Microsoft got involved and in our case the firewall was only configured to allow 250,000 connections. Once this limit was reached our systems slowed down. The limit of 250,000 connections was the default setting and had never been changed. It was also a cumulative number so a reboot would fix it for a while as it reset the number of connections.

 

Cheers

 

Paul

 

 

Edited by PaulCheffus
Clarity
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I'm seeing random very long response times at the moment.

 

For example, fetching index.php?/topic/149199-forum-grindingly-slow-this-afternoon/&do=getLastComment to add this comment took 27.22 seconds according to Chrome DevTools.

 

The same symptom as previous problems.

 

 

Just letting you know, not whingeing!

 

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No problems at this end today, yesterday gave some 522 errors late afternoon. I think it's pertinent to say not all users experience the same problems at the same time which indicates there may be path and traffic issues as much as anything at the server node.

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11 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

No problems at this end today, yesterday gave some 522 errors late afternoon. I think it's pertinent to say not all users experience the same problems at the same time which indicates there may be path and traffic issues as much as anything at the server node.

It really doesn't feel like that at this end...

 

Because the delays are not consistent I guess some people are just lucky and don't see them and some might see a few but not report them.

 

When the delays happen they are present both on Chrome on Windows and Safari on iPad simultaneously. At the same time other websites are working as fast as normal. The delay always occurs in the first page fetch, all the subsequent graphics and CSS files are delivered much quicker (although some of those are slower than maybe they should be but not of the same order as the initial page delay).

 

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Logged-in a few minutes ago and it took more than a minute between when I pressed the button after entering my details and the forum loading the first page.

 

General navigation is currently variable from almost instantaneous to slow and Followed Unread is particularly slow.

 

John

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I've been finding it a bit slow but put it down to the fact that its post Christmas, we've all got over the excitement of opening those pressies, we 're still feeling too fat and full to be bothered to do much, so we're all turning to the forum to relieve the boredom :)

 

PS: I've had a couple of

error 522 connection timed out

this evening

Edited by rab
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