Speed Problems

[MagnetsAndHangers]

Am in West London (Heathrow area), and have had problems each day accessing the site for the past month.
I even got one just now when I clicked on the link to this thread.
The time out error is the one i get most.
I have a quick link to http://uk.ebid.net/ on my Firefox toolbar.
That is the one I always use.

[canuckbid]

Hello. It must be your computer or your ISP (internet service provider). The site is fast as anywhere on the internet. You could try cleaning your browser and see if that helps.
Tools-internet options-delete temporary files and or cookies.

[MagnetsAndHangers]

Hello. It must be your computer or your ISP (internet service provider). The site is fast as anywhere on the internet. You could try cleaning your browser and see if that helps.
Tools-internet options-delete temporary files and or cookies.

I clean my browser each week - I get the same problem whether I use IE or Firefox. I delete temp files and cookes every few days.
I dont have any problems accessing other sites.
When it does load - yes - the site is as fast as any others.

[Spyder1942]

just as fast as any other

[canuckbid]

That's too bad then. Not sure what could be the problem. I'm in Canada and it loaded super fast and I can navigate the site quickly. I have done some upgrades on my end though as in a new router and beefing up my satellite link speed.

[MagnetsAndHangers]

Just got the following when tried to add to this thread...

Database Error Database error
The database has encountered a problem.
Please try the following:

* Load the page again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
* Open the helpdesk.ebid.net home page, then try to open another page.
* Click the Back button to try another link.

The helpdesk.ebid.net forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may contact them if the problem persists.

We apologise for any inconvenience.


Was going to add - I am with Virgin Media - my son has his own BT line in his room - so am gonna get him to try it periodically over the next few days.

[Gothicina]

Total loss of everything but the main pages, including forums here.

Southend-on-Sea Essex area 17.23 to 17.31 hrs.

Was just thinking how much faster the site seemed

[canuckbid]

I wonder if my internet goes through different servers as there is mainframes in different locations around the world. Usually if I have a problem it's weather related as I run my own satellite dish for the internet.

[Idealproductsales]

Yeah I suspect the problem with many people in U.K is spotty internet service and routing issues (the "Mainframes" canuckbid refers to- are actually just routers and switches along the way that your connection has to hop over to get where it is going)

Often, some providers (Such as Cogent and Layer3) have old or low quality equipment, and narrow routes (routers have to have a defined routing table which chooses which route for traffic to take.. ) and fewer Peering contracts with other providers.. So, when there are latency or packet loss issues , or a huge influx of traffic plugging up a particular route, sometimes they cannot route around it effectively. What happens then is the packets - (packets are little pieces of data 4096 bytes in size, usually- web pages and images, etc are all broken up into packets for sending across the internet) - packets will be delayed, and in some cases even dropped or lost, and because of this, your computer has to re-request the packets again, which causes the latency (lag/slow loading) that many people see. Very often this happens on a route over which ebid has no control over, and they cant do anything about that.. Unless they wanted to go spend another $20,000 - $30,000 (USD) PER MONTH on a second bandwidth contract with second provider to add that additional optional routing to the network grid.

However when you see errors on the forum or on pages, it often means that traffic is overly heavy for some reason. I suspect the forum error mentioned a couple posts above by MagnetsandHangers was due to a "too many connections" issue with MySQL - it can only handle so many connections to the database server before it has to not accept any more. Since the speed of the site has been consistent for many of us, other than the infrequent Database Error on forums- that's my suspicion.

I've long thought I should write up an article on how the internet works.. I mean it isn't rocket science- it is very simple in concept so much so that a first grader could understand it.. Just think of how "passing notes" in class would work, and a "dropped packet" happens when the teacher intercepts the note For techno-geeks like me, it's easy to understand what is happening, and not blame Ebid for the problems, because it's easy enough to spot when an issue is in-between the site and the user.. but for people that just know "Click a button and it magically appears on screen" it isnt so easy to understand, because they dont "see" everything that has to happen just exactly right, *every step of the way* for a fast-loading website

I suspect it is a combination of growing pains for ebid (new users and more auctions and more traffic , faster than they are able to update and upgrade equipment) , and some routes are having trouble where they go across one of the big bandwidth providers, and those providers are not able to route around the trouble spots (or, they simply won't)

Put the two together and it can make *any* site look bad.. Ive seen the same thing happen to FeeBay actually- sometimes it just gets slow.. they just happen to have a *lot* more spare equipment laying around in their datacenter, and a *lot* more techs on duty, so they are able to repair issues faster.. and they also have extensive bandwidth contracts with a greater number of providers, as well as servers physically located in many different countries... Comparing ebid's network to FeeBay's network is sort of on the lines of comparing a go-kart to a Ferrari

but, even with all that high tech gear, FeeBay *still* has problems, and in fact, if you were to boil it down to a % of problems per Server, FeeBay has MORE problems as a percentage.... they just are not as noticable because they have such a massive network and probably at least 1 or 2 spares for every active unit.. so when something breaks down, traffic is simply routed to a spare.

[MagnetsAndHangers]

Strangly enough - i just got another database error when I used my usual link to get into the site (uk.ebid.net).
I changed the url to us.ebid.net, and got in immediately and got to the forums that way.

Not sure if this was just a co-incidence