Why is FR the slowest loading forum I visit.(vanity)

Me | Today | Me

[MrPiper]

Why is FR the slowest I visit? I have almost quit coming here, not that anyone cares, due to slow loading of a TEXT forum .

[ThomasThomas]

If you just want to browse don’t login and it will faster.

[Freedom_Is_Not_Free]

An answer why FR loads so slow would be appreciated. It is not like the pages are buried in 56K hostile pictures.

I too am baffled why it is so slow? Servers.

My wild guess would be because John Robinson wrote the code himself, it just is just inefficient and cumbersome. That is just a wild guess, not trying to disparage Mr. Robinson. My understanding is he wrote the code for security reasons and thusly, it just runs slow.

Of course, I can be corrected instantaneously if someone would just identify the real reason why this site runs so slowly. Maybe it is just inadequate bandwidth because Jim needs a lot more money for bigger better servers.

I don’t know...

[samtheman]

Entropy isn't what it used to be

I like it.

[Freddd]

Ever wonder why people stopped donating?

[piytar]

Quite all right. I’d missed the comment re Mrs. Pipper. Thinking of asking the kitties to Zot the post. At least...

[piytar]

Probably because Mrs. Piper is in the other room downloading porn.

Over the top and not worthy of you, gunner, iMHO.

[TexasRepublic]

if account.name$ = “MrPiper” and yearly.dollars.donation<100.00 then
throttledown()
endif

[Jim Robinson]

Well, I think we have some bottlenecks at the server. We used to have about 8 or 10 of them at the data center. I think we’re down to about half of that now. The system used to run a lot faster, but after the last two sever crashes it slowed down some. John must have thought we could get along without the extra servers and so just reconfigured some of the older/slower unreliable ones out of the system. But looks like we do need the extra horsepower. We now want to purchase some new servers and some more disk, as we keep running out of storage space, and also beef up the memory capacity throughout. The system used to run very fast even under a heavy load, so I don’t think it’s the application software, although the db may be a bit of a bottleneck. We’ve had several db related problems in the last few years. Hopefully, we’ll be ordering and installing the new equipment soon.

[Dan Nunn]

Growing doubt? By whom? Certainly not if you look at Amazon's revenues, which put it at about $2 billion a year, or Microsoft, where we've heard that they are talking about launching an IaaS to counter Amazon EC2 and compliment their Azure strategy, or the numerous other growing companies in this field.

Of course there are issues to consider, and there are many workarounds to those issues, if you deem them to affect you (such as backing up your data from the cloud locally, scaling across regions using cloud management tools like Scalr and Rightscale, etc). Not to mention the built-in tools like Multi-AZ availability and read replicas for Amazon RDS, Elastic Load Balancer and Auto Scaling with Amazon EC2, Latency-based routing with Amazon Route 53, and CloudFront's natural edge locations for caching S3 requests.

There was ONE instance EVER of Amazon terminating an AWS account due to content, and I'm sure you'd agree with the decision - they terminated Wikileaks' account which contained illegally obtained content that put our soldiers and citizens at risk. No "current thinking" (your words, not reflected in actual reality) considers this a threat to their business model. And I count Obama's opponent in the general election an ally in this; as I mentioned earlier, MittRomney.com is hosted by Amazon EC2.

So if the powers that be don't see the benefits in not having to raise $14,000 first before buying a new server, rather than firing one up at peak demand times, or the ability to have incremental backups nightly of static files with unlimited storage space, or the benefits of having fail-over systems in place when hardware fails, or the ability to have point-in-time recovery and snapshots from a GUI for your database, then by all means, discount my advice. Obviously I'm biased by my own personal success story and the peace of mind it has granted me.

But don't you dare attack me with your snide "You might learn something" comment, discounting the past 6 months that I have spent migrating my company to the cloud infrastructure and eliminating a major source of uncertainty in my business, which I mentioned in my original post, so don't feign ignorance.

Once again, unless JimRob has multiple connections to the internet in his basement where he's got his servers housed, he's at the same mercy of his internet providers or the datacenters he currently uses. Nothing changes by switching the infrastructure except the faces of the players. And I'd say Amazon's track record is damn good.

[samtheman]

Sure the sales of their (your?) product are doing very well. I’m happy for them. I’ve got nothing against them.

But yes, there are growing doubts about data security on cloud servers.

[Dan Nunn]

As I love to read to get up to speed and learn something, I would enjoy reading any sources you can provide me. Snarkiness aside, I am definitely interested in reading the well-reasoned data security concerns.

[Melas]

That was a fairly modern machine. My first PC had a turbo button that doubled the speed from 4.77mhz to 10mhz. I had 10mb of hard disk space on that machine, which seemed like plenty because it was still a floppy world.

[samtheman]

These are basically all related to the same problem, but I’m putting them all in this post for my own ease-of-lookup.

http://www.novainfosecportal.com/2012/05/08/is-the-dirty-disk-problem-the-first-practical-chink-in-cloud-securitys-armour/

http://www.thedatacave.com/dirty-disks-and-cloud-security

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/042612-cloud-dirty-disks-258731.html

http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/dirty-disks-raise-new-questions-about-cloud-security/

http://esj.com/blogs/enterprise-insights/2012/04/dirty-disks-cloud-security-risk.aspx

[rellimpank]

—I wait more for FR loading than with all other websites that I visit put together—it is annoying.

—and I donate usually around $200/yr which is probably more than a number of the wise ones making snotty remarks to your, as far as I am concerned, legitimate question-—

[Dan Nunn]

Interesting articles, and I appreciate you sharing them, though it does look like it’s not an issue at the major cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace. Additionally, storing static data inside specialized storage services like S3 and database content in hosted SQL services like RDS would further reduce the risk of any data breach, as the services cannot be accessed at a low level as ordinary VM volumes can.

[FreedomPoster]

This is a damn good question.

It has been raised a number of times in the past. There was a fundraiser presumably for new servers not that long ago. Hopefully something will happen before the election, or it won’t be pretty.

[FreedomPoster]

Bandwidth isn’t cheap. I was recently curious about the same thing you are, and talked to some folks who really know hosting and bandwidth costs. Based on their numbers and a few measures from Alexa data, the operations costs here didn’t look out of line at all.

[samtheman]

You make some good points but here’s what I take away from those articles:

1. More than one writer said something along the lines of “this is the beginning of what we’re going to be seeing”
2. It points to a more general problem of lack of care and respect for MY data... no one has as much care and respect for MY data as I do... how could that ever be otherwise?

And BTW, there have been recent stories of hacked data at Amazon.

[FreedomPoster]

I’d say unhelpful smart alecks would be part of the reason. Of course, they exist on every forum.

I’m a long time monthly.

[Revolting cat!]

Evidently, somebody hasn’t paid the Piper!