It's better again
 

Yesterday sucked. I'd be typing a response & only get a few characters or words in & it would 'freeze' for 5-60seconds before it let me continue. This went on forever & sometimes multiple times in the same response; was (figuratively) tearing my hair out. Today's fine.

FT Really Slow Right Now
 

Posted 2220 EDT. Realllly sloooow. Taking @ 2 minutes to bring up pages in OMNI/UA.

Maybe another banner time for access?

Same Here
 

Was working very fast until I got down to the UA forum (it's now 2:56 AM on the east coast), and every forum or thread that I click on now loads extremely slow. The page starts loading, then seems to freeze for about 30-40 seconds, then finishes loading.

bj-21.

Im also gettin very slow load times... :confused:

Posted 2037 EDT/04-27-04
 

Wow. After being back up to speed during the day, it's back to sluggish right now.

Two minutes to load on some UA threads; some not loading at all; re-opening after logging out is very slow.

:confused:

Back to normal for me.... ^

There seemed to be some network issues at the data center.

Hard for us to work with since we were wrapped up in the Freddie Awards.

Incredibly slow right now.

All other websites visited are quick to load.

I second that
 

FT is crawling along for me today. I've noticed a slowdown over the past day or so - but nothing quite as slow as this.

:td: ;)

-Chris

Yes, sorry John but it's the old problem again.

It was OK in the morning UK time during the US overnight, but now it's gone right downhill again as others are reporting.

No -- different problem today.

FlyerTalk was featured in a series of articles on slate.com, and that series of articles was linked on the index of msn.com today.

The slowdown is do to a large number of visitors from those links -- effectively we've been slashdotted, although the systems are actually holding up better than I would have expected under the circumstances.

;)

That explains why another FlyerTalk record was broken today:

Today at 12:06 in the afternoon Eastern Daylight Time, 1,930 users were on-line — the most users ever on FlyerTalk.

Even more significant is the fact that roughly only a third of the users were actually registered FlyerTalk members...

Edited. Problem resolved.

Stll slow
 

Took me five minutes to get to the reply page.

what is going on?

FlyerTalk seems to be performing fine for me. Took about 10-15 seconds to load this reply page.

Maybe the problems are resolved &/or you are having problems @ your ISP?

-Chris

maybe
 

This is the only sight I am having the problems with, and it has been for about four days.

On dial up, in the starbucks via tmobile and at home. All times, slow.

Working fine for me.... actually faster than normal... :)

Took about 3 seconds for this reply window to come up.

I am happy!

William

Sorry there are no issues with the site right now -- there may be some routing issues between the area of the country you are in and Denver, but there's no way for us to make that better.

Secondly a request -- when you have an issue please DON'T bump old threads and add your issue to the end of the thread -- especially if the issue is site speed. It is unlikely that your issue has any relation to a previous issue, and I really don't want to spend time browsing old issues to get to yours.

Thanks.

okay, NOW it is working
 

All I can say is, I am sure glad I posted that post sicne NOW it is working fine.

:-)

Sure will do
 

Just to clarify though. Wasn't this post, at least three out of four comments simply about slow load times? From the first poster, then in May, then again end of June - when I noticed this current issue and now today?

I notice that at one point late last week, someone mentioned the loads from links, but the driving theme of posting in this thread seems to be just load time issues?

I'll surely put another post up if it happens again, but I am confident that it won't

keep up the great work!!
N

Re: slow page loads; click on link, then "enter" address in browser's address bar
 

I've had problems loading the FT webpages.

I'll click on a link to a thread. The browser window begins to load the new page, with the title at the top, white window, but then just hangs there. With every new link.

What I've found works well is to click on the link; when the browser hangs, put your cursor in the address bar and highlight the address and hit "return" or "enter" on your keyboard. The page should load immediately, for some reason. Alternatively, when it hangs, you can click on the "Go" button next to the address bar, if you are using Internet Explorer.

Slow Page Loads
 

I had the identical problem. Finally solved it (20 minutes ago)..... I updated my router's firmware and .... all is well again.

Is there a simple fix for this, or is it complicated?

I've been having the same identical problem. The page loads the top blue banner - and nothing else. I even sent an email query asking what I could do to resolve this (no answer, of course).

When the page hangs, I simply keep hitting the backward and forward arrows until the page I want eventually loads. The only time this doesn't work is when Spybot warns me that "Avenue A" is trying to download to my computer. When that happens, I know I won't get into Flyertalk at all no matter how many times I hit the arrows - so I just quit and come back later.

But getting back to the problem - is there anything that can be done about these hanging pages? It is SO annoying! And SO frequent!

The "Avenue A" warning from Spybot is a false alarm, due to its overly-restrictive settings. Avenue A is a company/ad service serving ads on our site.

As far as the slow page loads, those could be related to a number of things, including your router/internet connection. It can also be caused by a clog somewhere between our end and yours, usually caused by the numerous virii and related problems affecting internet traffic.

Of course, sometimes a slow page is caused simply by our servers handling a lot of traffic, but we aren't experiencing abnormal load levels or anything similar at our end to cause your slowdown.

"Avenue A" technically may not be spyware, but it's not totally benign either. It is still a tracking cookie, and I'd just as soon not have a cookie on my computer that reports back to advertisers what other sites I visit.

Set your browser to not accept cookies from Avenue A, then. If you do, though, you'll probably get a lot more popups, as that's what they use to limit your popups to one.

I am having the exact same problem using dial up (so no router to firm ware upgrade).

I use Norton Internet Security and I think that it may be blocking popups which is causing the page to freese so I can not read the thread at all. Sometime I can not open it at all, other times 10 refreshes may get it to open.

My personal stratagy on my computer is that I am will not change settings in Norton for one website when all other websites work fine with it. As a result, I visit FT very rarely. This is something FT should deal with, as other people who have Norton Internet Security and have never been to FT will just assume it does not work and never know what they are missing.

solution
 

I think I have come up with a work around.... a way to avoid the adds....

Instead of clicking on the forums and threads (links) right click on them, then click open in new window. The new window is frameless so it does not have the banners and appears to be working for me. This is a great way to get around the adds.

Let me know if this works for anyone else....

Hope this helps.

Nice idea - unfortunately it didn't work for me. I still had the "Avenue A" issues in the new window. I don't go through a router either, so updating that software is not the answer.

But as you described in an earlier post, I noticed that I began to experience this problem of no page loading after installing Norton firewall. And the problem is only on this site. Every other site I regularly go to loads just fine.

My frustration level is reaching the point now where I will probably greatly reduce my visits to Flytalk. And I was so enjoying this place, too!

After more testing, the solution I cam up with seems to only work 70% of the time for me. I think the problem is with specific adds perhaps. I still have some isolation test to conduct to solve the problem. Although, like you, I think the easiest solution is just not to visit FT as often and then I don't have to deal with the issue. FT should be Norton and McAfee friendly as this is what most of the world uses and if they dont use Internet Security or Firewall, then they need to get with the program before something nasty happens to their computers.

That sounds right - a popup trying to get in and the blocking software saying "no". The "hang" is the period of time between the popup trying to get in initially and the multiple times before quitting.

I'm not sure, aside from refusing popup ads, what FT can do about it.

It would appear that the popup add has some type of code in it that causes the rest of the FT to load after the popup has loaded. By blocking the popup, FT does not finish loading. I could be wrong, as this is a guess. I do not have the problem with any other sites. So, if my guess is correct, the popup should be secondary, not primary, and this would solve the problem?

After finally getting on this thread, I see that I am not the only one having problems! I have tried all of the above suggestions to no avail and have lowered my security wall also but nothing is working. It's so disappointing-this was my favorite website and is the only one I'm having problems with.

Yes it is a real shame. This is the first real show stopper for FT. Sometimes I can not view pages, other times it takes 10 clicks on refresh, although the right clicking thing and open in new windows does help a bit. I would be willing to pay for access, but I am not going to turn off my Norton which solves the problem right away, espicially with the trojans that you can get from visiting web servers that do not keep up to date with their updates.

The past few minutes have not been bad for some reason?

I disabled my Norton and it didn't make any difference. It took 3 minutes to get this reply page. I hope improvements to the site are in the works?

Depending on your version of Norton, dissabling it may not be enough. If FT is looking to read cookies so it knows what adds you have seen, you may be running into the same problem people have using the Zone for playing cards... see the Norton thread here... (uninstalling it solves the problem, not turning it...)

Norton Help Site for Zone (may be the same issue)

Actually, the page will still load, but only after a long delay. That's what I meant in the OP - if the page hangs during loading, put your cursor in the address bar and hit the "enter" or "return" key on your keyboard, and the page loads much more quickly than simply waiting for the "hang" to end.

This is not how it works.....
How do you know that the page would load if you refresh it? If it stalled and you then hit refresh, a new set of adds may come with the page allowing it to load. I have found that the page either loads or does not load, and waiting does not make a difference, and I hace given it plenty of time.