Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler This site is deathly slow to load

Fred, the site is always pretty fast for me, both at home and on my cell on 3G. I'm in Dallas.

No problem with the speed this morning. Going fast for me now.

I once explained Internet reliability to a crowd something like like this. It made sense for them because they were all school teachers. May not shine as bright here.

Surfing the Internet is like working in a daycare full of 2 to 5 year olds. Sometimes you can't keep up with them, sometimes they all take a nap. Sometimes the hyper kid can take a nap while the sluggish fat kid runs laps around the building. Each kid plays a part in the overall experience but no single daycare worker can expect to control every single kid at the same time, all by themselves.

If you are going to work in the daycare, you have to expect random results but if the entire daycare is unusually sluggish, you have a problem. Check for carbon monoxide. If one kid suddenly gets consistently slow when he used to always be fast, then get that kid checked out. If he is just taking a nap today but the other kids are fine, let him have his nap and go play with another kid.


In more realistic terms. The Internet is works by allowing all of the routers of the world to talk freely with each other, no matter what ISP owns them. Each router takes your information, checks to see where your sending it, then makes a decision as to what router further downstream it will send it to next.

This can happen many, many times from point A to point B. You travel through many ISPs and routers and any one of those hops along the way can get unusually busy or have a problem and slow things down. It is designed so that if any router has too big an issue, the traffic could travel another route and this happens often. The path you take to get from point A to B today could be very different from the path it takes tomorrow. The new path could be either more or less efficient for you.

This is in no way trying to diagnose any of the slow users problems above. Nor is it pointing or removing blame from any ISP, user or end point. I'm simply leading up to this.

My point,
I'm bored on a conference call and when that happens, I often type way to much crap on here.

My other point is that when Internet problems are inconsistent, It is very difficult for the destination site to track down the cause when just a few people are experiencing slowdowns.

While I know nobody above pointed fingers, it's very easy to say that "Axiom's sight is slow tonight." While semantically, that can be said to be true, unless it is slow for all users at the same time, the actual physical item out there that is slow is most likely something way outside of their control.

I bet it's that darn kid who eats paste.

Always messes things up.

Yeah. I HATE that kid.

Awesome, Murph. So, the reason Joyce and I don't have kids is related to why I don't have everything networked? Cool! I always thought there was a relationship between those two!

And I thought it was due to that ufo someone discovered near Mercury. Time to put the tin-foil hat back on.

My problems with slowness on Axiom's site is usually fast, but occasionally it's slow and stays slow for hours. I mention it only so that Axiom can identify a potential problem and fix it for their other customers that are actually trying to look and buy something, and maybe getting frustrated at the site speed, making the experience a poor one.

But, given your description of the possible problem, it's something outside of their control anyway. Is there any other sites near Axiom that someone knows of, that they can give to me, so when I experience slowness, I can check my speed with that site also?

Hey guys !

Sorry for not answering this thread sooner but I'm been watching it closely and working with Amie in the back-end to try and figure this one out.

I'm Mad Beggar (also knows as GG or Guillaume Giraudon if you want to get fancy) and I'm Axiom's CTO.

We have in the past months made some upgrades to our hosting hardware and connectivity to provide you all with a better experience. Most of you may have noticed a decent increase in performance on the boards since about a month ago.

I have to admit that the random hits in performance being reported by CatBrat and Fredk have me puzzled. At this time, we are suspecting some sort of routing issue in one of the mid-range or tier 1 carriers on the east coast, but as with most of these issues, its always hard to tell.

As such, I am reaching out to you all and requesting your assistance (on a voluntary basis of course :-) ) to help us troubleshoot this a little further.

Should any of you have the ability to consistently reproduce the slowness issue, I would like to have a remote desktop sharing session with you and a quick phone call so try and diagnose the issue from the offended end.

If you wish to volunteer, please get in touch with Amie with your availabilities and I will be delighted to give you a call and make your acquaintance.

Thank you all in advance for your help and thank you all for the traceroutes and speed reports.

Mad Beggar.

PS : Ajax => 30.03 Up, 5.65 Down ??? who's your provider ? Did you ask for that kind of upstream ?

Hey, GG! Thanks for introducing yourself. You are our god and master! We appreciate everything you do to make Playland informative, useful and fun.

If I were not the only one here with such highly evolved manners and social skills, I'm sure there would be others to express their profuse thanks as well.

Sorry that Ian and Amie never mentioned the term "cretins" when they offered you the position.

Oh SURE! Rub it in. Make fun of the old guy! OK! OK! I had a brain fart! (Hmmm? Along with the old guy card, should I play the Vietnam vet card or the deathly ill card, or both? )






Guillaume, welcome to the forum. Had you asked for this help a couple of months ago, I would have been your man. But, since the recent changes, happily, the site is blistering fast for me.

So, either Axiom's site is taking a nap, but just for me, or maybe one of my ISP's routers is sick.

I think its the router. Do I give it meds, or just use a hammer?