poll on DU performance

[steve2470]

How often do you experience slow performance on DU ? Meaning, you click a link to start a post, view a link or reply to a thread, and it takes over 5 seconds to do what you wish to do. For me, it's at least once a day every single day for the last month or so.

Skinner says anything over one second is unacceptable performance.

10 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Never
	0 (0%)
	Once a year
	1 (10%)
	Once a month
	4 (40%)
	Once a week
	0 (0%)
	Once a day
	0 (0%)
	More than once a day
	5 (50%)
	Other (see my post)
	0 (0%)
	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
Show usernames Disclaimer: This is an Internet poll

[In_The_Wind]

1. Last night ... Chrome wouldn't load DU for over an hour. I switched back to IE.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. Speed goes from barely okay, to slow to terrible.

This morning it is terrible. A minute or more to load a page. It just hangs and hangs. Some page elements, like avatars, often don't load.

I have tried three different browsers (Safari, Firefox, and Chrome) and the results are the same. I have also tried other sites and they do not have the same problem. This is clearly a DU-only issue.

[steve2470]

3. yea over the past several weeks I have tried several browsers

The browsers are several flavors of Opera, IE, Firefox, Seamonkey, and Chrome.

I've done tracerts and pings. I've notified Skinner and talked briefly to Elad. I've done a download/upload test on speedtest.net.

Restarted cable modem and router several times.

I really don't think it's my machine, LAN or even my ISP. I've notified Skinner twice, so I'm not going to annoy him any more.

[davepdx]

11. Steve, have you tried flushing the DNS cache?

Instructions vary with the operating system used:
http://www.whatsmydns.net/flush-dns.html

[steve2470]

12. yea I've done that also

I've checked with OpenDNS who is my DNS provider, and they say they are resolving DU just fine.

I've concluded, for now, that because I'm here so much, it's probabilities. If I was only here for 5 minutes a day, I am certain I would notice nothing at all. I'm not going to complain any more to Skinner.

[davepdx]

14. That has got to be frustrating.

Do you notice the page loads stalling at a particular time of day (ie., during high traffic times like evenings)? If so you may want to evaluate how well OpenDNS is working at those times compared to other DNS nameservers. One such program is DNS Benchmark (linked below).

https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

I had a similar situation as yours occur a number of years ago when I was using Verizon's DNS nameservers. I switched to OpenDNS at that time and got a significant improvement but as time went on I experienced slowdowns with them as well. My experience has been that responsiveness varies over time due to varying loads on the nameservers. I found other public DNS nameservers through the program linked and another open source program named Namebench and the use of the faster DNS nameservers reduced or eliminated the slow page loads. I don't know if it makes a difference but I always flush the local DNS cache before I run the program. I hope you find a solution.

[steve2470]

15. it appears OpenDNS is the fastest (see graphic)

Last thing I can think of is typing DU's IP address into my HOSTS file.

[davepdx]

16. Is this slow page loading only happening on DU or does it

happen on other websites as well? From what you've written I'm suspecting that you are experiencing a site (DU) specific issue but I'm not certain. When I had DSL before I had an issue with noise on the line which caused all websites to load slower. If slow page loading is a general issue then other troubleshooting can be done. I eventually had the phone company (Verizon) come out as there was a hardware issue (their hardware). If it is DU specific then I'm out of ideas at the moment.

OpenDNS is certainly your best option from the test results. You may want to re-run the test when you are in a period where you are getting slow page loads and see if you duplicate your baseline results at that time. You should expect to see some variation throughout the day but a result with grossly different set of values relative to other DNS nameservers might shed some light.

[steve2470]

17. my only problem is here on DU, really

I'm really thinking I need to be patient. This is a very busy site and I'm sure Skinner et al can't afford to have a Google-speed network. Even Google on rare occasions makes me wait a tad.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

6. Have you tried clearing your temporary internet files for each browser?

That may help.

I'm not sure what system you're running and what specs it has, but I'd definitely delete all cookies and temp internet files and see if that helps.

[steve2470]

8. I've done that many times, it does not help nt

[RC]

4. Speed goes from quite acceptable to 20 seconds or more.

And only on DU. One commonality is, if I sit on a page for a while, either because I am doing something else, or because of a long read. Then try to backup to the Home page or to General Discussion. Backing up from Computer Help and from Photography are the same way. This can happen any time of the day.
Again only on DU.

[lpbk2713]

5. Several times a day.

Some times refresh (F5) helps and some times it doesn't. Time of day
(as in traffic conditions) does not seem to have a bearing either. It
doesn't matter if I'm opening an OP, creating one, changing from one
group to another or any other special cicrcumstances. Some times I
get a delay even when I'm just scrolling in a thread. I never posted
anything about it in ATA because I have seen others that brought it
up, but now I wonder how many others have not said anything and
how widespread the problem may be.

[steve2470]

7. Skinner is baffled

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1259&pid=3171

I see some people were experiencing problems overnight. Any idea if it has sorted itself out? This is baffling because I never experience problems myself, and I'm on DU all day.

[fizzgig]

9. i rarely have issues

but couldn't get du to load for love nor money this morning (7ish eastern).

[progressoid]

10. maybe every other month for me.

I attribute it to slower internet access for me. I downgraded earlier this year.