I'd love to watch the Trains and MR videos...

[rrinker]

but there is a limited connection tinmeout on their servers and I am NEVER able to download the complete file, if it exceeds abotu 1mb in size. It is NOT my end - I have no trouble downlaoding farlarger files from other sites. When saving a Kalmbach video, it runs fro approximately 1 minute and then ends, completed or not. THis is a sure sign of a connection timeout issue - i can understand limiting the connection time to serve moretotal users, but it prohibits slower connections from downloading larger files.
I can connect via work, which has more than 10x my connection speed, and they always download fine. It takes me about a minute 15 seconds to DL 1mb (dual ISDN). The timeout always occurs 1 minute into the transfer. Happens on both Windows Media and Quicktime files, as well as the PDF article.

Just FYI

--Randy

[jfugate]

Kalmbach is running asp pages, so this site is on Microsoft IIS.

Since these are asp pages and not aspx pages (.NET, which is newer technology), I suspect Kalmbach is on IIS 5.0 .

In IIS 5, there is a setting on the home directory tab near the bottom to configure applications. Kalmbach or their ISP would need to go into their application for their pages with video components and select configuration. Then they select the app options tab and change the ASP script timeout.

The timeout default is 90 seconds, although sounds like it has been reset to 60 seconds. Sounds like for video to stream on a slow connection the timeout would need to be quite a bit longer, like 600 seconds (10 minutes).

The downside of doing this is abandoned script threads could be running for a lot longer and hog resources for 10 times as long.

The other thing to do is to get a separate streaming server and adjust it's settings appropriately.

Or stop trying to stream videos through IIS that are longer than a few seconds to dialup connections. As it stands the Kalmbach site is so slow it's almost unusable via dailup. I know of at least one modeler who has completely given up on trying to go to Kalmbach's web pages because it's so dang slow.

IIS 6 uses a better memory model and performs better. If Kalmbach's not on IIS 6.0, they should consider it because that would solve some of their performance problems, IMO.

[rrinker]

Couldn't agree more.

The worst thing I notice about this particular section is the ad server is the slow element - it's always what's waiting, at least on my connection, even though the actual messages have displayed. And I notice I get incomplete elements there as well. Right now, for example, it appears there shoudl be 4 elements. An ad for MRP2005, which is displayed fully, a Google ad for Trainz which is displayed in full, a Google ad for "UK TrainSim" which is only half displayed, and an ad for something starting with "Model Railroads" which is only about 25% there.

Obviously there is some data that shows that ads on web pages generate some revenue, otherwise no one would pay you to dipslay them. But personally, I have NEVER purchased anything as the result of an ad on a web page. I did have them all blocked with Firefox but a) I upgraded to a newer version and had to uninstall the old one, which lost my ad blocks and b) the ads are dynamic anyway, so every so often a new one appears which I didn't block, so I gave up.

--Randy