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Your explanation made a lot of sense to me.

Because I don't work in the IT field myself (except when fixing my own $%!& computers), I hesitate to comment. However, could it be that it's not (only) a bandwidth issue?

I was thinking that from the technological point of view, FR seems to be one of a kind. Every pageview is unique and different for every user. If you and I log on at the same minute, we will still see different pages. Depending on our individual preferences, we will see different sidebar topics in different orders. "New comments" is bolded or not depending on individual user data. You may have selected the forum to show you 50 posts at a time, I may be looking at 100.

And so on. Even a second's difference in logging on will put new postings at the top for me that you didn't get to see.

So the server is assembling, and dishing out, many different pageviews every minute, instead of the same one to all users.

In addition, the database is huge - sometimes when searching on a keyword, I'll find threads all the way back from 1999. Click on the thread title and it comes up pronto.

I belong to a fair number of Internet forums and browse many more, but with the exception of Yahoo.com I've never run across one with such a huge message archive - and FR offers many more user features than Yahoo. (Inclusion of graphic files in posts, for example).

Could this be more than a matter of simply buying more bandwidth? Is FR's database server operating at the cutting edge of what can be done with technology - in uncharted territory, so to speak?

Could this be more than a matter of simply buying more bandwidth? Is FR's database server operating at the cutting edge of what can be done with technology - in uncharted territory, so to speak?

There's a thinking person's post.

I gave blam the "Cliff's Notes" version. Like I said, I didn't want to geek everyone out. Now, if you all would want me to explain this down to the byte, feel free to ask. I'm sure for most here that I will cure their insomnia if they have it.

;-)