Why is this website so slow to download?I dont have any problems with other sites.Quite a few times I got the refresh screen or try again later.When this happens I usually dont check it out on those days. Gerald
Im glad im not the only one with this problem!!!Well lets hope they read these and try to correct it.They promote “THE WORLDS GREATEST HOBBY” But have the slowest web site on earth.
DON
I don’t have a problem with this web site.
I don’t have a problem with it, and never have. It must be your browser, or memory, or something. As you can probably tell, I don’t know about these things!
Gerald, I’m in Grand Rapids Mi and connect via the telephone line of Ameritech-SBC and I connect at 31,200bps which is a darn slow connection considering what other people connect at.
Even at this slow rate I have no problem with this
forum.
How many other telephones are on the same household line, portables?caller ID, hard wire phones. It adds up, especially if you live in an telephone area that has NOT seen an up-grade to it’s infrastructure.
I had to drop one portable, 2 hard wire phones(extensions)
Copper telephone lines were never designed to carry data.
Finally, check with your tel co and have them put a test on the line to determine excessive interference/static. I was originally connecting
at 28,200bps and the tel co did come out and cleaned up the line bumping me up to 32,200bps.
The standard 56k modem can move date date at a maximum rate of 56,000bps. Impossible to achieve
on the old fashion copper tel line.
At work I have a T1 - T3 connection and this site does seem to be slower than other forums, but they don’t see the heavy traffic, nor do they have the data archives and such that this site does. That stuff takes its toll on a server, so naturally this site will be slower than say…www.trainboard.com.
One reason this site is so slow is that all of the RealMedia ads and animations have to be redrawn every time you change pages (such as when you’re following the thread of a forum discussion). I personally find the slowdown annoying. I suppose I might feel differently if I could afford a high speed DSL or cable line but since I can’t, I just have to suffer through the slowdown everytime I click on a link. It’s frustrating!
Hi guys,
Another consideration is that the site becomes slower at peak times of the day. We notice it here at Trains.com at around 10a and noon CST, i.e. break time and lunch time at work.
There are things we can do better and are working on decreasing the time it takes to download certain pages on our site. Please be patient and keep coming back. There’s something new every day.
Have a happy new year!
Jim Schulz
associate editor, Trains.com
A lot of the answers on this thread are way too technical for me. Sometimes the site is slow, sometimes fast, but I find a lot of sites are like that.
I figured [ and hoped ],it was normal, since I am often slow, but sometimes [seldom ] fast myself.
Happy New Year.
I’m confortable at this site, kinda like a ModelRR
class 100, although I wish I had a higher GPA.
Jim, Atlas’ websites are many times busier than this site, as is Trainboard, and they are all much faster than Trains.com. In addition, you can view the entire thread at once, without having to wait between 5 and 60 seconds for your server to recreate the whole file. I inquired about this, and Customer Service told me it was the graphics. Where are the graphics on each forum, pray tell??
Hi Gregg,
The graphics on the top right hand side of the page (Amtrak/kid/Santa Fe/engineer/steam locomotive/coductor) are large and take some time to download as compared to other sites. Like I said earlier: we’re working on it, be patient, and keep giving us this good feedback so that we can improve the site for easier use.
Jim Schulz
associate editor, Trains.com
Try making the ad’s and links on left part of a border so only the center part is updated each time.
My son assures me this can be done. This site is not too slow but could be faster in the forum.
Have a great new year ppl’s
ps, I am on cable in Melbourne Aust.
Jim, I think I found the “graphics” problem, and it’s not the top log, which downloads almost immediately. The right hand side of the page is cut off on my screen, and I’ll bet it’s the graphics in the ADVERTISEMENTS there that are so slow to load, especially that flashing Greenberg job that’s running right now!!
The ads should be storing on the local drive and just referenced when the page refreshes. If they have archive turned off on the website, I do this on mine, it causes the screen to re-read everything from the server. That’s done so you don’t get a stored page image from your local hard drive but get the latest info from the web server. I don’t think they have that set so it’s probably your ISP…Walt
even with my 2Mbit/s leased line this page is sometimes exceptionally slow. maybe there’s lots of traffic.
have fun
Sandro
www.sschaer.com
“Amen!” to your last two sentences, ChessieMike. Having the entire thread open for display would be a big improvement. I also participate in Adobe’s PageMaker User Forum; all you have to do is click on a discussion topic and the entire thread (or as much of it as will fit on the screen) is displayed. It makes following the discussion much easier. It would be nice to have that capability here also.
Yes, the site is slow. But the info is good! I know Trains is working on it because everything they do is under constant improvement. May I suggest that the whole string be displayed without having to go to each entry, one at a time. Some times I forget what the original question was.
CHESSIEMIKE
I suggest that you look into using frames for the forum.
- one frames contains the thread tree and the page navigation elements
- the second frame contains the actual message being viewed
This would mean that when a viewer clicks to view a message only the frame that contains the message is being updated, not the entire page with all the graphics
This site is slow probably due to the graphics reloading, but TrainBoard got so slow that I gave up on it. Two minutes plus to change a page is considerably longer than here. 
Roger