WinXP + IE8 + HTF = 50% CPU useage

Aye, I get that w/ IE8 on both somewhat old, duo-core WinXP machines I use for work as well.  It was even worse when I briefly tried IE7 on one of them about a year or so ago.

Still, HTF ain't no speed demon w/ Firefox 3.6.x on my ancient single-core WinXP machine either.  HTF is plain and simple a hog as a forum site, period.  Offhand, only other forum site I visit (at all) that's worse (in loading/navigation speed) is the Android Tablet Forum site.  I've been frequenting blu-ray.com more regularly for deals, especially for fast-going BF-type deals, than here in large part because of that.

The biggest problem I find w/ HTF is the overbloating of flash ads and such.  On the laptop, I decided to try blocking most sites I don't care about via IE8, including the various flash ad sites, and every single page hit on HTF gives me a ton of content blocked messages -- ok, maybe something more like 5-6 or so, which is definitely more than most sites I visit.  It's getting to the point that even my aging Blackberry Tour running Bitstream Bolt, which essentially dials down flash ads and such, can often load HTF pages faster than the few different IE8/Firefox WinXP machines I use.

HTF's generally poor loading/nav performance (on top of issues like a still-very-bad search function) is becoming more and more annoying to me and certainly don't help encourage me to stick around much these days.

Please... PLEASE do get rid of some of the worthless, resource hogging gizmos and flash ads...

_Man_

There seem to be a lot of performance issues on IE7 and IE8 that we are working on addressing.  Dave- you have the ability to turn ads off.  Are those performance numbers with ads off?

Problems w/ too many flash ads are at least two-fold.

First, you have the internet bandwidth issue.  If you have cheap (A)DSL like me at home (or using 3G wireless and somehow have flash capability), especially if needing to go over less-than-great WiFi connnectivity on top, then downloading a bunch of flash ads will slow things down substantially.

And then, some flash ads might bog down an older computer, especially if there are more than one of them.  Fortunately, we don't normally get the truly serious offenders like we did a few times in the past, particularly early on w/ this new site software.  Still, having multiple flash ads on a forum page just doesn't really make sense unless you want to alienate users w/ older/lower-end computers and/or lower end internet connectivity.  Afterall, you can generally count on a whole bunch of (different) page hits from each forum user session just because of the nature of forum usage, which is different from most other types of sites.  You don't need to throw everything *plus* the kitchen sink at the user on every single page hit -- that's just a waste, is annoying, and may just lead to us either tuning them off or just block them w/ our browser or something or even make us want to visit here less often.

Beyond the flash ads, I think the site is probably just loading too many different things period.  In Firefox 3.6.x, I see it still spending inordinate amount of time loading something or other *after* most of the page has been loaded and rendered.  Usually, I see that the Reply box doesn't get fully loaded/rendered until every single one of those seemingly extraneous things have loaded/rendered.  That's really bad because that means I cannot start typing a reply until all that happens, and sometimes, I'm not even sure if the browser has somehow gotten stuck loading those things and then feel a need to just reload the page to make sure.

Not good all that...

_Man_

I'll add this.  Seems like the site is loading much better for me today, and I'm not getting a ton of content blocked messages from my laptop+IE8 setup like I mentioned before -- maybe just 1-or-less on average now.  Maybe this was changed in the last few days since I hadn't gotten around to checking the site for a few days -- and longer than that for this laptop.

Doing a quick check on a few page hits seems to show almost no flash ads now although it still does seem to occasionally get stuck trying to load something -- seems like it might be a flash ad at the top of the sidebar area that's not loading correctly or maybe getting blocked or something.

If so, thanks to all involved for being very responsive to the complaint(s).

_Man_

"Waiting for pixel.quantserve.com"

That's what I see all the time when I try to load a page on my XP machine at work.  The slowdown prevents all the icons from appearing around the reply box...and it prevents me from being able to post a reply--without consequences--until it has finished loading.

The consequences, if I type-in a response inside the reply box, is that when it does complete loading and the icons appear all the text gets pushed together and any page breaks that I used to create paragraphs are gone and I am left with one big paragraph that needs to be broken back out so it is easier to read.  I have been trained to wait to type in any response until loading is complete!  And I can usually accomplish that by opening up a few more HTF pages in other tabs to read other posts and come back to the reply box a little later. 

I should note that we are also running a much older version of FF (3.6.24) due to work constraints.

None of this is an issue on my much-faster Windows 7 machine at home (with the current FF). 

Aren't there other issues w/ using newer versions of FF for HTF?  OR have they all be resolved now?

Part of the reason I haven't upgraded to newer versions of FF is because of that (and the potential for issues at other sites).  FF v3.6.x works just fine for all the other sites I frequent on my main home PC, so I have little desire to upgrade.

Despite (or perhaps because!) I'm a software/tech guy (who's also interested in many other non-tech things), I most definitely do not believe in the bleeding edge w/ software updates/upgrades.  I believe in the KISS principle in general and don't like fixing what ain't broke unless there's a lot of good, solid reasons to do so.

_Man_

Quote:

Originally Posted by ManW_TheUncool 

I'll add this.  Seems like the site is loading much better for me today, and I'm not getting a ton of content blocked messages from my laptop+IE8 setup like I mentioned before -- maybe just 1-or-less on average now.  Maybe this was changed in the last few days since I hadn't gotten around to checking the site for a few days -- and longer than that for this laptop.

 

Doing a quick check on a few page hits seems to show almost no flash ads now although it still does seem to occasionally get stuck trying to load something -- seems like it might be a flash ad at the top of the sidebar area that's not loading correctly or maybe getting blocked or something.

 

If so, thanks to all involved for being very responsive to the complaint(s).

 

_Man_

 

Well, maybe I spoke a little bit too soon.  Seems maybe a little bit better than a week or two ago, but my content blocked avg just went up to 1-to-2 instead of 1-or-less after several more page hits.

In case anyone's wondering, the IE8 content blocker on this laptop is blocking a couple of the auto flash ad generaters on this site (among other things).  I didn't originally intend it to do that, but decided to just keep it that way after some time w/ it.  If I'm gonna have to be annoyed by them either way, then I'm gonna just leave them blocked going forward.

_Man_

Quote:

Originally Posted by ManW_TheUncool 

Aren't there other issues w/ using newer versions of FF for HTF?  OR have they all be resolved now?

 

I, personally, haven't had any (on my at home PC).  And any that I've seen come up here as FF has "exploded" off the 3.xx model have been resolved.