Everytime I navigate to a new page, the page loading is slowed down because a website that the page is trying to connect to: www.smartpakradio.com is down or loading slowly. It appears that the forum waits for the connection to time out, so I have to wait a very long time…every time I switch to a new page. It’s awful. It’s nearly unusable. I am using FireFox but it happens in opera as well.
[QUOTE=Stacie;4070384]
Everytime I navigate to a new page, the page loading is slowed down because a website that the page is trying to connect to: www.smartpakradio.com is down or loading slowly. It appears that the forum waits for the connection to time out, so I have to wait a very long time…every time I switch to a new page. It’s awful. It’s nearly unusable. I am using FireFox but it happens in opera as well.[/QUOTE]
I find this happens to me on occasion - I’m not always checking the site at the same time every day, but I think around 2-3pm each day it gets really really slow like that. Just COTH, not other sites. I figure either that’s when everyone else suddenly logs on, or they do some kind of maintenance procedure? I can’t be sure it’s always at that time, but it seems like it’s more or less once a day.
That would be the server for the SmartPak banner ads that have been appearing at the top of every page for awhile now… the banner ads are not showing up for me right now, so it seems as if their server is having some sort of issue.
Thanks for letting us know. We’re due for a board pruning, as well, so that might help matters a bit, but I’ll forward your experiences to the experts and have them check in re: the SmartPak ad loading.
We do all of our regularly scheduled board maintenence in the dark of night when the fewest people are online so it’s the least disruptive as possible.
Thank you!
Mod 1
You guys may want to look into ad cashing. It seems like my computer is trying to download the images for the ad Every time it requests the new page. I would rather my browser had them all in cashe so I would not waste time waiting for a page to come up.
You also may want to look into performance of your servers and network at whatever number of hits you have… COTH is always the slowest website out of most other places on the web, wich leads me to believe it is not my computer’s performance or internet connection.
Thanks!
Thanks evntr06–you’re right and a cached ad system is actually already in the works! We hope to roll out a new ad system, along with some other improvements around the end of the summer.
It should also reduce the load on our servers a bunch, as they won’t be being hit for the ads anew each time.
Hooray! 
Thanks again for the tips!
Mod 1
