During my recent trip around the world, I noticed FT speeds

South America - okay
Europe - super speedy (admittedly this was between Christmas and New Year when traffic may have been lower)
Asia - sluggish
Australia/NZ - never fast and intermittently crawling

glad I found this forum and others are having the same problems as I, almost ready to give up on the site, up to five attempts to get pages to load, multiple clicks to get topics to open, pages hang and lock up.

Tried using 3 different browsers all with the same problems, has been like this since early December.

And not a word from IB

And I don't guess I'm surprised based on their past responses--or lack thereof.

Still slow as molasses here, often takes several clicks to access a thread if it will even get there at all. Many times still opens the frame of the page without any of the text from the thread.

Also noticed quite a few times where a script will hang (using Internet Explorer 8).

Same problems for the last few days. FT is running very slow, whether I access through the Chinese ISP directly, or through my US-based VPN tunnel. Definitely not "normal." Each page is taking a couple of minute to load up (when they load). It's getting close to unuseable for me. It does seem to be better when I access during what is the middle of the night North America time, which leads me to believe it's some sort of overload or bottleneck issue.

Is there actually any effective action taken to correct the FT problems that have developed over the last two years, or are we just spitting into the wind with these comments?

Fact Pattern:

January 1 - 9
DFW
PHX
SJC
Hyatts
Starbucks
SPGs

Response in all locations above : SLOW

GoGo

Response in location above : NONE

Home on Cox Cable
Local Libraries

Response in location above : SLOW to NORMAL

* Welcome to my world

Bolding mine!

Ditto. It also seems like North American daylight hours on the weekends are slightly better than the weekdays, but not exactly stellar.

Case in point: I hit the submit button on this post and it took close to a minute to get posted, and hitting the Edit button afterward took close to 30 seconds to bring me to the edit screen.

+1

At first, I thought it's me because my work computer is OK. My personal laptop is slow.

Something I do notice... On my pesonal PC, when I first get to FT, it's OK. Then it gets slower and slower when I visit more pages. I'll see the header (the blue bar with the FT logo), then I'll see the breadcrumbs. After that, it'll just sit there 'waiting' for the rest of the page...

My limited (but dangerous) amount of technical knowledge makes me think it's because the way IE8 renders tables. It may not show the table until it has all the code for it. Assuming the actual forum data is from one place and coming through OK (e.g., the breadcrumbs), perhaps it's what's mixed into the actual posts, i.e., the ads...? Perhaps the connections to the ads are flaky...?

Apologies if I send you down garden path. My imagination can be quite vivid sometimes.

We recently made a change to the network. Can you please give me some feedback?

By any chance, could you go to this site: http://www.speedtest.net/ select a server in Los Angeles or San Diego, run the report, and past the results in here? When the test is done, there is a link to "copy direct link" that will copy the results to an image that you can paste in here. I just checked my internet connection to Canberra and got this: http://www.speedtest.net/result/681813370.png

Not any better here. Still often having to refresh several times to read a thread. Still slow as molasses.

I've tried running IE8 in compatibility mode, that doesn't seem to help, either.

Yea.. its been really slow.. its killing me..

Just wondering if its the ads thats causing this slow loading.. seems all others site (based in US, Europe and Asia, all loading pretty fast for me.. Just this site is crawling....

No, it's not the ads. I have the ad-free version of FT and have the same problems, especially when it comes to making a new post.

If you're using Windows, you can edit your hosts file to get rid of Ads.

Much easier, if you're using Firefox, is to get the ....... extension. Ads-be-gone.