multi1.rmuk.co.uk....

[neil.b]

Having a nightmare at the moment. Almost every click results in Firefox sat there saying "Connecting to multi1.rmuk.co.uk..." and I have to wait anything from 5 to 30 seconds for the page to appear.

This is not a connection speed problem (we have a gazillion megabits connection here at work) and it never used to do it (been using Firefox PR for about 4 months now with no trouble).

Its so bad as to be totally unusable.

[neil.b]

Ah, never mind. Allowing pop-ups from said URL seems to bring it to life....

[neil.b]

Actually, scratch that: its still doing it.

[PetrolTed]

I know what you mean - it can be slow at times.

I use Firefox most of the time. I'll see what's occurring.

[neil.b]

Cheers Ted.

I presuming the code requests an ad from the ad server and doesn't display the page until successful?

Perhaps the ad server can't cope with the volume of traffic and is not processing the request fast enough?

[PetrolTed]

When I've looked into it in the past, reports show that the ad server was performing adequetely so I'm a bit confused as to why we suffer delays.

I think it may be compounded by my poor HTML. In theory the ad should display once the page is loaded and not start processign whilst the page is still rendering.

A more standards compliant set of gassing station pages are in the pipeline which may help.

[neil.b]

Interesting...keep us posted.

Actually I've just tried it on Opera and IE and they both do it to some extent (difficult to compare as its so random) so I don't think its limited to FF.

[Joe911]

PetrolTed said:

When I've looked into it in the past, reports show that the ad server was performing adequetely so I'm a bit confused as to why we suffer delays.

One of the sites we host (in fact several) use rmuk and we have seen in the past problems when they run slow for a period. To be fair it is quite rare.

Personally I'm not a big fan, but then, if it pays the bills!

[PetrolTed]

Spot on. And the hosting bills ain't insignifant!

[Joe911]

PetrolTed said:

Spot on. And the hosting bills ain't insignifant!

Just out of curiosity (feel free to reply off list) what bandwidth/page/request rates are you running at (say, per month)?

And again, out of professional curiosity, what is the server architecture?

I'm just interested on the scale of the PH operation.

[PetrolTed]

Last time I measured it a few months back, the site was generating around 17 million pages a month. Not sure what the bandwidth was - I've now moved to a scenario where I have a fixed sized pipe of my own rather than paying for actual volume of data over time.

Server architecture is 2 web servers, 2 DB servers, mail server, a couple of firewalls, load balancer.