Help please, slow website or me????
 

Hi all. I have tried to get on a website that is pretty slow at loading pages. I have tried with Opera and IE. Could someone please click on the site and tell me if it takes ages for a page to load or is it just me? (ps, on opera it only loads the page up to 16%)

http://www.bps.org.uk/

Cheers!

Loads ok for me - you sure you are not imagining it? :) :)

Took about 20 secs. (on dialup).

Nope, all works fine at normal speed on broadband.

3 seconds @1Mb.

Only about 10 seconds, using Firefox

Very slow on Portuguese "Broadband" takes about a minute

Site's completely dead for me.

Are too many Prooners testing it, all at once? :D

Doesn't work at all for me, 10Mib blueyonder, not that it makes much difference if the site is dead :)

Doesn't work for me either

I suspect their web site manager will be so shocked by the recent 'hits' he will be looking for a good psychiatrist.:ok:

Thanks for your time chaps. It must be something on my computer here, it eventually loaded a page this evening using IE but it took about an hour to load. All other web sites work ok but not this. Odd.... :confused:

Thanks again.

The poor webmaster probably will not even notice if you PING his site:
Start - Run ping www.bps.org.uk

(You may have to tell your firewall PING is safe to run)

I think he's searching for a new hard drive subsystem right now, hope he has actually made the backups.

It's running now for me, and loading at the speed of light (I have broadband of some description here in the office). So maybe they were just having server problems yesterday.

Maybe it is setup that way on purpose so you think you are going crazy. Then you will call them for a referral.
John

Hi all. Just an update. Looks like it is something here as ebay takes all day to load now, all other sites work and load ok so it must be something here. :(

It wouldn't load at all for me when I tried it yesterday, but this afternoon it loaded in about 5 seconds and at last therefore, I understand the humour in BOAC's post yesterday.

P.P.

May I just add it wasn't for me by the way, 'twas for a girl I know called Nikki.......

BRL,

I've got a horribly slow laptop, and when using IE it's almost unbearable. But I've started using Mozilla Firefox as a web browser, and with that the site you linked to opened in a couple of seconds on broadband. I tried it with IE and it took about half a minute.

Good luck
Andy

Thank you. I have just downloaded Mozila Firefox and the problem remains. :( Both web sites take hours to appear. I can only think my firewall may be doing something :confused:

BRL

You may need to defrag(ment) your hard drive.

DBTL - a fundimental question and I should know the answer! How do you PING a site? And what am I looking for?

I had a bit of software on a previous computer which would show the routing of a link to a site - is this connected and if so, can you remember what software I'm talking about?

Thanks for the help...

FJJP,

Ping.exe is built into the OS, as part of the TCP/IP protocol.

Run, Cmd, PING hostname or IP address. e.g. ping www.pprune.org or ping 213.161.73.143. You can see all the command switches by simply typing ping. Generally you don't need any, although -t and -a can be helpful.

What are you looking for?

Well, if you ping a hostname and it resolves to an IP address, then it is likely that DNS is working correctly (assuming you haven't got the address in a local hosts file).

Second, if you get a response it shows that you have a physical connection to the host you are pinging, so your network is set up and working OK. If you don't get a response, it may simply be that the host is not responding, rather than indicating a problem. For this reason, it is useful to have one or two addresses (e.g. www.pprune.org, www.bbc.co.uk) that you know DO respond.

Third, you can see the response times - on a local network (your PC to your router) the response should be < 10ms. On the internet anything under 200ms is not unreasonable, over 500 is getting bad.

The default in Windows is 4 ICMP Echo requests (pings). You may see that not all get through, indicating that the connection is poor.

SD

Saab, TVM. Useful for me, especially as I have developed a home network problem - at least it will remove or confirm connectivity from the fault resolution.

FJJP

If you are speaking of tracert, then it is related to ping - they are both part of the ICMP - Internet Control Message Protocol suite - that is built-into every implementation of TCP/IP that I am aware of.

It shows the interfaces that are traversed by a ping packet from your PC to the remote host.

Try tracert www.pprune.org to see what you get.

Again there are various command-line switches that you can use to tailor it to your need of the moment.

You might be talking about something altogether more advanced, such as Virtual Route or similar. These are commercial products that add lots of additional functionality and GUI interface to the ICMP stuff. For example, VR can show you a map of the world with your PC and the remote host and all intervening hops marked by their position - obtained by querying the WHOIS databases maintained by RIPE and IANA and those responsible for managing the allocation of physical IP addresses.