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Forums Performance Locked

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Forums Performance
Posted by Anonymous on Friday, December 7, 2007 4:08 PM

I am a recent member of this forum and notice that its performance is VERY, VERY SLOW.

Is anyone else having this problem?

Thanks

TMT

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Posted by Anonymous on Friday, December 7, 2007 4:15 PM
Not for me. Do you have dial-up?
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Posted by Blind Bruce on Friday, December 7, 2007 4:26 PM

I have DSL and it comes up super fast. Are you perhaps referring to the response time for a reply or some other facet of timing?

Maybe all those tools are weighing the forum down. If I knew how to post a laughing face. I would put it here.

Welcome to the forum!!!

73

Bruce in the Peg

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Posted by cacole on Friday, December 7, 2007 5:09 PM

I have a cable modem, and it seems to vary according to the time of day.  Sometimes posting a reply takes forever after I click on the "Post" icon.

 

 

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Posted by luvadj on Friday, December 7, 2007 5:12 PM

Posting take a while for me as well. I'm on cable modem.

 

Bob Berger, C.O.O. N-ovation & Northwestern R.R.        My patio layout....SEE IT HERE

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Posted by loathar on Friday, December 7, 2007 5:57 PM
Slow posting on the reply screen on DSL here too. Takes a while for the smiley face screen to come up too.
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Posted by concretelackey on Friday, December 7, 2007 5:59 PM
I have a cable modem as well and rarely have issues loading acceptably fast (anything faster than dial-up is acceptable). However, I have noticed that when I veiw the MODEL RAILROADER FORUMS page that the last posted message is usually about 20 minutes behind real time.
Ken aka "CL" "TIS QUITE EASY TO SCREW CONCRETE UP BUT TIS DARN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO UNSCREW IT"
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Posted by Anonymous on Friday, December 7, 2007 7:10 PM

I am on dialup...slow dialup (24K).

This is one of the slowest sites I visit.

TMT

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Posted by BlueHillsCPR on Friday, December 7, 2007 7:41 PM
 Too_Many_Tools wrote:

I am on dialup...slow dialup (24K).

This is one of the slowest sites I visit.

TMT

 

Sucks to be on dialup still.  I am on wireless high speed and the speed is great all the time. 

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Posted by hobo9941 on Friday, December 7, 2007 9:44 PM
Yeah, I've got dial up, and yeah it's slow.
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Posted by jasperofzeal on Saturday, December 8, 2007 12:20 AM
 8500HPGASTURBINE wrote:

Once in awhile my loads slow, but most of the time it's super fast. I have DSL. DIAL-UP, What's that 

Think of a cable modem as a good locomotive drive (Kato, Atlas, etc.), DSL as a decent drive (Athearn, Walthers, etc.) and Dial-up as a tyco pancake motor or at best, a dummy loco.  Laugh [(-D]

I know your question was rhetorical, just think as my answer as "rhetorical".  Big Smile [:D]

TONY

"If we never take the time, how can we ever have the time." - Merovingian (Matrix Reloaded)

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Posted by twhite on Saturday, December 8, 2007 12:42 AM

When I was on dial-up, this forum was painfully slow, with cable, it's faster, but still not the fastest site I visit.  I don't know whether it has to do with the amount of people using the site at the same time or not.  But there are times when I think I'm still on dial-up, LOL! 

But hey, a lot of times I find that the forum's worth the wait. 

Tom Smile [:)]

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Posted by markpierce on Saturday, December 8, 2007 1:13 AM

I have dial up, ugh.  (That is where I spit out 98% of my profanity.  Fortunately, there is no one to witness this.)  I already spend $150-plus a month for communications costs (land phone, cell phone, basic cable-TV, newspaper, and so on).  I'm not yet ready to spend $200 a month.  This is more than I spend on gasoline for my so-called-gas-guzzling SUV, or all of my other utility costs put together (water, gas, electricity, etcetera).  Biggest expense by far is taxes; a far second is the college and living expenses of my son.  Not enough people pay income taxes to spread the load.  Why don't we reduce carbon dioxide emissions to brake global warming by abolishing dependent tax exemptions and so stop subsidizing human reproduction.  (Don't you realize that humans emit pollution, as determined by our courts, by just breathing?)!  Besides, we don't need more births because we have a high rate of immigration.

Sorry for the ranting....  I don't think dial up would be so bad if there weren't all those advertisements with graphics slowing transmission to a crawl.

Mark

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Posted by jasperofzeal on Saturday, December 8, 2007 4:05 AM
 markpierce wrote:

I have dial up, ugh.  (That is where I spit out 98% of my profanity.  Fortunately, there is no one to witness this.)  I already spend $150-plus a month for communications costs (land phone, cell phone, basic cable-TV, newspaper, and so on).  I'm not yet ready to spend $200 a month.  This is more than I spend on gasoline for my so-called-gas-guzzling SUV, or all of my other utility costs put together (water, gas, electricity, etcetera).  Biggest expense by far is taxes; a far second is the college and living expenses of my son.  Not enough people pay income taxes to spread the load.  Why don't we reduce carbon dioxide emissions to brake global warming by abolishing dependent tax exemptions and so stop subsidizing human reproduction.  (Don't you realize that humans emit pollution, as determined by our courts, by just breathing?)!  Besides, we don't need more births because we have a high rate of immigration.

Sorry for the ranting....  I don't think dial up would be so bad if there weren't all those advertisements with graphics slowing transmission to a crawl.

Mark

I hope you're joking about most of what you said.  If not, how about trading in your SUV for a smaller car that's easier on gas (or even a hybrid, you get a tax break), how about getting rid of one of your phones (I got rid of the land line when I got a cell phone, cut the amount I spend in communications dramatically), how about having your child (young adult) pay his own way through college (how else will he learn about responsibility if daddy is paying the bills), how about petitioning Arnold to give you guys a tax break or he'll be "terminated" from office (I somewhat agree with you about the govt. raping us every payday just to support worthless programs and leeches though), and I don't know where the courts got info about humans being pollutant, as I recall we exhale carbon DIOXIDE and CO2 is what plants use to "breathe" and in turn give out O2.  I think you meant carbon monoxide, which in turn is a pollutant.  Maybe increase plant to human ratio to help the situation?

I don't know Mark, all this rant for being stuck with dial-up?  Confused [%-)]

TONY

"If we never take the time, how can we ever have the time." - Merovingian (Matrix Reloaded)

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Posted by tstage on Saturday, December 8, 2007 7:42 AM

A suggestion for you dialup users.  Purchase or download a utility program that will go in and "tidy up", fix, and enhance the performance of your computer.  This might help your page-loading problems immensely - except for WPF and any other graphic oriented or saturated thread.  Web pages - particularly in MR (albeit the ones just mentioned) - have loaded up much more quickly for me.

There are still occasions where things seem to bog down.  Even so, for me, it's a lot better than it used to be.

Tom

https://tstage9.wixsite.com/nyc-modeling

Time...It marches on...without ever turning around to see if anyone is even keeping in step.

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Posted by jasperofzeal on Saturday, December 8, 2007 7:47 AM

 TA462 wrote:
I have DSL and I believe it actually saves me money over Dial Up in the long run.  My internet surfing time is more enjoyable and I actually spend less time on it then I would if I was on Dial Up.  For me anyways time is money.  You guys want to talk about taxes?  Try living in Canada, sure we have free Health Care but we are taxed to death. 

Now that's a funny contradiction.

TONY

"If we never take the time, how can we ever have the time." - Merovingian (Matrix Reloaded)

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Posted by NeO6874 on Saturday, December 8, 2007 11:28 AM
 tstage wrote:

A suggestion for you dialup users.  Purchase or download a utility program that will go in and "tidy up", fix, and enhance the performance of your computer.  This might help your page-loading problems immensely - except for WPF and any other graphic oriented or saturated thread.  Web pages - particularly in MR (albeit the ones just mentioned) - have loaded up much more quickly for me.

There are still occasions where things seem to bog down.  Even so, for me, it's a lot better than it used to be.

Tom

 

Absolutely, Adaware and Spybot go a long way to kill off bandwidth hogging apps (http://download.com, they're both there, i just don't have a direct link at the moment).  Also another thing that will help a lot is geting Mozilla Firefox http://getfirefox.com and installing AdBlockPlus.  That'll stop all the ads on a page from loading, and firefox is much better at not letting all the nasties get back into your computer.

 

As for connection speed, you almost need broadband (Cable/DSL) to get on any website, as things are much more media oriented than even 5 years ago.  The net is going to get even worse for dialup users as time goes on.... 

-Dan

Builder of Bowser steam! Railimages Site

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Posted by MisterBeasley on Saturday, December 8, 2007 4:21 PM

We have 3 computers sharing a cable modem - two desktops and a wireless laptop.  There is a huge difference in response between the 2 desktop machines.  The faster machine with less memory is a pig, while the older, slower machine with more memory works fine.  However, the faster machine belongs to my teenage daughter, and it's bogged down with all the Instant Message nonsense, and whatever ad-ware and other garbage that brings in.

I'm afraid that the Internet content-provider community is giving up on dial-up.  More and more, the sites are full of high-bandwidth graphics, including worthless advertising and gratuitous videos.  Other than photo-fun, MR isn't too bad.  When Comcast "upgraded" their main page for cable modem users, they put in so much garbage that parts of the screen took minutes to load on a T1 line at work!  Now, when that sort of thing happens, you know they're overdoing it.  Part of the issue here is that all the Web types who work for these companies are sitting at their desks with direct connections to the servers.  They never see the delays that the rest of us experience, so they often don't even know there's a problem.  Webmasters should be required to spend 1 day a week on dial-up.

It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse. 

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Posted by zgardner18 on Saturday, December 8, 2007 6:06 PM
You guys that are still on Dial-up really need to consider the switch.  Even if you believe you don't spend a lot of time on the internet.  I made the switch about 4 months ago and it has been great.  The price is really the same.  I get mine through Verizon with my phone.  Something to consider.  It's made my life on this forum a lot happier not to mention the whole surfing the web thing.

--Zak Gardner

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Posted by NeO6874 on Saturday, December 8, 2007 7:02 PM

Just a quick price comparison, using the local providers...

AOL (Dialup) -- about $25/month, speed varies, never faster than ~50kbps (regardless of the fact you have a 56kbps modem), download speeds can only sustain about 20kbps

Roadrunner Cable-- about $40/month, speed up to 5.0mbps (5000 kbps), speeds vary based on usage in your area (ie if everyone's watching the latest youtube videos you'll be slower than if you're the only one online).  I've never seen speeds drop below 1.5mbps (1500kbps) in my area

SBC/Yahoo DSL -- price varies, $15/month for the slowest @ 768kbps.  IIRC You're the only user on your circuit, so barring any line problems, you should always get said speed.  Limited to 18,000 feet runs (or thereabouts).

 

So, on that note --

AOL (or equiv) about $0.50 per kb/s per month; assuming 50k/sec, you get about 129600000 kb in a month (assuming alwasy on 24/7 for 30 days) rough equivalent of 129gbit or 16GByte

SBC/Yahoo (or equiv) about $0.019 per kb/s per month; assuming 768kb/sec, you get about 1990656000 kb in a month (assuming always on 24/7 for 30 days) rough equivalent of 1.9terabit or 0.24 TeraByte (1tb/TB is 1000 gb/GB)

Roadrunner (or equiv) about  $0.008 per kb/s per month; assuming 5mb/sec, you get about 12960000000 kb in a month (assuming always on 24/7 for 30 days) rough equivalent of 12.96terabit or 1.6TeraByte

 ---------------------------------------------

Now, most of that traffic would be junk traffic (eg, your computer "hi, i wanna look at 4-4-0.jpg" and the server "OK, I don't know what that is... try here..."), but you can see that a lot of traffic is thrown around. 

In two days my computer has received over 477,500,000 bytes (477,500 KB; or 477.5GB), and most of this time the computer is using less than 10% of my available bandwidth (sitting idle, not playing any internet games, browsing ebay and the trains forums)...Before restarting it to reinstall a driver, I wouldn't be surprised if I had 1000 times that or more traffic through the computer... (I rarely, if ever, restart)

-Dan

Builder of Bowser steam! Railimages Site

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Posted by concretelackey on Saturday, December 8, 2007 7:07 PM
It would be really cool if someone could do a cost analysis of the various interent options available....Big Smile [:D]
Ken aka "CL" "TIS QUITE EASY TO SCREW CONCRETE UP BUT TIS DARN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO UNSCREW IT"
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Posted by concretelackey on Saturday, December 8, 2007 7:08 PM
sorry, I just could not resist that
Ken aka "CL" "TIS QUITE EASY TO SCREW CONCRETE UP BUT TIS DARN NEAR IMPOSSIBLE TO UNSCREW IT"
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Posted by Anonymous on Saturday, December 8, 2007 7:34 PM

What is DSL?   Just kidding but out here in the woods we don't have DSL.  We used to have satellite for tv but the trees keep growing and we lost our satellite.  No, we don't have cable either.

   We use dial-up and the phone lines were strung in the '30's.  My average connection is 19.2Kbps, sometimes it goes to 21 Kbps.  There is a state university nearby and early evening the connection is between 14 and 16Kbpi.  Needless to say while downloading my mail, I am eating dinner.  This site is fast compared to othere especially news sites.

   Before you ask, we do have electricity, the closest village put in a traffic signal last year but then I can sit on my back porch and go deer and bear hunting.

   One thing I forgot to mention.  I make it a habit to clear all the history, cookies and temp junk.  Don't  have to get off line because computer won't delete any of them in use. 

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Posted by Anonymous on Sunday, December 9, 2007 2:07 AM

 zgardner18 wrote:
You guys that are still on Dial-up really need to consider the switch.  Even if you believe you don't spend a lot of time on the internet.  I made the switch about 4 months ago and it has been great.  The price is really the same.  I get mine through Verizon with my phone.  Something to consider.  It's made my life on this forum a lot happier not to mention the whole surfing the web thing.

I agree that DSL is better and Broadband is even better...but assumes that either are available to upgrade to.

In many rural areas, upgrading is not an option...DSL and BB do not exist.

I expect in the future a mandate will be levied upon websites to provide a text only bandwidth efficient mode since otherwise a significant number of customers will be left behind...customers with money that advertisers will want to reach.

We are already seeing this in the celluar market where companies are having to invest in infrastructure to reach customers in sparcely populated areas.

TMT 

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Posted by Phoebe Vet on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 7:26 AM

Dial-up is obsolete technology.  It is absurd to demand that the world slow down and wait for you to catch up.

"Because that's the way we've always done it" is NOT the path to the future.

Dave

Lackawanna Route of the Phoebe Snow

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Posted by d van on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 8:24 AM
Been very slow on all the Kalmbach BB's for a while......SoapBox [soapbox]
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Posted by MisterBeasley on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 10:15 AM
 Too_Many_Tools wrote:

I expect in the future a mandate will be levied upon websites to provide a text only bandwidth efficient mode since otherwise a significant number of customers will be left behind...customers with money that advertisers will want to reach.

I don't think so.  In fact, I see the opposite happening.  More and more sites are going to egregiously-large and slow-loading "Flash" graphics.  We have a T1 line (better than Broadband) at work, but it literally takes minutes to load the home page for Comcast.net, because they have all this Java stuff with pictures of celebrities and pop tarts on it, and they insist on having that nonsense come in.  SI.com (Sports Illustrated) takes forever, even on a high-speed connection, because there's an ad box on the right side with bandwidth-sucking graphics.

It's the ad graphics that are hurting your performance.  It's the ads that are paying for the sites, and you can be sure they aren't going to pay for the site if you can opt for not getting their graphics.

It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse. 

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Posted by tstage on Wednesday, December 12, 2007 10:56 AM

The options for TMT's situation have already been addressed.  There's no reason to rehash this again.  It's time to move on.  Thanks.

Tom 

https://tstage9.wixsite.com/nyc-modeling

Time...It marches on...without ever turning around to see if anyone is even keeping in step.

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