OT: Avsim fubar today?

[GypsyBaron]

Is anyone else having issues with Avsim, particularly the forums?

The site is VERY slow in loading and I tried to reply to a thread there 3 times and
after the little green 'doing something' animation stopped my post was still in the
'reply box' and never was posted!

I believe they did some sort of 'system maintenance' or upgrade last night. I wonder
if this is another of those 'now THAT didn't work too well' events.

Every other site or forum that I accessed this morning loaded instantly.

Paul

[smoky942]

I've always found Avsim to be the slowest loading site I go on. Upgrading my internet to a fast fibre optic connection made no difference. One day last week, the pages loaded instantly, and I thought good, at last they have it sorted. Next day it was back to it's normal geriatric pace. Sometimes, a man could lose the will to live waiting for pages to load, so I hop over to another site.

[n4gix]

Tom tried to install the latest update to the forum software night before last. It took about fifteen minutes to install, the about six hours to uninstall and clean up the mess left behind. I suspect there's still some additional "clean up" needed, 'cause otherwise this "update" only did this: :toilet_claw:

[GypsyBaron]

Thanks for the info, Bill. Had a chuckle over your animated icon there at the end :)

Paul

[Naismith]

Why is it I wonder that Avsim Front page http://forum.avsim.net/index.php?app=ccs&module=pages&section=pages&id=2 takes for me upwards of 10 seconds to load, yet
Avsim Library http://library.avsim.net/ is instantaneous?
The result is I tend to avoid the Front page and go staright to the files. For news items I go to FS.com and avoid their sloooooow file library. And as a last resort Simviation for their sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooow "wake me in the morning" file experience. Seriously you three, given that you are advertising fuelled, you haven't improved in all the years I've been using you, this is almost 2014 with fibre optics etc. :bull_head:

[TARPSBird]

...yet Avsim Library http://library.avsim.net/ is instantaneous?
The result is I tend to avoid the Front page and go straight to the files. For news items I go to FS.com and avoid their sloooooow file library.
I also go straight to Avsim's library page, since downloading a file is usually the reason I'm visiting Avsim in the first place.

[n4gix]

Why is it I wonder that Avsim Front page http://forum.avsim.net/index.php?app=ccs&module=pages&section=pages&id=2 takes for me upwards of 10 seconds to load, yet
Avsim Library http://library.avsim.net/ is instantaneous?
Have you ever noticed just how many people are accessing the main page and/or forums at any given time? Rarely is that number less than 800 at any given time of the day. Also, most of those logged into the forum server are there for at least one hour.

The library is on a separate server entirely, so it is not affected by either the main page or the forum system. It's rare than there are more than 200 concurrent connections to the library server, so it responds much faster. Also, most of the files are very quickly downloaded, which of course means the connection is dropped more quickly.

[Canelo]

Looking at the front page I think I see some of the problem, embedded ads. Many of the ads are loaded from other servers and slow the load time down. Ads are no-cache and load anew every time. I have always believed in KISS, the least amount of images as possible, specially on a sites main page.

Display ads pay by performance so you need a bunch to generate a few dollars. Payware makers have very small advertising budgets and don't pay all that much.

Beings SOH is non-profit, we can pay for bandwidth by donations, and with no ads we save tons of bandwidth.

Having 800 on-line should not strain a well balanced server, download limits and permissions should regulate FTP usage, so I believe the slowness often seen in the forums is caused by the core software. Most big boards run on vBulletin as does FlightSim.

Avsim offers a great service free to users and tries to serve the community, being slow goes with the territory.

Luckily SOH has a file library that can set parameters by usergroups; such as how many MBs in a day or total MBs per user, what download speed a usergroup gets and how many files a user can download a day, month or year. This keeps a good balance added to a 512MB file size limit.

[phantomx1]

I haven't been to Avsim's website going on two years now. Apparently they have changed their site to where it no longer remembers me as a member and somehow made it where I had to create a new pass word each time I wanted to visit the site in which most every time the sign in wouldn't work any how, so I simply gave up trying to get into the library and rarely went to their forum anyhow.

[n4gix]

Well, that is definitely odd. I've been registered at AVSIM since 2002 and have never had to re-register or even change my password...