I'm drunk.
Now that right there is the kind of refreshing honesty that keeps me at FR. Thanks. ;o)
Posted on 10/11/2012 8:11:29 PM PDT by hole_n_one
Yet again, FR fails the big LIVE THREAD test.
How does what is supposed to be the premiere conservative site on the 'net continue to fail?
I would have expanded on this except it took forever to get this simple post through the muck and molasses that we have to wade thru on night's like this.
We need to donate more so they can expand the server farm and get a fatter pipe.
FR is always SO slow on ‘big nights’ that I wonder about a DOS attack..
Nice if JR would comment on what the deal is.
i love this site- the only thing i frequent more on the www is my email- and i contribute- but i must say tonight was frustrating to the point of aggravating during the Veep debates...
IBT......
It’s working just fine for me. The clean design of Free Republic means a fast, more responsive source for breaking news and informed opinion. The live thread here was my means of keeping up with the debate since I had no access to either TV or radio tonight.
I'm on some sports message boards that are so easy to use. Simple to post pictures or youtube videos. When you click on send you know right away your post was entered.
Might be time to upgrade in a different direction
Oh and I thought this thread was about Freepers on the live debate thread saying that Biden had won...
Why zot this? It’s a legit gripe and it would be nice to find out if anything can be done about it. IMHO I think the cause is FR’s popularity- more users than the servers can handle.
Maybe posters need to stop posting pictures, baseball scores and complaints about how slow the thread is. Just post what happens.
OK, got it, maybe Jim can post the number of users are registered, then from that number, anyone can can figure out just how much each of those would have contributed as a whole. I would wager it would be a very small number.
Myself, I have $10/mo sent automatically, how much are the rest of you donating? maybe he should have a listing of those who donated only available to those who did so we can call out those who whine and don’t.
Yep, I learned the hard way that when it times out on a post, don’t reload!
Pictures don’t slow it down because they aren’t hosted on FR servers- they’re linked to the original source so the images actually come directly from the third party and bypass the FR server.
I donate $20 a month. Oh well. Maybe one day Jim will get a better server company or upgrade the ones he is using.
Any server cluster in the world can become slow due to traffic and load.
Obviously, you haven't donated enough to FR yet! So, since the problem you're bemoaning is mostly the fault of you and your ilk, why don't you, yet again, make a donation?
I believe Jim said after the first debate that the new servers were bought but not installed yet.
then i guess we could post many pictures and it wouldn’t hurt? Good! I didnt know that. I’ve got a lot of pix set for the next R vs O debate
If I understand you correctly, a reply about the GDP would somehow find it’s way thru the slog and be posted without a problem, but, if one replied with a comment about how it was entirely within the realm of reason that the Professor was able to make a radio out of a coconut, it would have been blocked.
Been registered here since 2000 and donated many times. But yes, this site is kind of useless when anything is going on. I now just go to twitter.
I'm not hysterical........
I'm drunk.
Just saying the fewer people on the highway the smaller the traffic jam
Exactly. This websites guts needs serious help it seems.
Sorry - This Web Page not available.
On some of those boards, you can edit a message after it has been posted or even delete it. However, one thing I like about this board is that it supports HTML.
The hamster was trying!
I donate $100 a month to support FreeRepublic.com because I value its clean, commercial free interface. If everyone who complained did the same, then Jim might be able to afford additional servers for the high traffic nights. So if you are’nt a monthy donor, you are getting what you paid for.
Maybe the posters ought to refrain from posting unnecessary apostrophes when pluralizing nouns, and when saying (or thinking they are saying) "its", "your", "there", or "their".
As a test, see how the response slows down when I type the following:
it's you're they're night's
But NO, forget it, that would require a literacy test and for so many here English appears to be a non-native language.
I might consider being a monthly donor if I thought I would GET what I paid for.
Not necessarily more servers but load balances to even the strain.
FR’s hamster needs to have a talk with Lance Armstrong.
FR is never there when you really need it. It’s getting ridiculous. It does make me wonder where my donations go.
I am far from a computer expert. But there are chat room programs that hold thousands of people for instant discussion. Should FR use one of those style rooms, and only open it up for live threads or big disasters like 911? There must be a low cost way for us to communicate in real time.
I look forward to live threads but I guess I shouldn’t bother. Election night, oh how sad that will be. :( even if we win, FR will be down.
Cracks me up when I see people that have been posting for 10 years with multiple posts
I was one of them tonight. I’d press post and nothing would happen, so I’d put it through again.
To my idiot brain, this would be easy to program. Just put in a stop that disallows identical posts.
Really?
I guess it's reassuring to know that someone was able to get through. I am very skeptical, however, judging by the (very low) number of posts (replies) made between 9pm and 10:30pm EDT.
It's not that hard to figure out.
I love to track what people say and the last 2 debates I couldn’t believe how slow....
Yeah, let’s focus on a misplaced apostrophe instead of FR’s miserable history when it comes to events like this.
In contrast with other live threads, the traffic tonight seemed light, but maybe that was just an indication of not many posts coming through. Still, FR has worked very well with threads of 3000 or more posts.
In the old days Freepers got yelled at by other Freepers for posting Twitter-type small talk.
You posted a thoughtful comment that provided new information to the thread.
A wise crack wasn’t wanted.
We were serious back in the day.
I'm drunk.
Now that right there is the kind of refreshing honesty that keeps me at FR. Thanks. ;o)
What FR really needs is a clustered database, that automatically replicates data across servers. Alternatively, use of a distributed cache like memcache would probably make a big difference. It's how large sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Reddit, and other similar websites handle large amounts of dynamic data.
There's no simple solution. Faster servers can help, but you run into other limiting factors if the application can't handle high levels of concurrency.
Google doesn’t have this problem but FR doesn’t have Google’s budget either :-).
Maybe some computer scientist who is close to the guts of FR could explain what the big hold up is. Modern computers don’t usually wear out; they are overwhelmed. Usually on a night like tonight there’d be a whole gaggle of articles, let alone posts. On the other hand maybe Jim wants it to be a secret lest the enemy bollix things up even worse.
Well played buddy, it never occurred to the rest of us to drink during political Super Bowls and play-off games like debates and elections.
I couldn’t agree more. Lately, visiting FR is akin to slogging through quicksand. I’m getting sick and tired of the frustration it causes.
I’m a quarterly donor. I am sure something could be done. Another format for live threads, something like a chat rooms?
Now you really broke it.
Everyone is clicking your screen name!
Indeed, all user authentication data and the most recent week of posts would probably fit easily in a few gigabytes of RAM. The challenge is how to architect access to it.
........maybe it would help the discourse if you hacked up a period, question mark or exclamation point you mangy, flea infested feline.
All I got was a time out.
Yaelle , I tried for over an hour to reply to something you said on the “live” thread — both within the thread and as freepmail — to no avail. I can’t even remember now what it was,LOL. Extremely frustrating.... I am a frequent contributor and have to admit I’m getting tired of the endless problems during “important” times. Is it time for FR to accept advertising to help pay for whatever is needed to ensure enough capacity?
I’m a monthly donor. The site loads slow at all times, and I don’t even come here during high traffic - instead I just watch on cable and come back later to read the fallout.
I like the digest of news here, and I like the ability to voice vapid/inane responses without physical consequences, and I occasionally like the depth of insight of some of the analysis, but I suppose I do feel sorry for folks who have to rely on this site during high traffic, and who feel ripped off if they are donating and expect to get their money’s worth during such times. They have bought a solid work horse, but thought, perhaps, they were paying for a thoroughbred.
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