Brad Wardell's views about technology, politics, religion, world affairs, and all sorts of politically incorrect topics.
Is it Comcast or JoeUser or the hardware?
Published on December 13, 2003 By Draginol In Cooking

Everything is too slow. I don't know how much of that is from Comcast and how much it is because WinCustomize.com is currently camped out on JoeUser's servers because its servers crashed. But it's frustrating.  I like things to be fast. I'll pay a premium for them to be fast. That means when I click on a link, the link shows up right away.

I wonder if anyone else is finding JoeUser slow. I know WinCustomize is slow but there's nothing that can be done about that. Not until after the holidays anyway when we get new servers up and running there and get it back on its dedicated machines. What bad luck though, 3 servers in 2 months. All hardware related. Note to self: Never buy a Fujitusu drive again.


Comments
on Dec 13, 2003
I have DSL and JoeUser is probably the slowest loading site of all the pages I surf regularly. But it's not THAT bad. Like 10 seconds compared to one for most other webpages.
on Dec 13, 2003
Y'know, that reminds me of another question. If one assumes the capacity of the Internet has a finite limit (I'm talking transmission speed, not server speed), then how does things like VoIP and video clog things up? My dial-up creaks as it is, but does the high bandwidth stuff affect my speed? I've been wondering that for a while.

-crowbraid-

on Dec 13, 2003
I've noticed it's been really slow- but I didn't know why, so I'm glad you do.

~Dan
on Dec 13, 2003
The page isn't that heavy, the HTML itself is just 38k. I remember the HTML on the old skinz.org site was over 150k without images, so was WC at one time. Could it be a script/render issue?

I say this because the main content of the page loads really fast for me, but the top-left statistics appear a long a long time after. If your browser waited to display everything at once it would seem very, very slow.

If this is hosted on the same servers as WC, though, you have a lot of simultaneous users. It doesn't bother me, really. It is good enough that I wouldn't have called anything but the top-left stats 'slow'.
on Dec 13, 2003
I'm on Comcast Cable as well and I generally do not have problems with the speed of the pages. Most pages load in 2-4 seconds for me. With the exception of the Account Info box loading a little slower. Not blazing speed but definitely in a comfortable area.

Right now the site is running well for me. I just did several page refreshes on this page and most of them loaded completely in 3 seconds with a couple stalling at 5-8 seconds.

However, being the administrator of the database for JoeUser and WinCustomize I do know that at times we do have database bottle neck issues. Early today I definitely saw some DB bottle neck issues that was causing the site to be a little slower and the WinCustomize message boards unresponsive. I just kicked these servers (restarted the services) a few times can that help return it to normalcy.

But if you feel the site is slow please let us know. We would like to hear about it.
on Dec 14, 2003
Yup - I'm on Comcast as well - and for the past few days, JoeUser and Wincustomize have been insufferably slow - usually to the point that the pages won't even load.

It's only been these two sites though. :/
on Dec 14, 2003
The same, on thursay morning joe user took me at least 5 minutes to have anything, and I'm just tajing about the template. the content was unaccessible. Usually the connection is OK
on Dec 14, 2003
The problem right now is that all the databases are running on a single low end machine instead of 3 high end machines due to the server crashes.
on Dec 14, 2003
I dunno. I visited off and on all day today and tried to notice load time, and never got over a 4 count, excluding the top left stats. Obviously the server situation has things slowed down, but something else has to be causing such a dramatic difference for some people.
on Dec 17, 2003
Consider running it on linux? ..... opps... trying to add a smiley but gave me javascript error, editor_insertHTML is not defined. I know you are pro Windows and IE..but dont shut me out! btw, using Netscape 7.1
on Dec 20, 2003
i had a question too: when there is a delay when the joeuser page shows up, there is a giant joeuser logo that shows up in the background, then apparently it gets covered up by the joeuser page itself. what use is that logo? i already know i'm at joeuser.com, that's the url i clicked/typed in. no one sees it unless there is a delay, and that image has to take some time loading up right?