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

Since I found out about this website (on Tomorrows World), it's been increasingly slow and unstable, often crawling to the point where I can click on a link then go make a cup of tea and come back to find the page has just finished loading, then the webserver for a while refuses any connections at all.
As I think I understand it the whole website is based on CGI due to the ever changing nature of the information available, does that have any bearing on why the server is so slow because the machine hosting it is being bogged down by requests? or is it a bandwidth issue? I'd really like to know because it's becoming unusable and with the amount of people registering it's going to get worse if nothing is done about it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like this site

It's a combination of server load and bandwidth, both of which we're addressing right now.

It's OK most of the time, but unusually high periods of demand will cause the server to just give up.

May I enquire what hardware you are using and why you decided to go with cgi? I would have thought it would have been mmore efficient in something like this to use servlets as only one instance of each particular servlet need be in memeory at any one time. This would of course do nothing to alleviate the bandwidth problems, but could speed things up for the server.

I am an e-comerce consultant by the way so that is wy I am intersted in your systems.

I'm curious as to why you chose to recognise the user by IP address, because I logged on earlier (my machine hadn't been reset so the cookie should still have been in the browsers' memory), went to the main index and it said that I was someone else, I turned off the web proxy option in NS and reloaded the main index and it gave me my email address not someone else's because I'm on a static dialup ISP. I noticed someone on freeserve (which do dynamic dialup) had problems about being logged in as the last person to access h2g2 via that IP. I saw in the signup email that www.h2g2.com uses cookies but why does the system get confused sometimes?

We definitely do not recognise users by IP - freeserve may well be doing strange things with cookies, or serving cached versions of our pages to you instead of passing the requests through. I'd advise not using proxies if you can avoid it.

We ONLY recognise users by cookie.

I don't believe that Freeserve are doing anything strange cookie wise because they're just another dynamic dialup ISP afterall. I`m intending to incline that web proxies are partly to blame for caching pages which should not be cached.
In light of this evidence and tha fact that these pages only really work under IE and NS, shouldn't you have a faq page about how to "properly" access this site? for ex. the html doesn`t "work" under the latest IBrowse web browser for the Amiga, I tried to see if I could "fix" it but I gave up, the tables for the top main menu (especially the search engine text entry box) seem to defy logic.

We don't use CGI in the sense of separate processes per script - all the scripts stay in persistent processes that are tied into the server.
(in other words, they're effectively Perl servlets)

I'm using Voyager with an Amiga A1200, and whilst I find the "forum
Q&A's" pages are easily readable, in their respective frames,in most
of the other pages, i.e. my h2g2 home page, the text appears in 2-4
digit's width colums on the left of the screen thus;
th
is
is
ho
w
it
app
ear
s.

It's a real pain to read. I have Voyager in Hi-Res and full screen on
a Phillips CM8833 MkII and every other web page I've come across fits
on it fine. SuperHi-Res would be nice but then the fonts are to small.
Could you please do something about the page layout.

 IBrowse does display certain tables wrong,
so h2g2 is most probably not to blame.

 Version 2 of IB should fix that I suppose,
whenever Stefan decides to release it. Presumably
within the infamous "only two more weeks", which software
developers have turned into the ultimate designation
for an unspecified period of time.

Real computers dont do that.. Amigas.. Pah!

(only poking

Tony