airship/spekesoftly
As has been made clear the present server is a stiff and it will be replaced shortly. Our history is replete with these ocassions where performance is very poor due to demand.
To put it in perspective we started when 3% of homes in Europe were on line. Try to imagine a time when there was no Google, no Amazon, no such thing as the Dot com boom let alone the crash
Yahoo was a noise and Windows 95 was still late arriving.
Avoiding the middle of the European day has been standard advice throughout the years - a palliative. Using a tabbed browser is our long term policy advice for all of you, all of the time whatever the state of the server. It gives you the best chance of reading the site at a pace that suits you.
If you sniff around you'll find independent stats on us which show PPRuNers read far more pages than the vast majority of sites - 12 or 13 at one sitting. We're setting up a new sytem what will again cope with that. With a decent proportion of users switching to a tabbed browser the time accessing and placing demand on the server to get your fix should drop. That's the mythical average user of course.
In our experience people dont even open a fifth of the number of tabs suggested earlier in the thread. Most folks find the interface gets too crowded if they're run more than five or six tabs at once.
One final tip for those considering a switch to a tabbed browser. Firebird has been mentioned so if you are so wedded to Internet Explorer that change seems daunting there is help at hand.
Firebird is like Linux, open source code - anyone can write for it. If you go to the preferences section after loading it you'll find a section on 'themes.' A click there will take you to the Firebird site where you can select and load a completely new look to the browser. One of them will mimic exactly what your used to seeing with your present browser.
Regards to all,
Rob Lloyd