Some of the big pages on this board take ages to load. Most of the reason for this is the enormous number of explicit font changes that occur all over the place.

It would be great if we could strip out, or at least shorten, all these font changes. They take up about half of some pages, and it would therefore make navigation about twice as fast without them.

Curious what kind of connection speed you are running. At work (about 150k) large and small pages load verrrrry fast.

for months now, FlyerTalk-board-loading-speed is no longer a problem for me, and I use a ISDN connection at work, a TV cable - ethernet connection at home and 'only' a 56 tf connection in Wengen.

"Font changes" aren't the problem. Nor is connection speed (unless you're paying a couple of dollars a minute to use one of those inflight telephones for your data connection).

lately we've been hitting "duress" on this server again, meaning that at times there's a whole lot of activity going on. Our CTO has been monitoring this and has come to the conclusion that if we can hold out for another few weeks, up to a month, then we'll have moved to our new chat technology which is far more robust than this and speed should be OK then. The problem is actually in the way that the 'search' engine performs on this one. in the future, the new search engine will be much faster and not a drain on the entire system....thanks for holding on for us, this thing is really, really growing and remember, the number of posts is actually a very small part of total activity - there is a world of lurkers wating to make their first comments.

I am techno illiterate, but I noticed a reaaaaaalllll long current thread on the UA boards that is now 16 pages of over 500 posts long went pretty weird at about the 500 post mark. REAL slow to load and post to.

Lots of experienced folks with multi posts on last page or two. Even Rudi despite comment above has 4 (unedited!) identical posts over 14 minutes on page 15, which was at about the 500 mark, so it is catching out many users.

Is "500" posts a point that UBB goes into melt-down for any single thread? There must have been so few (if any?) over the years it proably has not mattered before?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/004763.html

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~ Glen ~

I haven't noticed any problems except when the &^$*&^*&^%* ad-server takes a long time to respond.

56kbps modem. But there are still a lot of people who only have 28.8k or 33.6k modems.

The font changing code alone takes up almost 1/2 the size of the big index pages. Cutting a 100kB page to under 60kB will reduce its loading time from roughly (depending of the effect of compression) 20 secs to around 12 sec on a 33.6 connection, as well as taking lots of comms load off the server.

V.42bis compression is extremely effective on repetitious text (and smart enough to back off when it's not advantageous). You're really barking up the wrong tree on this one.