[centurymantra]

Having taken up a little more interest in headphones, I've been using this site a little more as of late and I felt like I should mention that I've observed that this site runs really....REALLY slow.   I don't want this to be taken as a complaint as this is an awesome site and a wealth of information, but the slowness brings does makes it's functionality pretty limiting.  Most pages take around 30 seconds to load and, although this on the surface is kind of a silly thing to complain about, the cumulative time it takes to read through threads is quite significant.  For example, if I was to do a search that yields 10-15 threads of interest, each of which have 3 or 4 pages, it would take well over half an hour to read through them - most of which is spent waiting for pages to load.
 
It seems this is due to the amount of "stuff" on the pages and I know that it is the ads and banners that make the site possible, but it might be worth looking into whether the site can be tweaked.

 

[IPodPJ]

It's because of the Amazon.com widget.

 

[Pillz]

I find that Head-Fi runs very slowly on IE. I have no problem using Chrome.

 

[Currawong]

This thread too me 6 seconds to load and is 1.6 MB in size. That to me is absolutely insane. If there was a version with the 1.27 MB of scripts removed, half of which is Yahoo UI API stuff, it would be far better.

 

[Antony6555]

Quote:

This thread too me 6 seconds to load and is 1.6 MB in size. That to me is absolutely insane. If there was a version with the 1.27 MB of scripts removed, half of which is Yahoo UI API stuff, it would be far better.

x2
 
 

 

[Sganzerla]

Head-Fi is being slow for me since many weeks ago too!

 

[Yoga Flame]

I find that there are two types of slowness on websites in general.
 
The first type is due to one or more problematic Flash or Javascript programs running on the page. When this happens, the whole browser just locks up for a while and won't respond to clicks or scrolling. This type of slowness can be inconsistent from person to person because it might come from a random Google ad or get served up from Amazon or some other 3rd party, and it depends on the person's geographic location. Most Javascript programs don't have this problem. It's just the few badly coded ones that cause all the grief.
 
The second type is from having lots of content loading (i.e. downloading from the server onto your browser) on the page. The content may be text, graphics, video, or even Javascript files. This type of slowness isn't as bad as the first. You can still click on things in the browser while content is loading. And once all the graphics and Javascript files are downloaded, most of them get stored in the cache so they won't need to be downloaded again. But here's the important part: don't click the browser reload button. That will cause all the cached files to be re-downloaded from scratch.
 
It's also possible for both types of slowness to occur together. You might get a lot of large Javascript files to download first. And after they finally finish loading, they start running and then lock up the browser for a few seconds.
 
I don't really have a point to make besides the thing about the reload button. But hopefully this will help people better understand what's going on until the web guys work this out.
 

 

[centurymantra]

Interesting comments from all...I will try a different browser to see if that improves things.  I've found that the minimum download time for any page is around 15-20 seconds...and sometimes more.  That is pretty much like stepping back to the days of dial-up.  I hate being a curmudgeon, but if this is a common experience, it really is a bit of a problem.   I've kind of given up on doing any kind of extensive browsing on the site at this point due to the sheer time consumption and ADD induced torture of dial-up level wait times.