svpii and Dan, Thanks for your well-reasoned posts.

If I can just add one more thing. Dan, you mentioned a couple of times above at your frustration at being "bombarded" with posts/messages about the slow-downs when they happen. I can totally understand that. I've worked on the support end of software products for many years and no matter what or how much you do, someone is still going to complain. But I think many of the "me too" posts to this thread (and others) are probably people just trying to give you some feedback, i.e. thinking it might help you more with the problem if you know that user A has it on a cable modem, user B on a T1, etc etc.

When you get a string of these types of comments while you're already under fire, I know that can feel like frontal attacks. Again, thanks to your and the team for all the work. Good luck on this one and have a great weekend (get outside!).

P.S. Seems to be working pretty well this morning.

Thank you Dan for your reply. I may also have been more acerbic than called for. My years of having customer support under my domain tends to make me pro-customer to an extreme degree. I did feel your comments to be anti-customer, but your subsequent comments have ameliorated that response.

Those of us w/ backgrounds in IT feel your pain. Truly. And the previous post of blairvanhorn's is correct: we weren't (in our mind) piling on - we were trying to give you the variety of conditions under which speed seemed problematic. Again, just our nature. NOT to say that we don't have members who are artists of sarcasm and self-perceived 'wit'... in that we feel your pain as well http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

I agree that it seems much improved this morning - whether serendipity or the fact that you guys are running faster in the hamster cage, the results are good. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Thanks for your comments... I'm honestly sorry (and chagrined) that this thread turned out as nasty as it did.

I know my comments were hot and could be construed as anti-customer, but they weren't intended to be that way, and I appreciate your understanding.

As for the speed increase, it's probably temporary, as we still haven't resolved the problem to our satisfaction. Mornings tend to be faster anyway...

But John's still plugging away. We have a multiprocessor server this time, so we have a little more room to grow if need be. It's just getting over this initial hump.

FWIW, it seemed indeed to be an "afternoon" problem. Speed was very good starting about 5:00 pm MST and is still fine now. Afternoon is just starting out east, so we'll see... http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

FewMiles..

------------------
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Here's what we are going to do:
I ordered an additional 512 megabytes of RAM for the server this morning.

I will continue to monitor CPU usage on the server to decide whether a second processor is required.

One thing that I'd like to ask all of your help with is monitoring the performance of the network. There have been routing problems at the hosting center at times through the week. If you're one of the technically inclined Flyertalkers and you hit lags or something seems wrong, run a trace route for me and either mail it to me, [email protected] or post it to this forum. It helps when dealing with network problems at the host if I have hard data with which to beat them over the head.

Thanks for your interest and support.

FWIW, seems "okay" to me right now! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Glad everyone cares so much that we do get upset! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

Have a great weekend. Thanks! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

John,

What I don't get is that everything _had_ been working great for the last few weeks...then you guys go to a dedicated server and it all goes to hell in a handbag?

Dorian

Don't know if this is to the correct server or not:

[This message has been edited by Dorian (edited 12-07-2001).]

So the bottom line shows 2% packet loss at your server.

Well it's really SMOKIN' right now. Don't think I have seen it this fast! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

My words exactly! Did not know my puter could go this fast. Thanks FT! Way to go.

Seems like the speed is consistently fast today... hope it keeps up.

Yeah! Everyone kissed and made up. FT is great and I appreciate all the work Randy's crew put in. And I posted a "me too" message because I agree with blairvan horn that we are trying to give you feedback. I add that we are also trying validate each others problems so that we know we are not alone. Sometime the problem is only on our end and we don't know it unless we all chime in to compare difficulties.

In fact I had a problem over 18 months ago that I never understood. I would love an explanation and there are plenty of people here with IT backgrounds who might be able to answer. At the time (when I first joined FT) I logged on from work using 56K modem and AOL. At home I had a cable modem using IE. When I logged on to FT there were rarely any new posts. In other words if I logged on June 20th I would see only posts from say June 6th or before and there were no new posts. Of course at home FT was showing posts up to June 20. The next day at work FT still only had posts from June 6th or prior. At home FT was again up to date. Every couple of days from work FT would become current (ie. on July 1 there would only be posts up to June 6 but on July 2 all posts up to July 2 would now appear) but then for the next few days only posts up to July 2 would appear.

The only explanation someome (w/o any IT background) gave me was that when I was logging on to FT from work it was not actually connecting to FT but to some computer (server? something?) that was in the middle and was not updated. Note FT was not the only web site that I had this problem with.

That does sound like a company proxy server caching heavier hit areas of the web. We've received feedback from another user that sounded like the same thing: She could always get the latest FT pages from home, but from her University's connection, she never got the latest posts...

FYI - using home computer, cable modem connection, windows98 -

Tracing route to flyertalk.com [216.38.206.22]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 8 ms 8 ms 12 ms 10.10.0.1
2 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms 172.22.1.1
3 13 ms 15 ms 15 ms 172.22.2.1
4 14 ms 15 ms 13 ms 172.22.2.194
5 16 ms 15 ms 18 ms freei1.chlnc.ip.att.net [12.126.20.129]
6 20 ms 21 ms 23 ms gbr2-p52.attga.ip.att.net [12.123.197.38]
7 24 ms 26 ms 21 ms gbr4-p70.attga.ip.att.net [12.122.1.197]
8 36 ms 35 ms 38 ms gbr3-p10.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.3.37]
9 35 ms 35 ms 34 ms gbr1-p40.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.122.1.165]
10 35 ms 36 ms 37 ms ar6-a3120s1.dlstx.ip.att.net [12.123.16.125]
11 63 ms 59 ms 56 ms dlstx36c3.internap.com [12.126.176.22]
12 54 ms 55 ms 55 ms border3.ge3-0-bbnet2.den.pnap.net [216.52.40.71]
13 65 ms 64 ms 68 ms viawest-2.border3.den.pnap.net [216.52.42.106]
14 70 ms 65 ms 64 ms gi71.core2.den.viawest.net [216.87.89.130]
15 67 ms 67 ms 320 ms fa6-0.agg1.den.viawest.net [216.87.89.150]
16 * * 171 ms s2-0.gateway.den2.viawest.net [216.87.89.234]
17 150 ms 98 ms 104 ms flyertalk.com [216.38.206.22]

***********
Pinging 216.38.206.22 showed a range of 90ms to 598 ms, with a 25% packet loss w/ 32 bits of data ...

************

URL: http://www.flyertalk.com/milesfr.shtml
Page Rating: 2/5
Total Page Size: 87250 bytes Total Graphics: 26347 bytes - 16 images
Server Connections: 2
Date Tested: Monday, Dec 10, 13:18 EDT
This report shows how quickly your page loads at several common modem speeds.

Load Time by Modem Speed
Modem Speed Download Time
14.4k 52.47 seconds
28.8k 28.24 seconds
56k 16.33 seconds
ISDN (128k) 9.45 seconds
T1 (1.44 MB) 4.48 seconds

Server Connections :
connect.247media.ads.link4ads.com
www.flyertalk.com




[This message has been edited by svpii (edited 12-10-2001).]