Maybe it's because of the large graphics elements. The title header which appears on each page takes forever to download.

Also, it looks like the entire first post is being downloaded for each thread - lots of unnecessary data! Is it possible to show just a few words?

Can any of these new "features" be disabled on a per-user basis to improve usability?

Unfortunately, some of us are stuck with dialup (no DSL availability in my case).

 

I've run the site over dial-up and the graphics are cached so that you only have to download the header once along with the other little graphical elements that make up each page. In fact the old site's home page when we shut it down was 37KB where the new site's is currently around 13KB. This is excluding images. On the first visit you could expect around 100K total to get the page plus the images but subsequent loads of the home page should only be around 13-15KB.

As for making the site faster I will give some consideration to a look that is stripped down, no graphics, etc. that might be more dial-up friendly. It will be some time before I'll be able to address this though as we've still got a lot of clean up to do.

Thanks

Mark

 

I use 56K dial-up and find the site is amazingly fast for me now! I'm in SoCal. Is there a difference between regions as to dial-up efficiency?

Love the new site, Mark!

Clo/Wanda

 

I have dial-up and even with all the pics and graphics and such,this new version seems to be faster

 

Update...

After seeing the comments from other dialup users, I thought my problem might have something to do with my browser or its settings. On a whim, I deleted all of the temporary internet files on my computer (it's been a long time since I did this and it took several minutes to finish...).

The performance has improved significantly. I don't understand why deleting those files should have had any bearing on the performance though...

 

As you just found out Temp Internet files can be a blessing or a curse. They'll save you time so you don't have to re-download the same data. However, IE can only search so quickly thru all of those files to see if you already have the object (html page, image, sound, etc.) This can get resource intensive when you have a large number of files to search thru.

What you just saw was because of too many files. What you have to do is lower the Mbyte size of your temp files folder (Tools-->Internet Options, etc.) to somewhere between the time it takes to search for items and the time required for your dialup connection to pull down a new copy.