I've thought about getting a subscription to Poser World but everytime I go there to look at the subscription preview section the pages seem to load EXTREMELY slow on my 56k modem compared with any other site. Anyone else have this problem? I can't get broadband in my local area (yet) so what I'm wondering is how slow or fast will my actual file download speed be if I do subscribe? If it's going to take hours to download relatively small files on a 56k modem, then I don't need the aggravation. Comments?

Hey it goes extremely slow on my dsl. Write them a letter and tell them your concerns, maybe they will get it together and fix it. And it isn't just when a new update is announced, it's ALWAYS slow. Sorry to complain, but I hate excuses instead of answers. Marque

the previews area is on a different server from the subs area so it should be faster....i'm not sure about the dsl problem Marque is it that slow it doesn't go or just slower than you normally get, i can't get anything like that here so i'm on a 33.6 modem and get the fastest spped dloading from there, now i know i'm biased a bit ;o) but i wouldn't fib :o), the only way to make it go faster is add more T1's and well i'm sure you know there not cheap.....Steve

the previews pages are extremely slower than the subs site because they have banners (not any at the subs area) PLUS heavy graphics of big previews of all items of each update! I have found over the years that what affects your downloading speed is the in between servers of your ISP as well as where you are downloading from and at what time! I don't have trouble at home myself at a 56k modem and the majority of other members don't either... there are a few exceptions of course as well, not so lucky ones!.. but there's no way we can cover all! :O) Rena

I have also DSL and it is very fast on all sides. But on your side it is like sleeping, but if you go there in the morning (I am in germany) you will have much better speed, may this can help. Another thing to renapd and steve: it would help a lot if there would be a NEWS-Page with all the new items. Any chance to get it? Your side is slow, but I rather fall to sleep during downloading than missing one piece.... Great side!

If you wait until the rush is past after a new update you should have no problem-- I have DSL but it seems to be as slow as a modem in some situations, how fast do you get around in Renderocity? Poser World [subscription side] and Rocity seem about the same to me. Don't ever try to download after an update-- the clothes will stay around. It truly is worth the extra time. ALmost all the offerings there are NEW models, not maps of some other thing you have to buy. And the furniture and scenes are magnificent. Emily

From a personal perspective I average 7.2 kb dload from Pworld. Other areas I can push 9K (dial up - no broadband in my area, nor will there be) The pages load extremely quickly compared to many other sites. Any problems between me and the Pworld servers I can usually track down to routing at my ISP or one of the 15-17 hops made to the pworld servers. If you're having problems, it's worth running a trace route to see where your connection is bouncing to get there. Nine times out of ten the problem is in between you and there. I won't usually download less than 24 hours after an update as there's almost no bandwidth available (for me anyway) and I'm lucky to count a download in bytes, let alone kilobytes. Seems to me that with faster connections (dsl, adsl, cable) people are getting more impatient and less grateful. Perhaps that's just my perception though. Another thing that's worth considering is the contention ratio applied to your connection by your ISP, sometimes it's simply that there's a lot of people connected or the up/dload allowance has been altered to allow for heavy usage. Lots of reasons. If in doubt, trace the route, check the hops, contact ISP and ask questions, if that ain't it, then yes, there's something else wrong. But, with many people downloading at satisfactory speeds from Poserworld, it seems pretty safe to assume there is a problem elsewhere.

I've heard this story too many times, everyone else screams on the download, Poserworld crawls. Rather than blame my ISP, since every other site I've hit is sans this problem, I will just not re-subscribe. I hate excuses. Marque

"Seems to me that with faster connections (dsl, adsl, cable) people are getting more impatient and less grateful" If the site were free I would never say a word, but I pay to be able to download. Don't tell me I'm ungrateful, that's crap. Marque

the site is pretty slow sometimes and I have DSL, in fact I just go away and come back later....this is true when upgrades are announced....

I haven't had any problems with the download speed - only if I go right after an update has been released it's slow... other than that it's been great for me. I don't know what the problem is for the others...

Dear Questor-- I'm not That impatient-- I pay $120 a month for DSL, no other broadband will reach me [I'm on the edge of the copperwire cutoff] and dial up is horrible and extremely erratic. I'm lucky to get 11K download from PoserWorld, usually it's 8.5 and on heavy days, 680bytes, but as I said, heavy days are not a good idea anyway. Not exactly much to be grateful about on this end. Emily

Contrary to appearances I was not sniping at anyone in particular. Having received a number of emails regarding my own site downloads being slow - something I have no influence over at all as that's to do with the hosting company and other factors, and noticing a number of complaints around several forums and newsgroups regarding slow pages and slow downloads on many different sites it appears that the faster net connections get the more impatient people are. I saw a lot less complaints about "slow" before broadband was widely available. Now, well... In the UK it's common to have a fairly high contention ratio on lines. One example is a small company that collapsed when trying to install broadband cable in my area, they were offering 20/1 contention on medium cost accounts and 50/1 on low cost. High cost would be variable up to 20/1 depending on demand. It doesn't take much imagination to see that 20 people sharing one line out of the ISP all downloading stuff or file sharing or whatever, is going to reduce available bandwidth. This is where I use information to arrive at possible conclusions. One can only speak from personal observation and experience. That people think I'm sniping at them is neither here nor there. It's a simple fact that complaints about speed have increased with the availability of high speed connections. As I stated, I haven't personally had any problems with speed to Poserworld. A few people do. If the majority had problems it would be a safe assumption that it's Poserworld servers at fault, because it appears to be a minority then it is also reasonable to assume it's something else causing the problem. My perception is not and was not a reflection of anyone in particular's attitude but a generalised statement. Bad hair day, I probably should have kept it out for a different thread.

PoserWorld is only slow for me (cable connection) after an update...otherwise it's fine. Now if we want to talk about slow, I think we're at (Renderosity) the slowest site in the universe. :-)

poor folks with cable modems and dsl and slow downloads.. I think that I will just keep zooming along at 56k!! hehehe

I remember the subscription preview site being pretty slow when I first checked out PoserWorld, even on DSL. What sold me was the incredible content available to members. Once I subscribed, I was delighted with the speed increase on the actual member's site. As their membership has grown, loading times can drag quite a bit right after an update announcement, but the pages still load in 4-12 seconds (that can SEEM like a long time, but really isn't). Downloading files can drag considerably during those periods, however, mainly because Steve & Rena really don't stint their members on content, and some of the downloads are pretty hefty. I've come to put off downloads until 2:00 am or later, Calif time, and find they go pretty speedily then. Marque, I'm sorry to hear about your connection speed. There are sites that I visit that seem to be beyond some kind of bandwidth "bottleneck" as if some leg of data between us were limited to a slower ldata link. These sites (mostly tech support sites for long-existing companies, it seems) can drive me up the wall, so I can sincerely empathize with your frustration. I can only say that I consider the content at PWFW is good enough that I'd put up with slower download times by a factor of four or even eight times longer and still feel the lifetime membership I bought to be an excellent investment. Since I've gotten Win-XP, I find I can have 2 to 15 IE6 windows open at a time, so I can keep pages loading while I read others. I can normally download two files at a time, or just one if I'm cruising other pages, so I usually just browse the forums while downloading individual files from separate windows. I do agree with moenchen, though, that a "What's New" page with links to all the download pages for the latest update would be a WONDERFUL convenience. Jerry B leather-guy ...Just my 2 cents worth, opposing opinions expected and encouraged...

Attached Link: http://www.toast.net/performance/

Just did a little experiment just because you made me curious. I downloaded three different files via cable modem and got the following transfer rates: 70 KB/s, 45 KB/s, and 75 KB/s. The higher rates were smaller files ~1 meg. The 45 was ~4.4 meg In addition the pages just popped up for me ~1 sec. For comparison, with a modem connected at 56K numbres or 4 KB/s would be good. For DSL numbers of ~30-100 would be good depending upon the type od DSL you have. Some ISP's limit the bandwidth. Don't know what to tell you, I am bless with a good ISP :) If you want to test your download speeds on a number of different servers try the link above. Number I reported are in kilo bytes. If you go to toast or msn the numbers are in kilo bits which makes the numbers look larger. http://www.toast.net/performance/ http://tech.msn.com/internet/speedtest.asp

"Seems to me that with faster connections (dsl, adsl, cable) people are getting more impatient and less grateful" I'm not ungrateful but I admit I have been rude. In that there's an update I gotta have it now so I cause part of the bottle neck. From now on I'll bite my nails and wait. I paid for a year. What I have recieved so far has, as far as I'm concern, surpassed the 50 bucks I spent. It is worth the wait. If anyone has a real problem with downloading I'd recommend their cd's. Personally even with cable there are a few sites that bog down on me. There is no way to guarantee that everything remains smooth in the route from a to b.

I always have good speeds when I download from there :)

It gets more and more mysterious then with some getting fast dloads and some getting slow ones, ...I'm not making excuses Marque as the membership increases we improve the bandwidth, this year we have moved PWFW over to a dedicated server of its own, added T1s and rented partial ones but its all about matching income with outcome....Now Rena and i don't deal with this stuff Allen runs all that, but i believe we pay $12000 a year per T1 line (which is pretty cheap as they go http://www.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm ) so you can see to add more would make a need to put the cost of membership up which we are reluctant to do hence the rental of partial ones as and when we can afford them...to check if you have a problem in the pipline (in win2k i'm not sure of other os,s) go to the command prompt and type in ping www.thewebsite.com....Steve

Just to stir the pot a little I had a chat with Allen, he's posted an explanation in the poserworld forums. Around about Tuesday Pworld should be back on it's own t1 with no other traffic routing through. This isn't obviously an answer to all the times there are download problems for some people, but it does explain the latest problem. There also seems to have been an upgrade to the forums and database which may have had some influence over routing. Anyway, as has been noted before, if there are problems, contact Allen, he is the admin, he's also in charge of the home of the Poserworld server. Steve and Rena don't have a tremendous amount of control over what happens with the machinery. The server is in the US, Steve is in the UK and Rena is in Greece. It's not like they live with the server or have super long arms where they can flick a switch and make everything better. Today, I have internal routing problems with my ISP, they're kind enough to publish this information in a MOTD that is updated hourly so I can check on networking status without wasted phone calls to their tech support. Some sites are working just fine, some are damned slow, some aren't even accessible, I'll live with it because I know they'll fix it sooner or later. It's not as though you dial in to the ISP, connect your computer to another and d/load. There is machinery in between that doesn't always work even if it doesn't seem like it.

God help me if I have any technical idea of what this means.. but I've contacted allen about weird connection problems and just got this reply from him... ############## Date: 04/29/02 06:09:56 Subject: Really weird connections [pwupdate] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey, No the Sprint T1's are behaving and the Intermedia T1 is going flaky (I think we are being DDOS'ed - denial of service at the routers). Anyway I switched PWsubs over to sprint (only requires a DNS record update) so you may get a few complaints, if you do tell them to re-start their PC so the local DNS cache will be flushed. Soon as the Intermedia T1 acts properly I will switch the DNS back. It works upon a restart. Allen ############# Rena

I love my poserworld subscription, glad there is some explanation....I subscribe for the content...the download speed is just a convenience...but thanks for the quick check and response !!