Lag has invaded the forums!

Am I the only one suffering from lag in the forums? What happens is that I find the site ok, and things often seem to work all right for a short time. But then, when I click on a thread to read an individual posting, or when I respond to a posting, things seem to freeze up completely.

This sometimes lead to a double posting, because when it looks as though nothing is going to happen, you click again, and rarely this seems to unfreeze everything, and your comment gets posted twice.

It is really bad, to the extent that it is making me consider not coming to the forums at all, which news I am sure would not cause universal mourning.

But I am posting here to ask if anybody else has experienced this, or whether it's my problem alone.

I'm experiencing the same issue.

*sigh* I certainly hope it's not a DDoS or something along those lines. Another forum I frequent had that problem all last week, and another a few weeks before that...

Yes, I've been annoyed with the same issue.

Intermittently, it can take 2+ minutes for any page to load. This has been happening off & on for at least the last month or so, possibly longer. When I'm browsing at work, I'm on a T3, and running IE6.

When this happens, I immediately check other sites such as cnn.com or yahoo.com. They always seem to load up in an instant, yet the forums will be hung or slow to load.

Yep Yep, same here.

Ditto.

I've been clicking to view or post, then walking away to do stuff around the house while I wait.

It's like being on dial-up again.

This has been happening to me for a while (months). I use Firefox and call it "sit and spin" (because the downloading icon in the tab is a spinny thingy). I always open threads in a new tab instead of the same tab. Sometimes I open 3 or 4 threads at once so when I'm done reading one I can go straight to the next one. It's irritating when they're all just spinning away waiting to download.

Yes, Ive been having the same difficulties as well .

I've been having the same problem for quite some time now.

-Ghoti

Me too.

Come on, it's not *that* hard to run vBulletin.

Maybe the forums DB is part of the asshat server now

Same here, it's been bad for a while and getting much worse, to the point where I assume it's something wrong on my end, like a virus or such, or the bad router in Dallas has gotten so old it's starting to have senior moments.

This reminds me.. I was going to write in and tell 'em that the next thing to do to the forums to keep an "even experience" is change the background images to the "gray loding texture".

Forum slow... like me!

yah me too

*Whew* You guys just saved my computer from a beating! Guess it's the forums being slooooooooooww after all.

*shudders*

Nooooooo!

( Removed due to double post due to occurrence of the very topic of this thread ! )

*sighs*

Yeah me too, kind of at random, but typically I might load the site, link to the forums, link to New Products (yay !) then click eagerly on a 'clothing and accessories' or 'body shop' and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh, no load, big freeze, my Safari 'page load' button just goes round and round as if forever. It's torture I tell you when I'm in need of retail therapy

I get massive packet loss all the time in SL just lately though, I can only assume this is all some kind of network/DNS/server type thing ?

Glad it's not just me.

Torley! What's happening?

*waves to Selador*

'Tis lag indeed. Either that, or some may have seen a scary white page with a technical error.

I have also had the problem where I make a reply and it shows as "0 replies" even though my post is actually there.

As observants know, these issues have been going on for several months--one reason is because I believe the forums are stored on the same server responsible for numerous other database stuff. So when they get used and hit frequently, the forums slow to a grind.

Not to mention, forum searches that can be quite intensive. We've already chopped down some of the search functionality but don't want to cripple search altogether. Yes, common words like "land" and "money" and "Linden" turn up blank pages when searched for in entire posts.

Also, another concern: attachments keep filling up quickly. We're monitoring this, but if it gets really bad, we may have to turn them off in the future and recommend an external hosting site like http://www.photobucket.com or http://www.imageshack.us

So, it's definitely not just you guys. And it's painful. :\

We do want to update the vBulletin version of the forums to the latest, but I don't know of any near-future plans to address this: priorities, priorities. (And for that reason, it's why we can't allocate resources like putting the forums on a superfast server all their own--other schtuff comes before.) There are many improvements in other areas which must be taken care of first.

(Irony: upon editing and re-submitting this, it stalled for a couple minutes.)

What have I done to you to deserve a suggestion like this?

I'm just evil. Nothing personal.

On another forum I frequent (rpg.net), they had to disable search because the size of the forum was so large the search function was causing it to be very slow. This especially happened with the "new posts" function.

It's possible the SL forum is rapidly reaching that point.

Also.. Uh on the same topic of the Forums.. why has everyones animated avatars stopped animating? Not to mention, this has happened in world also...

Actually, I'm not seeing ANY forum avatars or sigs for that matter. Never in my life have I seen such compact threads.