Is it slow or what?

[Viscount Sussex]

Danny, is it me or the site is running very slow in the last couple of days?

[Rollingthunder]

Yes it is,here anyway, but so are a couple of other major sites.???

[faheel]

No you are both right, its very slow here and in OZ as well (at least where my wife is)
In fact when I access it I end up with the servers main page, and have to click on a little window to get pprune to start, then its very sloooow

[1-A]

Hate to complain, but I got a ADSL line 1.5 mb/sec. and today is too sssslllloooowwww.

[pigboat]

I thought it was just me. No problem to acquire the home page from favourites, but the forums pages take three or four minutes, threads ditto.

[info4u]

Thanks for shedding light on the slowness of the web page, I also thought it was something I may have done and eventually mumbled about IE and the service provider!!
Does anyone else have any problem loading up the Blah Blah page?(chat line) as for almost 2 weeks I cannot seem to get it to load.
Thanks

[Iron Hen]

All usenet newsgroups were slow as well in the last few days using 3 different ISPs.
This morning everything is fine again.

[Capt PPRuNe]

There were problems with some international routers yesterday. The PPRuNe server was running normally so the problem lay with the route the packets of information were taking through the internet. Even I gave up last night after waiting for a long time. It doesn't matter if you have a high speed connection or not if the bottleneck is somewhere between your ISP and the server. All back to normal this morning.

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Capt PPRuNe
aka Danny Fyne
The Professional Pilots RUmour NEtwork

[Capt PPRuNe]

As an update to the previous post I have been doing a little bit of digging and found out the following:

I too noticed how slow it was to load pages yesterday afternoon (UK time) and yet this morning everything was back to normal and very fast. Checks on the server showed that the load was not particularly high and the CPU was coping well with the traffic. By around 3pm this afternoon I once again noticed that it was all getting very slow. The server checked out OK and after a call to tech support it was revealed that the problem was excessive bandwidth being used.

The PPRuNe server is currently using up nearly all available bandwidth at its current location in Orlando and the only solution is for the company that hosts the server is to install another T1 connection but that will take a lot of time and probably wouldn’t be available until the new year and that in itself only solves the problem temporarily. As the site becomes more and more popular so more bandwidth is used up.

Currently PPRuNe is using about 120Gb of bandwidth a month which is almost a whole T1 connections worth. When I moved to the dedicated server I was using less than 50Gb a month and had a contract for up to 80Gb but now, just 3 months later, I am already using 50% more than I contracted for and am billed for the excess on a monthly basis. The problem though is that the location of the server can’t handle that capacity and so the ‘slowdowns’ we are experiencing.

The other solution is to move the whole server physically to a new dedicated data center on the US west coast where I am told I can have unlimited bandwidth (at a price). The only real problem with this is that as PPRuNe gets busier it also gets much more expensive to run. I’m already paying a lot for the dedicated server and if bandwidth increases at the current rate It could all become too expensive to run. A victim of its own success. http://www.pprune.org/ubb/NonCGI/frown.gif

I have to make a decision over the next week about what to do. If I do sign up for the move to the data centre in California it would mean that PPRuNe would be down for about 48 hours while it is shipped over and the new IP address is propogated which is a nuicance in itself but at least after that I have been assured that there would be no more of these ‘slowdowns’ due to capping of the bandwidth.

So, I have to dream up some revenue generating ideas as the advertising alone doesn’t cover all the costs. The badges idea is already in production with the initial batch and will be available at the Gatbash on December 1st. Net purchases haven’t been finalised yet and due to pressure of work I don’t have enough time to sort that out just yet.

Hopefully I will have a better picture of where we are going when I get back from my next trip which I leave for tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.

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Capt PPRuNe
aka Danny Fyne
The Professional Pilots RUmour NEtwork