Please rate the site's download speed

After finishing a series of big programming upgrades over the past two weeks, I am interested to find out what your personal experience is on your computer.

I am looking for you to judge your perception of how long it takes from the time you click a link to the time the page finishes loading.  You can tell when a page load is complete when both the blue menu bar and the banner ad at the top have finished loading and you can navigate through the options in the blue menu bar.

Since I began to install the improvements about two weeks ago, I'd like you to use that as a benchmark to compare.

I just finished yet another update this evening, and it should be the last for a little while, so it's a good time to take a step back and see how it went.

In addition to choosing one of the three poll choices, please feel free to post a comment about your experience with the performance of the site now that the changes have been implemented.

(For now, I would like to keep this thread focused on performance, not features, but there will be some other opportunities to post comments on features in the near future.)

Thank you for your feedback!

Pretty darn fast on the the XP machine.  Not so different on the 2000 machines, I know that IE6 isn't supported no mas, there are a couple of things that don't work anymore,  the page pull  down, the editor needs a refresh to see the box, can't edit once posted.  But no biggie this XP machine works very well, the active topics page speed meter said .0694 sec. about the blink of an eye to load, I have an effective 2M to 3M download speed when traffic is light.

Thank you!

The emoticons loaded in under 3secs. the first time, under 2secs the second time all at

once.

"Isn't the speed at which a page loads dependant on a posters board settings."

Sure it is, but the question is asking about performance relative to 2 weeks ago. If you haven't changed your settings and your page loads are happening slower or faster that they were, something else is causing it. I'm assuming Todd is trying to determine if his changes to the site have resulted in the speeds people are experiencing.

I can't say I've noticed a difference, but for the most part things have always seemed to load quickly. The only exception is that the editor takes a second or so to load when I'm replying. That's with Firefox 2.0.0.14 on XP, FWIW.

Four4me: I'm not sure what those huge numbers are, but I'm guessing you're trying to paste HTML into your message.

Yes, you can slightly increase the size of your page downloads by increasing the number of posts on a page, but that is only a miniscule part of the download.  It might be the difference of a couple hundreths of a second -- maybe a tenth at the most.

The biggest part of the download, the part that affects any delays, is all the stuff that gets downloaded after the HTML portion of the page loads.

Also, I'm really asking you to compare your OWN times against each other.  Don't compare you vs. me, because that doesn't tell you if the performance has gotten better.  Compare your OWN experience two weeks ago with what you are seeing today.

Are the very first parts of the page you see appearing quicker?  (Earlier in the load cycle.)  Do you notice the page finish loading quicker than it did?

BTW, anyone answering "the same" or "slower", can you post your browser brand/version number and which operating system you're using?  Are you using dial-up or broadband?

"Slower" is a bit of a mystery, because there is half as much data being downloaded, but I don't doubt what you're saying.  I'd be interested to understand what environment you have so I can see if there is more I can do.

Well I'm digging for a deeper answer preferably from Todd. He is always upping the performance of this site. And some days 2 weeks ago or so pages loaded at different speeds and rates than on other days. Like someone said if there was heavy traffic i don't know if hes referring to this sites traffic or INTERNET traffic.

At night after 2 O'Clock i never have difficulty navigating this site unless Todd is working on pages. During the day and early evenings some pages load slower than they do at night. 

Since the last big change pages seem to load faster.

Todd what you are seeing in my post was me trying to post my board settings where the long number are there is just supposed to be a box with my boards settings for each way a page is displayed.

this page loaded in 0.0900 sec.

I think it runs a bit faster, but most sites load quickly for me, unless they are picture heavy or have a lot of animation on them.

If it helps, I use Mozilla Firefox, have Windows XP, use a broadband that varies from to 100.0-150.0 Mbps.

This page was generated in 0.0720 seconds for me.

The number is how much time it took for the server to GENERATE the page, NOT the download time.

That number is used to determine if a long page load time is due to the server or your PC/internet connection.

If it is a very small number (like you posted -- nine hundreths of a second) then you know that none of the time it took to load was due to anything on the server.

forget i said download i meant generate like it says at the bottom of this page or the lower right hand corner

This page was generated in 0.2350 seconds