Okay, I'll see if I can get this to post. Why, oh why has the site been so slow for the last several weeks? It is so slow today that I can click on a link, go downstairs, grab a cup of coffee and come back to my office only to find that the page STILL hasn't loaded up. I'm on cable modem and everywhere else I have gone today comes up just fine, so it's not the service... But it's getting increasingly frustrating...I won't go to the galleries when it's like this..I can only imagine what it's like for people with dialups.... Why is it so very, very slow? Thanks! Pendy

Did I hear my name (as the winner of the Crappy Internet Connection Contest, that is - LOL)? Actually, Pendy, I think it's the internet as much as anything else. I'm having more trouble than usual every place. Check this out, and you'll see what I mean: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/cgi-bin/tr_chartpage.pl?NorthAmerica This page is just for North America. I haven't looked at the worldwide page recently.

It's REALLY slow. Half the time, a page won't load.

It's not a general issue with the Internet - this site is running unacceptably slow. It gets more frustrating each day as this issue seems to continue unabated for months.

I had hoped that the server upgrade was going to solve this problem somewhat but things are worse than ever! The galleries are so slow that you need the patience of a saint to view them!

I once suggested in an earlier post that if the present procedures are not up to the task of managing this site then perhaps it's time to consider outsourcing solutions. Something has to be done to end this chronic speed issue.

I agree. The internet as a whole is not as bad as this site. It's getting where I may not even be able to read forum posts. Perhaps a clue is on error I got just trying to get here: "Connection to SQL server lost"

grrr. make that MySQL I work with SQL far to often and it;s easy to make that mistake

I wasn't saying that the site itself isn't slow. Just meant (and obviously should have said) that when the internet is in as bad shape as it was earlier, everything slows down.

While I'm the first one to admit that the internet health has to do with the speed of any web site, this site is running like a mouse stuck on a glue trap. Okay, bad imagery, but the point is that their servers seem to be busting at the seams, specifically the mySQL one. I'm not surprised that the server upgrade didn't help that much if at all. mySQL, despite the speed of the server, is a free program by the open source project and is fairly stable if properly configured, BUT it has a bottleneck in the amount of write versus read requests it can handle at any one time without getting all choked up.

To fix this site, it seems to me they have to rethink their whole database strategy. If they insist on using mySQL, they need to be aware of it's shortcomings and find ways to work around them. We use mySQL at work and have fairly high volume, but we don't rely on just the mySQL daemon for all requests and processing because we know it's a dog. If database handling is the only option, then Bondware needs to consider opening up it's wallet, getting Oracle and an administrator to keep an eye on it (it's kinda finicky) and go from there. Oracle, while not the most stable, does handle high end traffic situations such as this, as does other packages like SyBase, etc...

So the question is when is Renderosity going to make an effort to replace their current SQL system? I realize they may be out a programmer at the moment, but still, this is something they need to address with more than a bandaid for as Richabri said, it is still unacceptably slow...

My 2c as an internet developer...

Actually Sipapu, the internet site you show is very generic. ShadowWind is right! The slowness is coming from Renderosity itself. In a DOS command window you can try the following command tracert www.renderosity.com That will show you each and every router that your packet touches between your computer and the renderosity server. It will show you how long it takes between each "hop" in ms (milli-seconds) I find that there is usually problems of time-outs occurring at the renderosity IP. Hope this helps :) I suspect there is a "threading vs timing" (threading referring to a process performed by the server itself for internal processes)problem occurring with all the requests that need to be processed on the server. This was what I was talking about in regards to moving on up to an "enterprise" situation in a previous forum thread. Brenda

I'm on DSL and I've been able to do a fair job of reading the forums. It takes a little bit of time for them to load, but not so long that I lose my patience. The galleries are another matter altogether. I have not been able to view any galleries for almost a month now. The download time is just hideous. To me, that defeats 3/4 of Renderosity's reason for being. What good is it to have a gallery for an artist if you can't even enjoy their work? Also, uploading to the galleries is the pits as well. Hence, no showing off of any of my new work. The galleries are abysmyally slow, but uploads are impossible. I certainly hope some solution is found soon.

Ain't no way I was gonna argue with ShadowWind! Shoot, I didn't even know what he or she was talking about, so I figured it had to be right. Wasn't trying to argue with anyone else, for that matter. So, I ran tracert on Rosity, (is this what tracks pings?) and yep, it timed out on all 30 attempts. But then I ran it on my own local ISP and it timed out there, too. I had trouble even getting my ISP's home page to come up earlier. Anyhoo, I'll stay out of these discussion from now on. LOL!

don't you dare stay out of the discussion!! It's a great place/way to learn. If we can't see what you don't understand, we can't teach you new stuff or show you how to track things down :) Traceroute or tracert rather, tracks the path your data packets use from the point of leaving your computer to the destination point. Ping's are also packets but instead of showing you the path, it shows you the length of time it takes to go from your computer to the desitination. Now, you mentioned you weren't able to ping your ISP (grin) This could be one of a few things: You had no connection :( Your ISP has ping packets "receive disabled" (icmp service and/or echo ports disabled) :( But, the most likely is that your connection was up but the ISP's web page was having problems at server level (this server is usually not the same one you connect too). So, clear as mud??

Re the reasons I might have timed out trying to run tracert on my ISP: Well, I know I was connected, since I was also wandering around Rosity during that time. (And the connection icon on my systray was active, and IE always tells me when I've been disconnected, anyway.) Unless you're saying that tracert wasn't connected? I thought you said I wasn't pinging, so why would it matter about the ping packets being "receive disabled"? I'll try again another time. My ISP almost ALWAYS seem to have trouble. Sigh. Hmmmm. Could my firewall have created a problem here? Yep, I actually understood, in theory anyway, what you said. Thanks for the info. (Do I really want to know all this stuff? LOL!)

hehehe, yes, your firewall could have caused you to not be able to ping also depending on your setup (grin) forgot about that one! I also figured you'd know whether or not you were connected. (another smile hey,it's a valid reason!!) Some servers that run slow (um, hmmm) will turn off icmp packet receiving on their end to reduce traffic they deem unecessary or detrimental. Mean's you can ping till the cows come home but never get a response even though you can tracert (or traceroute) to them. Glad you stayed with the conversation :) You'll find this stuff comes in handy when you want to figure out why you can't go where you want on the net or why you seem to be going the looooooong way around!!

OK. Gotcha. But I'll probably forget all this stuff tomorrow. Re my firewall, I did give it permission to access the internet, but I suppose it could have rejected any return info, yes?

hehehe, yep, your firewall could well be rejecting pings coming back in!! And, if you forget I can remind you (big grin)

Well, I'm not going to mess with my firewall settings just to play with this. And thanks for the offer to remind me. VBG

I live in England. I get my fastest access in the UK early morning while the Americans are asleep in bed.

Page loading has never been the faster here for me (I think they must bandwidth throttle the server), but it's not the "loading" of the pages, its the "connecting". Click a link, wait...wait...wait...wait... page finally connects and loads.

Right now, the online thing says there are 788 users. Pages are connecting at a reasonable and decent rate. Earlier it was over 1500 and pages took forever to connect or timed out. This is a common pattern I see here, so clearly the number of people logged in has a major impact. Whether that's because of the mysql or what I can't say because I don't know anything about that. Still, it does seem that some kind of upper limit has been reached.

But no Sipapu...its definitely not because of general internet traffic. Rederosity will frequently be dogging it while every other site is flying right along. In fact, I've got in the habit of browsing other sites in other windows while I wait for Renderosity pages to do something.

From Manchester in England tracert gets this:- Tracing route to www.renderosity.com [208.138.126.7] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 159 ms 160 ms 171 ms 194.66.31.251 2 254 ms 167 ms 168 ms gw-umill.umist.ac.uk [130.88.100.250] 3 240 ms 152 ms 160 ms gw-man.netnw.net.uk [194.66.21.246] 4 230 ms 152 ms 183 ms gw-nnw.core.netnw.net.uk [194.66.25.97] 5 148 ms 159 ms 160 ms manchester-bar.ja.net [146.97.40.177] 6 231 ms 152 ms 168 ms po10-0.warr-scr.ja.net [146.97.35.45] 7 239 ms 152 ms 152 ms po1-0.read-scr.ja.net [146.97.33.13] 8 206 ms 145 ms 145 ms london-bar3.ja.net [146.97.35.126] 9 218 ms 152 ms 152 ms int-gw1.ja.net [146.97.37.74] 10 218 ms 160 ms 145 ms r1-Se0-1-0.0.Ldn-KQ4.UK.KPNQwest.net [134.222.109.225] 11 208 ms 145 ms 167 ms r1-Se0-2-0.0.Ldn-KQ1.UK.KPNQwest.net [134.222.231.13] 12 232 ms 213 ms 213 ms r3-PO4-0.Nyk-KQ1.US.KPNQwest.net [134.222.228.126] 13 286 ms 228 ms 235 ms r2-PO5-0.nyk-KQ1.US.kpnqwest.net [134.222.229.229] 14 293 ms 213 ms 206 ms jfk-brdr-02.inet.qwest.net [205.171.30.145] 15 277 ms 236 ms 236 ms iar3-sonet2-2-0-0.NewYork.cw.net [208.173.135.133] 16 294 ms 237 ms 236 ms agr1-loopback.NewYork.cw.net [206.24.194.101] 17 565 ms 260 ms 251 ms dcr2-so-6-0-0.NewYork.cw.net [206.24.207.177] 18 301 ms 252 ms 236 ms agr4-so-0-0-0.NewYork.cw.net [206.24.207.62] 19 285 ms 251 ms 259 ms acr1-loopback.Nashville.cw.net [208.172.114.61] 20 261 ms 247 ms 243 ms bar3-loopback.Nashville.cw.net [208.172.114.8] 21 291 ms 244 ms 266 ms renaissance-application-facili.Nashville.cw.net [208.175.64.202] 22 322 ms 251 ms 259 ms core-126-229.rentech.net [208.138.126.229] 23 332 ms 259 ms 252 ms www.renderosity.com [208.138.126.7] Trace complete.

23 hops!!! Ouch, I start to scream when I hit 13! And, each of your hops are over 100ms with most being well over 200 and I even see a 565? sheesh.... You deserve a pat on the back for patience :)

Yep, scifiguy, I definitely got that down now ;-) LOL!

• In fact, I've got in the habit of browsing other sites in other windows while I wait for Renderosity pages to do something. I do the same thing! In fact I've found all sorts of things to do while waiting for the pages to load - like reading! You could catch up on the galleries and read War & Peace at the same time - you'd finish the book first though! LOL!

i remember the days before desktops when all computyers were mainframes with a lot of terminals: as more people came on the system got slower, and one essantial tool of computer programming was an interesting book to read while the system was replying.

Where is Renderosity's server?

I think it's in Nashville.

Sorry for the delay in addressing the post. Yes, The servers are located in Nashville, TN. We think the problem is at the Co-Location facility and we are currently speaking with them about it. Sorry for the slow response times. Clint

I'm with you Anthony, Birmingham, UK. Its great around breakfast time here. The rest of the time, like scifiguy, I have a separate R'osity window and do other stuff while waiting.