After the superfast speeds of this afternoon

SN seems to have slowed right down again for me

Banner etc all loads instantly, but takes about 5-10 seconds to load the pages, even longer in some cases

IE7 and IE 6

If your making changes etc its ok, but thought I would let you know its slowed right down again

 

hmm, not making changes currently that would affect that.

I'm finding the site really fast, but we did have a blip about half an hour ago or so when the site was actually unaccessible for about 5 minutes.

Is it still slow for you now?

 

Actually thought it was my connection

I am finding it slow to load this evening

 

It happened just after the blip, still slow but not quite as slow

down to about 3-5 seconds to load a page now

It was like lightning earlier this afternoon, and I was on a filtered connection and download loads of service packs patches etc too, so was hammering the internet connection

I thought it was my connection too at first, but other sites are loading ok

edited to add, quick reply is almost instant again now, its just the page loads

 

Right... that makes sense.

When the servers have to be restarted, especially the database server.. everything is on a go slow. This is similar to when your pc first starts up but much worse because..

When you load this thread, the database has to search through and index of 7million posts in order to dig out the 3 or 4 that are in this thread. Then send all the data back to the webserver.

The next time someone loads it, there is a good chance that the data from that query will be held in the cache memory of the database server, so it doesn't have to search for it, and just bangs it straight out to the webserver.

Now.. bear in mind that this is happening all over the site (approx 5 - 10 threads get loaded every second on scoobynet), and there becomes a microscopic backlog, which just slows everything down as each thread load is waiting its turn to use the tables, etc.

This means that the site will gradually speed up as more and more data gets cached.

On top of this the webserver itself caches images, page templates, etc, etc.

So the upshot is, when the server dies, it will take an hour or so to get properly back up to speed again.

 

Thanks for that Simon

Makes perfect sense

It has gone slower again, but will see how it goes over the next hour or so