Slow Access on DG

For the past couple of days I've found it takes a very long time to access everything on DG. Many times I've gotten no response at all and have had to try again. That's also happened when I tried to log in. Is anyone else having this problem?

not having a problem with slow access, but then I have high speed internet. I did notice that I do not have a banner on my home page or on the Daves Garden forum, not really checked anywhere else, but that seemed strange to me. Do you have a banner?

Bivbiv;
I'm also on highspeed internet. Occassionally I do run into the sluggish responses from DG, I've asked this same question before, no satisfactory diagnose of the problem, as others haven't reported such problem. So that makes 2 of us that have reported this occurrence as of today. I hope others will come and share their difficulty so we can find out what's the cause?

Lily, do you have a banner across the top of your page?

edited to say, I just went to home page and now have a banner.

This message was edited Feb 8, 2008 10:23 AM

"banner"? Please clarify, I'm not familiar with the term.

The banner is the photo at the top of the page along with the website title, Dave's Garden.

I'm not on high speed. However, even though it's slow here sometimes, it's never been this slow. This is the first time I've actually had to try twice to log in and access other areas of the site. Earlier today I just gave up because it got so frustrating.

The picture strip along the top of the page is a banner. On this page it is a white gazebo. It is all showing now. California forum has our orange poppies. :~)

lol, that will teach me to preview! LOL Posted at the same time

It just took me three minutes to get back on this thread!

Got ya! lol. Now I know what a banner IS. I'm not experiencing the 'slowness' right now. But other time, I did, even loosing my message that I was typing even......

I've been noticing periodic slowness over about the last week, could just be that everyone's online at once, or maybe Dave's doing something, or someone else suggested last time this was posted that the site slows down when one of the big search engines like Google is indexing it.

Painfully slow here this am, and I'm using firefox, which is usually so fast. It's so slow I even glanced up to make sure I didn't actually switch back to IE7.

Slow this am for me also.

Same here, it's been intermittent all week. I too have high speed.

I have had this same problem. I have DSL and should not have such a hard time getting Dave's to load. I have heard that the threads will load slower if there are more than 100 posts on them though.

bhaugh; it's the initial loading of DG, well before we got the Banner up and running, that is when it's painfully slow sometimes. It happened this AM, but just briefly.

I have the same problems in the mornings sometimes also.




hello Princess Tammy

Long threads always take longer, but my problem has been that everything on DG has been slow. Earlier this morning I couldn't even post in a thread, but now it seems a bit speedier. I hope it stays this way. Before starting this thread, I checked to see if Admin had posted any problems, but there was nothing.

I'm waiting to wait to hear from Admin. myself. It's frustrating when you type a long text, then it vanishes. :(

Well, I thought it was my computer.

We haven't experienced anything (at least I haven't.) Dave has more access to the actual logs.

A couple things to keep in mind:

1) If you have ads turned on, they can slow down the site. (I know our ad guys hate for me to say that, but it's true - and turning off the ads is one of the perks of being a subscriber. The forum sponsorship ads don't seem to have an effect like the banner ads, and you can turn them on/off independent of each other.)

2) Mondays are our big report-generation day, and the system can get a little sluggish as it churns out all the weekly activity reports.

Beyond that, I'm really at a loss to give you an explanation.

Sometimes Comcast (my ISP) and Mozilla (my browser of choice) conspire to give me fits - but it's not just a DG problem when that happens. When I check my system's stats, I find I'm running too many windows, and/or a site has a lot of flash and graphics, and I'm running at 100% of the capacity. That's usually time to refresh and reboot the browser, or the whole system.

Thanks, Terry. No ads here.

I normally use the webtv rather than the computer simply because it's more comfortable than sitting at the desk. I only use the computer for DG when I want to post photos; but if this doesn't speed up, I may have to use the computer instead. Today the slowness seems to be an on again-off again sort of problem.

Abnormal slowness for the past few days here, too. Not sure why- it happens at home and at school, so I don't think it's my system. Usually DG flies at both places.

Been slow for me too. And it's only on here. I have high speed and sometimes it takes several minutes for a page to load.

Just a minute ago I ran into an extreme slowdown...other sites were working fine but DG just seemed frozen. Now it seems like it's back, but there was definitely a hiccup there for a minute or so.

Dave must be working on new programs. :-)

I've noticed the same slowness, or failure to load pages for several days. Today I changed my preferences to stop the ads (but leave the sponsors) and the performance seems to have improved. My guess is that there is an issue with the system that is serving up the banner ads.

David

I have cable. I have really been struggling. More often than not the pages are loading blank & then I refresh them. I am not having the trouble on any other sites.

I have always had my preferences set not to show the ads or the forum sponsors, and I've still noticed random periods of slowness over the last several weeks.

I have also been having problems with Dave's Garden being very slow. I went into my account and set my preference to not show ads or sponsors and it did not help speed things up.

Does anyone know exactly why it is taking so long to load pages?

I have high speed internet and I am not having speed problems anywhere else.

Nana3

I had been having slowness problems for the past few weeks, just on this site. All day today was aggravatingly slow! But all of a sudden tonight, it is pretty speedy going from one page to the next! I have high speed internet also and the past couple of weeks on here has made me remember when we had dial up service! LOL. I wonder if it has anything to do with Admin working on stuff for the site?

Anyhow, I am so glad to have the speediness back now!

It's been an on and off thing for me for several weeks now--it'll randomly slow down for no apparent reason, then it'll speed back up, then later gets slow again, etc. The slow period usually doesn't last that long (for me at least) I was still seeing some random slowness this morning--tonight nothing yet but it's a random enough thing that I don't know for sure if it's back to normal or not.

It is really slow tonight for me. It has been slow off and on, like ecrane mentioned, for the past several weeks too. And it's just on here. I am on high speed dial-up and feel like I have the slowest dial-up out there when on here.

And, for the past two hours it's been pretty fast again for me. I sure hope it stays like this!

It just now speeded up again. It would be great if it stayed like this!! lol

I agree, much faster tonight than it has been. It must just be volume. Today was painful...

Yep, on again, off again speedwise. Irritating, isn't it?

I have been having trouble loading pages too, but the worst thing is I can't enlarge a lot of high kb pictures where before they would take time but I usually could enlarge them (with a few exceptions).

I am on dial up but my computer is quite fast. AOL is also transferring the location here and I still don't have a proper home page, the dial connection is being transferred to an outside dialler and the US site comes up. I have set the UK page to my home page but have to select it, then I can't use it except for a simple email service. The dial connection always comes up at the same speed though which is as high as I could get it anyway.

As there are a lot of UK AOL users being transferred temporarily I wondered if this is having a effect on the US, but there are different servers so probably not, and as some have mentoned it is only on this site. I'm not visiting many other sites but found ebay a bit slow.

I watch and post on two forums where a lot of pics are uploaded, and many of them are very high file sizes which I can't enlarge at all, they take forever then if I don't give up I end up with a little box with a red cross in the corner. Many of these files are up to 20,000 bytes or 20kb, in general I'm finding a lot over 5kb. Anything much over 3kb takes too long for me now so I check the file first for size in the 'properties' on a right click and if too large (generally over 5kb) I don't open them. I would rather be able to look at them, but can't spend all day trying to open pics. Eventually I will just get fed up and not bother any more.

I wonder if the uploading of large pic files has increased, lol, probably not but I don't know. If it has then this could be having an effect on all speeds. Most people don't know they have too large files, many are just learning how to get their pics on here. We have all been at a stage where we 'don't know', and hopefully, eventually we learn with a little help. My enjoyment of using a site that is too slow is becoming a hassle, and I'm sure others may feel the same.

Would a Tutorial be a good idea to encourage others to realise how to resize their pics? I am trying to help some, mainly because of my troubles, but also it must be difficult for those on slow connections to upload pics that are too big. I know because I used to do it too! Resizing is an easy thing to do, and there is no loss of picture quality. It may also help speed on DG if everyone adopted the same policy.

DG automatically downsizes large picture files so that we don't have to. So the pics that you're trying to view shouldn't be any larger in file size than they were before. I also have seen many times when someone purposely downsizes their pics because they didn't know this would be done for them automatically, and the picture ends up not very useful because it's so small or low resolution that you can't really see much. If people really know what they're doing with resolutions, etc then pics could be downsized without losing too much of the quality, but many people have not spent enough time with their photo programs to have a good feel for what will work well or not. So personally I'd prefer not to encourage people to downsize, it makes it much tougher to ID things or figure out what's wrong with somebody's sick plant when you can barely see the picture.

Pictures that are larger than 1000x800 pixels can be hard to upload. Our system will reduce them to that size if they're bigger. We recommend 800x600 or even 680x460 for good viewing.

Unless Dave has already replaced the server, we are currently operating at 75% capacity (3 out of 4 servers - one went out late last week.) I think that has contributed to the sporadic slowdowns and problems with photos not displaying properly (and probably also part of the reason why Dave hasn't been as visible the past few days ;o)