Is anyone else finding that Empty Closets is really really really slow at the moment? It is taking minutes to load pages and often requires multiple refreshes to get it to do so (I clicked on the new thread button to write this at 21:00 and it's taken until 21:30 to load!). Using Firefox, Chrome and IE9 on Windows Vista on Be* Broadband (aka O2 aka Telefónica) with a 16mbps ADSL connection and every other site I've tried has been working fine (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, BBC (including iPlayer), Planet F1, The Guardian, You Tube etc). It's been like this for a couple of days now. http://i50.tinypic.com/2unvdcx.png is a Firebug screenshot - this is for this very page - taken some 7 minutes after enough of the page loaded to start composing the reply, as you can see the Chorme browser opened about ten minutes ago has still failed to get to the front page. One slight thing I have noticed is that my mobile on T-Mobile (aka EE / Everything Everywhere / Deutsche Telekom) handset does seam to be loading the site a bit faster - even when used in portable hotspot mode from the same browsers - but it's still slower than most sites, and the pages never seam to finish loading (but the main content does appear).
I'm not an expert on how EC is run from a hardware standpoint; remember that the internet is just a series of inter-connected computers, wires, and radio signals. There's a lot that can go wonky on some day between you and the servers EC is hosted on. Sometimes I'll not be able to connect to EC, but that usually clears up after an hour or so while others have no problem. As to what's causing it I don't know, I'll have to test it some more when it happens again. Currently all I know is when it happens to me even pinging the IP address doesn't work, it doesn't get to EC. I can ping other sites like YouTube and Google just fine while it's happening. I want to say that it's something to do with the ISP because it's like that for every other computer in my house when the odd latency happens.
I know all that - just wondering if the people operating EC knew if there ISP was having peering issues (the only time I've seen something similar) or if it's a Telefónica UK issue (probably). At least it looks like it's limited to one or both ISPs then (I assume that Empty Closet's servers are hosted in the USA?). Pinging and Tracerouteing emptyclosets.com don't flag up anything weird either
One would thing that wouldn't they - however there could be some CDN caching going on causing the hangs. This evening it seams to be back to normal though :lol:
