topic Re: Community doesn't work for users on slow connections in Community Site Feedback

Community doesn't work for users on slow connections

jelv — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 08:55:21 GMT

There has been a useful analysis of why one user is seeing consistent issues with these forums when others are not:

https://community.plus.net/t5/General-Chat/Plusnet-downloads-record-43m-profit/m-p/1378759#M210227

Since this new forum came into existence, I have built three new PCs. I can take a fresh hardware build, install an OS, update all the drivers, run all the OS and app updates, open Firefox and the Plusnet forum is the only website which doesn't work properly.

As my equipment keeps being blamed, I came up with a thinking out-of-the-box alternative.

I can now remote desktop to a computer elsewhere in the country with a great internet connection, which also has software which simulates a variety of internet connection scenarios (i.e. has the ability to adjust internet upload and download speeds, and apply simulated latency). In standard configuration, and running Firefox, this forum appears to work. If I set the simulator to use ADSL speed and latency, this forum suddenly behaves EXACTLY like I see it running at home.

The problems are -

The new forum uses entirely https, and the increased handshaking (compared to http) is a nightmare on slow connections.

The https on this forum has had no effort made to optimize the persistent connection settings, and therefore repeat open connections take far longer than necessary to complete on slow connections.

The https on this forum also makes no use of the caching settings, so many page elements have to be unnecessarily re-fetched on every change of page.

The combination of slow https and forum page timed events seems to have some failure threshold, which I appear to exceed.

Re: Community doesn't work for users on slow connections

MauriceC — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 10:15:14 GMT

Thanks for the detailed look at the problem @jelv but I doubt if anyone at Plusnet is actively listening. The topic has been raised several times and a few palliative attempts made to 'fudge' a fix. It's outside @jaread83 access to the code to even attempt a fix and Lithium appear to be even more unresponsive to system fixes than Plusnet.

Re: Community doesn't work for users on slow connections

rongtw — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 12:38:53 GMT

So like i have said previously , They just Hope customers will give up chasing problems By giving the Odd sorry we are looking into it

Re: Community doesn't work for users on slow connections

ejs — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 16:01:13 GMT

I have a 3Mb ADSL2 connection, and I don't really see any particular problems with these forums. Sure, they're a bit slow, but I don't really seem to care, they're still usable. They're not really much worse than any other big modern full-of-junk website.

If a page doesn't load or comes up with some error message, which for me is really not very often if at all with these forums, I tend to deal with this by trying it again.