Forum: Community Center


Subject: a thank you AND a complaint...

spook opened this issue on Jul 07, 2004 ยท 14 posts


spook posted Wed, 07 July 2004 at 10:55 PM

thank you for the quick action on the marketplace enhancements. the requests for suggestions and the feedback from the staff have been models of responsiveness and customer-orientation. however, there really has been NO satisfactory response concerning the continuing performance issues on this website - suspected to stem from the recent modification of the top navigation to many small image targets. website performance is a MAJOR part of "user experience" in this age of high-speed connectivity. and i would strongly urge the administrators to examine the rationale for/wisdom of this particular enhancement. it neither augments usability nor the overall design quality of the website. please, could you improve the performance of the website?


XENOPHONZ posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 10:16 AM

Odd...the site's load times work fine for me.

I have cable at home, and DSL at the office. The site's speed is quite good in both places. The load times are much faster than they used to be. No more "hanging" pages.

In the past, Renderosity's pages could take 3 minutes+ to load. By contrast, the pages will now usually load within 5 seconds or so -- except for an occasional "burp".

It's mystifying as to why others are having speed difficulties. I understand just how irritating that can be.

Something To Do At 3:00AM 



ShadowWind posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 11:13 AM

I'm going to third (or fourth) the complaint about the speed being affected by the infernal menu. I have DSL and the site just hangs when you are trying to look at a picture in the gallery, because it has to load those graphics (that for some reason do not cache) before it can display the artist's images.

PLEASE make it one graphic with an image map or go back to the text. It's slowing the system down a lot.

rdonovan,
Not a bad fix, but it also makes it difficult to get to some parts of the site that are only accessible from that top menu (especially chat) and a roundabout way to get to the forums/galleries if you read/view more than one.

ShadowWind


XENOPHONZ posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 12:22 PM

XENO - what browser do you use? Plain vanilla Microsoft Internet Explorer - ver. 6.0.2800 The speed problems that I had with RR for years seem to have gone away -- as of the institution of the new menu system. I'd be curious to find out why it's not working out that way for others.

Something To Do At 3:00AM 



XENOPHONZ posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 12:49 PM

I'm glad your speed is improved - but there are beaucoup people pulling their hair out over this

I hear you -- and I understand.

It's frustrating to click on a link.....and wait......and wait.....and wait........

As I mentioned earlier, such lag times used to be my everyday experience here at RR.

But that hasn't been true for the last 3 months or so.

Strange, indeed.....and unfortunate that you haven't seen the same results.

Something To Do At 3:00AM 



spook posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 12:49 PM

hi, xeno! i've experienced a noticeable decrease in performance since the institution of the graphical navigation. i've tried "local" adjustments to no avail. (i'm using IE 6, too.) i connect either by T-3, DSL, or cable - depending on location; and i believe that "hops" can be an issue, certainly. however, the "hanging" always corresponds to new images being posted in the galleries - which results in either the column, title, or banner graphics NOT displaying; OR only the banner being displayed.... when that happens, i "stop;" and then i "refresh." is it possible there's a server caching problem related to new images and indexing? otherwise, why would loading all images be impacted by new gallery images?


XENOPHONZ posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 1:12 PM

spook - I just did a refresh on this page in order to view your response - the refresh took about a second.

It takes a bit longer if I visit the galleries or the marketplace. But the wait times can usually be measured as 5 seconds or less.

About the only place where I see excessive lag times these days is in freestuff. And that seems to be due to remote server issues.

I hope that RR can get this worked out. It is irritating.

Something To Do At 3:00AM 



spook posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 3:23 PM

as a follow-up, the PCs i use at home (DSL or cable) are 2.4GHz, P4s w/512 MB RAM, 120 GB HDDs (or greater). on average, a renderosity page will NOT load (displays "missing image" icons) after approximately 40 seconds. that seems a long time to wait to confirm that nothing will happen.... refreshing usually gives me a properly displayed web page in 5-10 seconds.

ALSO, clicking on "stop" - while waiting for images to load - and then clicking on a hyper-link will almost always return a "page not found" error. "back" or "refresh" will return the correct "starting" web page. following a hyper-link from there may or may not result in the same type of behaviour - depending on the frequency of image posting at the time.

(note: it took 6 seconds for this message to be posted and 5 seconds for the site to respond after clicking on "edit.")

Message edited on: 07/08/2004 15:25


Lyne posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 4:37 PM

PLEASE make the menu bar thingy up there all one image again!!! I am glad the site is faster... BUT NOT to be slowed back down until the menu bar images all load one by one by one by one... PLEASE?? I took the survey and did not put this in there...my responses being favorable, and informative...now can I have the old fast one image menu back?? :)

Life Requires Assembly and we all know how THAT goes!


OrcaDesignStudios posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 7:10 PM

I'll again add my voice to this. This is the third time I've visited Renderosity today and every time I have a lag while those menu images load. I have cable and I've tried in IE and Netscape. I'd try Opera, too, but Renderosity doesn't work well with Opera (for me, at least).


ocddougdotcom posted Thu, 08 July 2004 at 7:15 PM

Ha...I was having problems with Norton Antivirus, so I uninstalled it. And still the lame menu takes forever to load. That menu doubles, at the very least, the time it takes to view an image. That's very unexceptable since this site is slow enough as it is. The regular text links were fine, bring them back!


Varian posted Fri, 09 July 2004 at 1:58 AM

Renderosity works excellently with Opera. I've been visiting here since before it was R'osity, with Opera all the way.


DCArt posted Fri, 09 July 2004 at 6:29 AM

Count me in as another IE user with cable modem who is finding the new menu VERY slow to load.



dlk30341 posted Fri, 09 July 2004 at 8:52 AM

Try loading the page with Mozilla...grrrrrrrrr...takes forever...