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

With the millions of billion things someone in my position has to do on a daily basis. I find my involvement here at a premium. Now don't get me wrong, in my job patience is a virtue, (what with humans believing sinning is far to much fun to put back in the metaphysical cupboard) but waiting eons for some of the more popular forums to load even stetches my patience.

Perhaps, the celestial line from heaven is a bit 'dodgy', but surely the service can be improved.

Secondly, I suggest that the Who's On-line pop-up should be embedded in every page. My suggestion will hopefully create an environment whereby people are likely to engaged someone new, creating a greater sense of community.

- The man in the 'penthouse' suite.

Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to drop by God..

I'm looking into the thread loading problem as we speak, it affects my computer as well...

We're moving h2g2 to speedy new servers later this month, which will improve the service greatly, so not long to wait to see an improvement...

Thanks for posting...

I hope God will drop by again to bless the new servers once they are installed.

And I look forward to the boost. Right now I feel effectively barred from interacting with all my friends during the day, over here at GMT - 5 ... I can hardly get to my home page, what with timeouts and such.

So roll on the new equipment!
Regards, Lil

And here at GMT there are times when it all slows to a crawl as well.
If Peta has problems at the towers, then what hope do us mere mortals have

Is the bottleneck at the server end then? I would have thought, based on the correlation between number of users and sloth of loading, that it was connection saturation.

Other possibilities are disk IO saturation or processor loading in building the pages (if you can't get the data into the pipe quickly enough it'll slow page requests down)

Given it's only running on two servers that were built and configured about a year ago (http://www.netcraft.com/ gives it as IIS 4 on NT4 as the server and OS). If there haven't been much in the way of hardware upgrades (I don't know there might have some) then it all could be starting to seen a bit creaky now with the extra users and load that produces.

if black is white then that proves god does not exist q.e.d.
so why are you talking to him.
sorry i know you are busy so on with it i have just done a sci-fi quiz
how long do you think i should go before i send in the answers

So...good news then. (...and I thought I had a monopoly on Good News.)

Anyway, If the current problems I'm working on over at Sirius Terra 9 are resolved to my satisfaction, (the local inhabinants stoically choose not to exist. Or could it be the highly corrosive atmosphere...?) I will run my celstial hand over the new servers...

I think most of the problems come down to the sheer size of the forum files. Perhaps somekind of change in the way they are kept might alleviate the problem. Or perhaps limiting the number of entries that pop up when you access the busy forums (say the last 20 messages, with an option to access the entire lot at the bottom of the screen; if so wished).

By the way, many have tried the 'If I didn't believe he therefore wouldn't exist, malarkey'. I seemed to have got on alright when the dinosaurs 'experiment' was in full swing. You didn't see them singing Hymn number 42.

Although, it's curiously never been raised by a 'Timelord' before.

The best policy with questions I've found is to never tell them the answers, why put a stop-gap on an inquiring mind, I say...

- the Celestial Manager.

Thank you but I think I should put them out of there misery at sometime any way I can always put up some more I have loads.

Over here in Godzone (New Zealand) over the weekend (11/3/00) I first tried to get to my h2g2 home page at 9pm GMT Saturday. I kept trying periodically and finally got through at 5am GMT. I then attempted to post to a forum. The top guff, banner bit, refreshed (unasked) twice. While posting I was inflicted with two more refreshings.

I then gave up on h2g2 and enjoyed watching NZ give Aus a hard time in the cricket Test match currently being played in Auckland.

Is this the first time cricket has been found to be faster than a computer?

is that cricket or kricket

is that a genuine question or just a posting from a thicket?

I was referring to the planet.