Frustrated with JoeUser's speed.

The price of popularity..

from JoeUser Forums

JoeUser is not just slow but it's been flakey lately. It's been very frustrating for me to deal with that.

The site's traffic has increased considerably in just the past few months. From 120,000 visitors in November to 160,000 already in February.

But that's not what's causing the problem. It's WinCustomize which shares the same databases as JoeUser.com. Its traffic has climbed from 10.2 MILLION visitors in November to almost 17 MILLION so far this month in 24 days.

But it's not like the hardware as doubled. In fact, it hasn't changed at all. Hence our problem.  And since JoeUser.com's free, it doesn't get the priority I'd like it to get.  But it IS being worked on.  The new forums are much faster than the old ones and they are being updated on a regular basis.  But it'll probably be quite awhile before the main site is updated.

Instead, what's goign to happen is that we will soon have a WinCustomize subscription drive to try to buy some mroe hardware for WinCustomize. This will take some of the strain off of JoeUser. But I do share your frustrations about the site being slow. 

In the nearn near term, the IT guys are working on reliability.  Little "bugs" that don't affect site stability at traffic level X start to bring things crashing down when traffic level Y is met. So they're fixing that which will hopefully also improve performance some as well.

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5,200 views 18 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
I am still waiting for JU to go subscription-for-premium service too. I know the user base here is too small to make much of a financial dent though.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
yeah.. where is the subscription service????
SoundPackager - Customize the Windows sound scheme
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
Keep up the good work, and a thank you for letting us play on your servers
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
You wern't kidding, took over 60 seconds for this page to load....
Reply #5 from JoeUser Forums Top
Oh, we can handle it. We appreciate the fact that this is free and that we are using your servers so we can put up with a delay...or the site not working at all, now can't we JoeUsers?
Reply #6 from JoeUser Forums Top
I know, it does take time to load, and often will not come up at all. But hey, who's complaining? It's free! Whattawe want, right?
Reply #7 from JoeUser Forums Top
I've been wondering what happened to the old 10 posts per page? I looked in user settings and couldn't find a way to restore this. Were pages shortened to 5 posts/page because of this strain?

Otherwise, I still greatly appreciate JU and love it here. Thanks! And I'll throw in my support behind a subs service for JU.
Reply #8 from JoeUser Forums Top
I'd happily pay to get this service but am very grateful it is free. Sure, it can be a little slow, but this gives me time to do other things anyway.

Keep up the excellent work, I appreciate it.

Cheers,

Maso
Reply #9 from JoeUser Forums Top
It is not that slow for me.......? O darn another virus.....o darn another virus.....I have to keep the sheilds up when I talk to the dragon hole......whoops....anotha virus......serious I have no idea what these kids are moaning about, after all as you say it is for free.....
Reply #10 from JoeUser Forums Top
wha...???
Reply #11 from JoeUser Forums Top
I think aeryck has a built-in filter, if he/she says more than 5 words that somehow manage to string together in a sentence that makes sense, it then fills in another 50 or so words that make no sense whatsoever.

On-topic though... I eagerly await JU launching the subscription service. Definitely something that would be worthwhile for me.
Reply #12 from JoeUser Forums Top
It's been a bit flakey lately, but never for more than a half-hour or so. The speed has gotten a lot better and I like the new look of the forums. I figure I'm getting a lot more than I'm paying for, so I'm not complaining. Good luck working the kinks out, tho.
Reply #13 from JoeUser Forums Top
Actually i have no problem with the speed. It's odd but for me this site loads very quick. I'm not sure how the speed has been on here in the past for you guys. Mabey i get faster speed cause i don't come here as often as you guys. Anyway, I'v been coming here for a couple of weeks, and i think this is a useful site. Lots of information on all subjects. *waves to fazz*.....it's Tom
Reply #14 from JoeUser Forums Top
The problem may have more to do with the language used for the website. It would be worth moving away from classic asp to say asp.net. Anandtech moved from ColdFusion to Asp.Net and noticed dramatic performance benefits... Now, you might decide that php or something else is a better solution than Asp.Net, but in any case, classic asp is not helping things....

Since I can't post a link to their site, just google for anandtech and their switch to asp.net from coldfusion, for some real-world results....
Reply #15 from JoeUser Forums Top
Lets try those links again...

www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2136&p=5

and

www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2287&p=1
Reply #16 from JoeUser Forums Top
Ditto on the ASP.Net comment- it's amazing.

This is the first site that I've ever wanted to pay for. I hope that at least the basic services remain free, but I think that most of us would be happy to pay for a premium subscription. Meanwhile, keep up the good work. JU is awesome.

Dan
Reply #17 from JoeUser Forums Top

Brad,

I wont complain.  You get what you pay for.  However, if you do ever go with the premium site, you got a customer!

I hope that 17m translates into mucho dinero for you!

Reply #18 from JoeUser Forums Top

We've already moved WinCustomize.com over to ASP.NET and the performance difference is pretty significant.

Check out these pages:

https://www.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx

Just click on the various links and that will show you where JU will be when we're done with it. 

Right now, the #1 problem JU is facing is the main user database is locaed far away and ASP just sucks about keeping connections alive.