[Grampa Dave]

What happens if several hundred of us are waiting 3-5 minutes for those images to appear on our machine.

That to me means a blockage of the system and possible overload of the server.

I don't go to those image loaded threads. Even with a new and very powerful pentium and the special image loading ram, it takes forever for those sites to load and to go to the next thread.

[mhking]

That to me means a blockage of the system and possible overload of the server.

Unless the images in question are housed at FR, there is no extra load on their server. 95+% of all image-laden posts/threads are loading those images from elsewhere.

The problem FR has been having is tied (from what I can see) to inbound traffic jamming the server (potentially from a DOS or Ping attack - or it could be something more innocuous, even), or to overall traffic on the backbone routers that serve FR.

It's definitely not image-based. Actually, FR does one of the better jobs of image-handling that I've seen (and I've worked on several of the busier sites on the web).

[js1138]

The images don't come from FR. The come from whatever server hosts them. A web page is a bit like a shopping list. The list can be short but you have to get the items from several stores.

FR does not know or care how long your computer takes to get the images. they're coming from somewhere else.

[ThePythonicCow]

That to me means a blockage of the system and possible overload of the server.

As others have already said in slightly different words, If you're sitting there for several minutes while a Daily Dose (or other image heavy) page is loading, the FR server sees no load at all. The FR server has already sent out the plain text html for that page to you; now your computer is hung up waiting for some other computer (perhaps Yahoo or Whitehouse.gov) to send the image (gif or jpg) bits to you.

And having a faster PC on your desktop, with more memory, is, as you note, is no more useful than replacing your old Ford with a Ferrari while waiting for a back ordered part to show up at the local store. When the part finally comes in, three weeks later, you can get to the store and back in 3 minutes instead of 5 to pick it up. Whoopee doo. Or, in this case, when the bits finally get down to your PC, it can display the image in 300 microseconds instead of 800 microseconds.