h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Especially the last few weeks it takes a LOT of time to open pages at H2G2.
Whatever website I visit, it all works rather fast; opening in ten seconds.
To open thís page, it took TWO minutes and for other pages at H2G2 it is between 30 seconds and three minutes; extremely slow and it is sharply tempering my enthousiasm. It just doesn't work that way.

And this problem is ONLY when I visit H2G2.
It doesn't make a difference if I use "plain text" or Guide ML what I use now.

At Internetexplorer/options/extra/ I use "automatically" refreshing pages.


I won't see this site earlier than afternoon, first of January.

I wish you all a speedy 2003!

Greatings from Amsterdam

You might be interested in Jim Lynn's journal (U6), the I've got a theory entry. It should have been fixed, but that might be the problem. You're not alone though, i have a lot a slow connections the h2g2.

Tango

yes, it's a real problem

and - as you know - it takes TWO to tango; passion ánd SPEED!

Depending on where you are, your connection to the BBC website might not be optimally routed. We have servers in both London and New York, and if you're unlucky, you might be getting routed to NY instead of London. New York has been slow for a while, because it doesn't have as many servers as London, so it's more heavily loaded and therefore slower.

The h2g2 servers *were* occasionally getting stressed by search engines - I don't know if that's still a problem there as I've been on holiday for a few weeks, but I'd guess your problems are more likely to do with loading on the head-end servers which pass the requests through to the h2g2 servers.

Ah, blame it all on the americans, sounds like a good plan to me.

Tango

Thanks for your reply, Jim.

I'm living in Holland, so I think my digital route is via LONDON ?

It is really extremely slow; I would néver use a smiley this way, çause it would take at least three more minutes.

It's killing my pleasure, adventure and writing at H2G2 and I am in a luxuruous position to write/surfe also in daytime, which makes some difference.

The change is very big since a few weeks.

I"ll ask this same question to the Dutch researchers club.

P.S. Blaming the Americans is fine with me (smiley), cause I've been married fifteen years with a Californian.......

Well, because of the way the BBC does 'load balancing' your route to our servers could *easily* be via New York. Here's how to find out:

Go to a command prompt and type 'tracert www.bbc.co.uk' and you'll see how many 'hops' you have to go through to get to the BBC servers.

Thanks,again, and how "to get to a command prompt" ??

Thats easy, you just....er....er..... I don't know

Jim, How do you get to a command prompt,

manda

Assuming you are using a machine with a Windows operating system:

Hit the Start button at the bottom left of your screen
Hit the Run option that then appears.
Type whatever it was that Jim said in the text box that will appear.

Yes, it indeed works that way if you work with windowws.

Het mentioned a total of six hops.

Is that a lot?
Or just a few that cannot cause delays?

Well, six is very few, but it depends how far it got. You can only really tell by where the hops go to. What IP address does it give when you type 'nslookup www.bbc.co.uk'? (The second 'Address' it gives in the 'Non-authoritative answer' section.

We are bussy tracing the numbers that belong to the 6 hops,

but the order nslookup.www.bbc.co.uk is not accepted by my searchprogramm.

nslookup.www.co.uk. is that correct??

Yes, I can correct myself by telling, that in your answer we have to write the programm tracert and thén nslookup etc.
In thát case it is accepted and a black screen appears, but no information at all and than it disappears.


When I typ tracert www.bbc.co.uk then I get the following information;

1) 3eea5a01 cable. wannadoo.nl [62.234.90.1]

2) d4407535 cable. wannadoo.nl [212.64.117.53]

3) 194.134.160.40

4) P5-o.xr1-Ind1.uk.euro.net [194.134.181.90]

5) rt-linx-a.thdo.bbc.co.uk [195.66.224.103]


That's it.

I hope this information of any value.

Thanks for your help.

Don't count on London being your final destination...

I live in Lyon and trying the same thing I get a total of 14 hops... what's even worse is that it goes Lyon - Paris - London - New York... Which means at the moment, my signal is whizzing straight past the h2g2 London servers and then takes around another 7 hops around the world before landing at its final destination in the states... Ain't the internet wonderful

OK, that means you're definitely hitting the UK. Is the site consistently slow? What skin do you use?

So as not to be left out, i had a go, and got this:


1 * * * Request timed out.
2 177 ms 174 ms 185 ms lettuce.as5388.net [195.92.66.2]
3 179 ms 173 ms 203 ms 212.58.239.89
4 184 ms 173 ms 173 ms www12.thdo.bbc.co.uk [212.58.224.112]

How does it know where to go after timing out on the first one???

Tango

First question; Am I definitely hitting London? Because I don't know whom you're answering.

But to Whiskey and others; knowing all the ins and outs of the gigital route isn't the main topic right now.
It is the fact, that opening a page at H2G2 for the last weeks takes a véry long time (between 1 and three minutes), while opening other websites never takes longer than 30 to 50 seconds.

And this kind of slow-motion-surfing/writing/posting is killing my love for H2G2 and that worries me.
If I'd know that the problem would be solved over two months I would be móre satisfied than now, in this confusing and frustrating situation.
I already gave a Yell at the Dutch researchers club, but I have not yet received an answer.

But to Tango; I know, that you wrestle with the problem for an even longer period

I used to have the same problem but (<fingerscrossed&gt it hasn't effected my for a while. I'm just trying to think if it stopped when i got my new computer or not...

Tango

Well, I have made sóme progress and I'd like to share that with those that are interested; now and in the future.

Preferences;

I already had ALABASTER, but if you take the other options it is múch slower.

Furthermore; Forum Style; singles pages is faster than other option.

And at last; User Mode ; I had EXPERT and I've changed that in NORMAL and I can say; it goes a líttle faster.

And a last suggestion I don't quite get is; "allow caching".