I’m able to trace to “trains.com” as far as Chicago, at which point it fails, probably a firewall issue.
Curiously, I can trace all the way to “milwaukeecounty.org,” but that one picks up the hosting company’s network in Chicago.
1007 CDT 90 online and speed medium about 1 1-1/2 minutes
1020 CDT 89 online and loading 10 - 20 seconds.
2 minutes to load right nowl. Never have seen it this bad!
I’d estimate some pages were taking 15 to 30 minutes to load, had to hit retry at least a dozen times on some pages. “Who is online” was showing 49 during the slow time. At 10:30PM PDT, the load times dropped to a couple of seconds.
The problem was not congestion on my end - pages from other sites would load up in a couple of seconds and the modem lights were not showing any traffic most of the time when waiting for Trains.com pages to load.
- Erik
Last night was a disaster from here–I couldn’t even get on the site to see how many others were trying. Not so bad this morning.
Just hope that the powers that be were watching, or maybe able to do something eventually.
“+1” to the 1st paragraph of Carl’s post. At 7:40 PM EDST I couldn’t get onto anything - not the Forums, and not even the linked NewsWire articles from the weekly e-mail update.
At 9:15 PM until I quit at about 10:30 PM - again, both EDST times - I could access the Forum and some threads intermittently - but at least one “timed out” and I got the “Oops - Something went wrong!” error message. About half of my attempts loaded in 20 - 30 seconds, but the other half seemed to stall about 1/3 of the way through - based on the lack of progress of the green ‘bar scale’ at the bottom of the page - so I chose to abort them. That included even simple tasks such as pulling the drop-down menu to edit a post ! (to fix some typos)
As Erik noted, the problem surely wasn’t at my end - I has no problems accessing other sites and doing some word-processing while I was waiting . . . [:-^]
- Paul North.
I wonder how long it will take to fix the problem. It has been going on for 3-4 weeks. Forum participation is nearly impossbile in the evenings. This kind of experience will discourage participation overall, even when the forum is working properly.
Even when the problem is finally fixed, it could take a long time for the fourm traffic to finally recover to the level it once was. The level of participation is a forum’s greates asset. It seems a shame to squander it due to a technical problem.
Last night was the worst I’ve experienced. Trying to get the page loaded was the slowest part. Once loaded, I was able to move about fairly quickly. But, I logged off thinking I was done, then thought I should edit what I posted, and time passed s-l-o-w-l-y trying to get back on.
I’m in agreement with Bucyrus, it will take a bit of time once the problem is fixed before the night time traffic will build back up, which I hope it will.
Paul has nailed my experience last night in the same time frame. I might add that normally the evening EDT is a time when a significant amount of forum activity normally takes place.
Most of the problems I’ve had getting logged on has been between 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. EDT. And the wait is usually 10 to 20 minutes.
Borderline close to timing out when I hit reply to make this post at 5:05 PM MDT. Last few minutes, while trying to read Newswire, ranges from very bad to almost normal speed. I can’t discern any pattern from one type of page to the other. 60 users.
Bruce
I entered the site at 11:00 PM MDT. Unbelievably between 5:08 PM MDT when I made the above post and now, 11:15, there have been exactly two posts made to the forum. One each to the Trackside with Trains thread and one to the Goosefest 2009 thread. It took 15 minutes to check out these two threads, get back to this thread, and hit reply. There are 18 obviously dedicated users.
Bruce
Forum was almost normal when I logged in at 10PM PDT tonight - site is reporting 19 users online.
- Erik
Around 9:20 PM EDT last night - Tues., 29 March 2011 - I couldn’t log on in even an unreasonable time (1 - 2 minutes) despite 3 tries. Gave up, tried again this morning - even then, took about 30 - 40 seconds, which is longer than normal.
- Paul North.
There are 16 individuals online at this time (5:53 AM CDT), but the site is slightly faster than last night…at least for now.
I’ve had problems the last few days…slow or no abiltiy to open, no automatic replies. Did send an email to customer services last night.
I called customer service and they said they are working on the problem, which I was told is being caused by high forum traffic at night. I was told that they do not know when it will be fixed.
When something like this happens, it has a two-stage effect. The first stage is that forum participants are unable to get on. Because they fail to get on, they may try less often, and thus not get on when the problem has cleared up. So overall, there is less participation.
The second stage is that when members feel inclined to post, they may be refrain from doing so because they feel that nobody will read it or respond because the forum is so dead from the suppressed activity.
IMO - that momentum has been lacking a lot lately - not due to the slow forum speed - but from a select few posters that have been taking just about every topic and using it to further their own personal (or political) agendas.
I don’t know. I think that might actually build momentum.