Site is becoming unobtainable

[Gwared]

Wahey! Finally after 5+minutes!

Erm, what I'm here to say is that this site is slowly becoming unusable to me. The pages are taking 5+ minutes to load and yesterday they were taking longer. I have no problems with anywhere else on the internet, so what could it be?

[Gwared]

Shortly after posting this the problem cleared, at least for the time being.

[Paul]

Please tell me if it becomes a regular or ongoing problem. There is no way that 5 minutes is an acceptably usable time period for pages to load but hopefully it may have been just a temporary glitch from the server end.

[Scellanis]

i have had the problem quite alot...but it nerver last long so i never bother with it......

i wont even notice it on this computer cos its that slow anyway.....

[Holly Golightly]

Well, I've been ahving that problem tonnes while I was using my parents puter, but it's about 3yrs older than mine, so slower, so that might have been it.... ( I ajust assumed that it was only me...)

[zledm007]

while i was on the road and used a total of 3 no check that, 4 different computers to use this site i found that this is indeed a problem. it tool me as much as 5 minutes to load it on my friends dial up connection, and on my aunts dial up AOL commection, i coudn't get the site at all it was so slow. on the flip side, whenever i was on a computer with a LAN connection it worked fine, but i am now noticing that at home (a LAN connection) the loading time is slowly increasing. the only reason i can think of for this problem is the growth of the site. while the growth is certainly a good thing, i love to see more and more new members and am constantly advertising the site to anyone i know who enjoys harry potter, i think that the more information that is on the site, the harder it will be for computers of all kinds (although the diffuculty levels will vary) to load the site. as to how to solve the problem i have absolutely no idea. and also, i don't know if my little theory here is correct. but, i do think it is a distinct possibility. good luck Paul, it seems you have some tough work ahead of you...

[Paul]

Thanks for the info - I still haven't noticed any problems myself, but I'm still currently using a slow dial-up conection and an old slow computer to connect (upgraded a couple of months ago to the best my motherboard could handle, but that still only gives me a 300mhz processor and 256Mb RAM), so maybe the reason I haven't noticed small slow-downs in the forum's speed is that I'm used to things going a bit slow anyway. I should be getting broadband at the end of next month which may give me a better idea of the true speed of how the forum is loading.

At the moment the forum is on a shared server, so if the server itself is being used a lot by other sites on that server, this could affect the speed. The size of the forum too, as zledm007 mentioned, may be a factor but if the server is fast enough, with large enough memory, size of the forum should not be an insurmountable problem. I've been looking into getting a dedicated server recently, but this can be a very expensive option. However, it may be necessary in a few months, so I'm hoping to somehow be able to afford it then maybe.