Business as usual... (speed issues resolved)

[Admin 14,788]

Just a quick notice to say that 2 things happened tonight:

• There was a technical glitch that meant the site didn't have enough memory to function as usual. Due the large number of people on the site at the time, it meant there was only enough memory for a limited number of people at a time, which created the effect of the site temporarily working and then appearing to run extremely slowly. This has been fixed. 
• An update to the latest version of the software was carried out. Ironically, after all the speed issues earlier, this update contained numerous features that should improve speed more than ever! Test it out by going to a page with lots of pictures than would traditionally take a little while to load... the experience should be much more seamless now. 

If any speed/loading issues persist, please let me know. We should all be set now though, and no further updates/downtime is planned for the foreseeable future. 🙂

Thanks for your patience. 

 

[spywareonya 37,961]

34 minutes ago, Admin said:

Just a quick notice to say that 2 things happened tonight:

• There was a technical glitch that meant the site didn't have enough memory to function as usual. Due the large number of people on the site at the time, it meant there was only enough memory for a limited number of people at a time, which created the effect of the site temporarily working and then appearing to run extremely slowly. This has been fixed. 
• An update to the latest version of the software was carried out. Ironically, after all the speed issues earlier, this update contained numerous features that should improve speed more than ever! Test it out by going to a page with lots of pictures than would traditionally take a little while to load... the experience should be much more seamless now. 

If any speed/loading issues persist, please let me know. We should all be set now though, and no further updates/downtime is planned for the foreseeable future. 🙂

Thanks for your patience. 

 

Great work as always

[watchr12 1,473]

Not to complain, but the site seems slower to me. I'm using Firefox 66.0.2 (64 bit). I notice two things: images load only as I scroll down, rather than loading when the page is opened, whether or not I scroll; and, when the page loads, undisplayed images are have full-sized placeholders, so the page immediately can become very long, rather than formatting as the images are loaded.

One other thing that seems new is the popup label for the insertion point in the comment box. If I don't move the pointer away from the text, the popup obscures what's being typed. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks for all your work making this a home for us.

[Admin 14,788]

18 minutes ago, watchr12 said:

Not to complain, but the site seems slower to me. I'm using Firefox 66.0.2 (64 bit). I notice two things: images load only as I scroll down, rather than loading when the page is opened, whether or not I scroll; and, when the page loads, undisplayed images are have full-sized placeholders, so the page immediately can become very long, rather than formatting as the images are loaded.

One other thing that seems new is the popup label for the insertion point in the comment box. If I don't move the pointer away from the text, the popup obscures what's being typed. Hope this makes sense.

Thanks for all your work making this a home for us.

The first thing you mentioned is actually by design - lazy loading. It was being trialled as the logic is that images only load when viewable on the page, meaning when you first go to a picture page rather than trying to load 50 pictures at 2MB each all at once, it should just load the ones you can see. 

If you have a very fast internet connection, this wouldn't help you (and may create the effect you described), but for people with slower connections it should work better, and reduce overall bandwidth usage.

If people don't like the way it works though, we'll scrap it.   

 

 

Not entirely sure about your second point as not experiencing that myself. Could you please provide a screenshot or more detail on what you mean and I'll get that fixed? 🙂  

[lovestoseepee 297]

@Admin Thanks for all the work you put into this place and for giving so many a place they can call home. Also thank you for fixing the latest problems, you do an amazing job running this place. 🙂

[watchr12 1,473]

On 4/5/2019 at 5:17 AM, Admin said:

The first thing you mentioned is actually by design - lazy loading. It was being trialled as the logic is that images only load when viewable on the page, meaning when you first go to a picture page rather than trying to load 50 pictures at 2MB each all at once, it should just load the ones you can see. 

I've seen similar setups on other pages. As pages get longer, there are more images to load when getting down the page to new posts. Is it possible to have thumbnails or smaller images? That would mean less bandwidth on your servers, but I'm not familiar with how this is structured. I do appreciate the placeholders, since it's no longer a race to keep up with the lengthening page as images load.

If you have a very fast internet connection, this wouldn't help you (and may create the effect you described), but for people with slower connections it should work better, and reduce overall bandwidth usage. At this moment, using fast.com (by Netflix), it shows: 70Mbps, Latency Unloaded 14 ms, Loaded 140 ms, Upload 6.5 Mbps. I've seen speeds up to 95Mbps, but not this morning. Plenty fast, though.

Not entirely sure about your second point as not experiencing that myself. Could you please provide a screenshot or more detail on what you mean and I'll get that fixed? 🙂  

Here you go:

Thanks again!

 

[2prnot2p 1,066]

On 4/5/2019 at 7:53 AM, watchr12 said:

I'm using Firefox 66.0.2 (64 bit).

That might be your problem.  I've used Firefox exclusively since 2008 and haven't had any malware whatsoever since I started using it.  It's the best browser from all that I've read.  But, I'm using Firefox 60.0.2.  I used to do all the updates and I'd get the new versions right away too.  But, it got so ridiculous as they have updates daily or weekly and a whole new version so often.  It's not needed.  I'll keep using my version for maybe a couple more years before I switch.  I found that sometimes the updates and/or new versions cause new problems that I didn't have before.  It's just a thought, try using an older version, maybe.  Worth a try.  This site is working great for me now.

You can find older versions of many software programs at the link below:

Old Version

Edited April 9, 2019 by 2prnot2p

[watchr12 1,473]

Here's the direct source for every FF version from 0.1 (Oct 2015) on: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

I've kept it up-to-date because of security issues, and to keep NoScript working. I do like Brave as well, but it's pretty strictly aimed at being ad-free. There's also DuckDuckGo browser, which goes for privacy, but not sure how well it keeps unwanted scripts off your machine.

Thanks for the info.

[watchr12 1,473]

I have to say that I find that the delayed image downloading is greatly slowing page loading on long pages. This is very noticeable when having to go to the bottom of a given page to see the latest posts. Is there any chance there may be a way to allow users to set pages to load with the newest posts first, so that the user will not have to wait for the rest of the page to load, and PF won't have to waste bandwidth? Thanks!

[Ozabot 63,207]

On 4/5/2019 at 5:17 PM, Admin said:

The first thing you mentioned is actually by design - lazy loading. It was being trialled as the logic is that images only load when viewable on the page, meaning when you first go to a picture page rather than trying to load 50 pictures at 2MB each all at once, it should just load the ones you can see. 

If you have a very fast internet connection, this wouldn't help you (and may create the effect you described), but for people with slower connections it should work better, and reduce overall bandwidth usage.

If people don't like the way it works though, we'll scrap it.

Lazy loadind works not so bad when scrolling down. But when you open the last post of the thread and scroll up for previous posts it's very uncomfortable, especially if there are several pictures in each post. Page behaves like crazy)

On 4/6/2019 at 8:55 PM, watchr12 said:

Is it possible to have thumbnails or smaller images?

We actually have thumbnails but they are very big. Looking through many TGP(Thumbnail Gallery Post) sites the optimal thumbnail size is about 150x220px. 

[DXR 834]

On 4/5/2019 at 5:17 AM, Admin said:

The first thing you mentioned is actually by design - lazy loading. It was being trialled as the logic is that images only load when viewable on the page, meaning when you first go to a picture page rather than trying to load 50 pictures at 2MB each all at once, it should just load the ones you can see. 

If you have a very fast internet connection, this wouldn't help you (and may create the effect you described), but for people with slower connections it should work better, and reduce overall bandwidth usage.

If people don't like the way it works though, we'll scrap it.   

 

It's driving me nuts.   Every time I scroll down, I now have to wait a few seconds for the next set of images to load before I scroll down further.  Very aggravating.   What I used to do was to pre-load the pages in separate tabs so that the images would load in the background while I was looking at something else.   Now I can't do that.   FYI, my connection is 23 Mbits/sec, which is fast enough to stream full HD video with no issues.   I think the problem here is the latency between the request for the next set of images and when they actually arrive.   In other words, they load quickly once they start coming, but there is a big delay between the request when I scroll down and the time the images actually start arriving.  Please consider scrapping it if it can't be made optional on a per-user basis.

Thanks.

[Admin 14,788]

It has been disabled.

I think it definitely worked better for scrolling down pages, and certainly saved bandwidth, but I realise that many members aren't starting at the top and going down, so it isn't really effective. 

Should be back to normal now.

The other speed changes seem to still be working my side though. Please could someone confirm if things are running smoothly for them? (aside from the picture loading - which is now back to normal),

[mickymoist 3,513]

👍 @admin working well here

[watchr12 1,473]

Page and image loading seems to be considerably faster than before: thanks!

[DXR 834]

Perfect.  Thanks!

[2prnot2p 1,066]

All works very well for me, but I cannot see why people complain when, in their own words, it takes "a few seconds longer."  We've become such an instant gratification society, haven't we?  I remember making popcorn the old way and it's much better than microwave popcorn.  It took a bit longer, but was well worth it!  Man, I am getting old, aren't I?  LOL!

[mickymoist 3,513]

2 hours ago, 2prnot2p said:

All works very well for me, but I cannot see why people complain when, in their own words, it takes "a few seconds longer."  We've become such an instant gratification society, haven't we?  I remember making popcorn the old way and it's much better than microwave popcorn.  It took a bit longer, but was well worth it!  Man, I am getting old, aren't I?  LOL!

LOL I know what you mean, remember this? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

 

[DXR 834]

22 hours ago, 2prnot2p said:

All works very well for me, but I cannot see why people complain when, in their own words, it takes "a few seconds longer."  We've become such an instant gratification society, haven't we?  I remember making popcorn the old way and it's much better than microwave popcorn.  It took a bit longer, but was well worth it!  Man, I am getting old, aren't I?  LOL!

It's all relative.  The problem is that each attempt to scroll takes seconds.   If you have to scroll say, 20 times to get down one page, that's a full minute to scroll down a single webpage.   Would you accept that delay for every web page you visit when online?  That would be like dial-up.  Similarly, wouldn't you find it annoying if you had to wait 3 seconds after typing each key on your keyboard before it registered?   Hitting the scroll key and waiting 3 seconds for it to do something every time is just as annoying.     If it happened only once per page, that would be insignificant, but when you have to do it multiple times in a short period of time just to view a single page, it becomes extremely annoying.  Imagine waiting 5 seconds every time you walked into a room and turned on a light switch before the lights actually came on.  Wouldn't you find that annoying before long?  Yeah, it's faster than lighting a candle or a gas lamp, but there's really no reason to have such an unnecessary (and annoying) delay for something you do so often.  On the other hand, a few extra seconds to start a video stream or play a DVD, or for the oven to heat up for dinner would be nothing.  Like I say, it's all relative.  It's not a matter of instant gratification, it's a matter of introducing unnecessary and annoying delays into (1) something that is done often and (2) something that was designed to be fast and convenient, thereby defeating the original intent for no valid reason.