[Half-time Orange]

The board seems a bit quiet for the number online, and I've seen a thread entitled "SI Servers" so I jumped to a comclusion that a lot of you are probably having speed issues here?

If so, read on:

Reference: My post in OTF:
Why is this site so slow for me?

Originally posted by Half-time Orange:
These forums are often slow for me, each page can take up to three minutes to fully load.
But usually I can read and navigate, but not reply until the page has fully loaded.
The advert picture is usually the last item to load and the cause of delay.

Just recently though, over the past few days, accessing the forums has become very, very slow - over 5 minutes to just see the address and forum title on the tab!
But it seemed to help to close the browser and try again.

Not tonight though - I came home at 5.30pm and was unable to access the forums at all until just now!
I actually left the page loading for over half an hour at one point!

There has been nothing wrong with my browsing anywhere else, just the 'Community at SIgames'.

I assumed it would be the same for everyone else, but I can see people have been posting throughout the period I've been unable to access the site.

Can anyone please explain why I'm encountering these problems here?

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THREAD SUMMARY
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SOLUTION for XP Users

Originally posted by Jongi:
since I added
<pre class="ip-ubbcode-code-pre">127.0.0.1 web.sigames.com</pre>
to my hosts file it has improved.


It is in &lt;drive&gt;:&lt;windows directory&gt;\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in XP.

So the file is most likely in:

cWINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Originally posted by Gregg Carter:
Edit it in notepad. It's perfectly fine to do and will not mess up your computer.

Originally posted by Powlay:
added it to the bottom seems to be running better already.

Originally posted by displaced_seagull:
Helps, I find, if you restart your browser after you do it.

Further troubleshooting:

Hairy Coo - you may need to enable the visibility of hidden files? Or if not that, check you're looking in the system32 folder - NOT system.
I assume you have XP?

:thup: Thanks Jongi, and to Gregg Carter, Powlay, displaced_seagull & Willigogs



Additional for VISTA Users:

Originally posted by Ryan S:
If you use Vista, you will need to open up notepad as an admin, then open the host file from within notepad, otherwise Vista will not allow you to save changes.

You should also open up the command prompt (as admin in Vista) and type nbtstat -R to force a reload of the host file. Make sure you use a capital R, it is important.

ADBLOCK Advice for FIREFOX

Originally posted by NHR-57:
If you use Firefox and don't want to mess with the hosts file, you can just adblock web.sigames.com and everything will be back to normal.

Originally posted by Insanemadman:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
how do you adblock sigames.com?

Using firefox's adblock?

Just put a * after the / and it'll block everything </BLOCKQUOTE>

Originally posted by Insanemadman:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
after which /?

Well, if you want to block everything on the SIgames site, add http://www.sigames.com/* </BLOCKQUOTE>

Originally posted by Ratinho:
Just adding Adblock plus to firefox and subscribing to the english language sites made it faster than ever for me.

Originally posted by Willigogs:
Firefox Adblock for anyone looking:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10

:thup: Thanks to NHR-57, Insanemadman & Willigogs



Possible Causes and Explanations

Originally posted by Willigogs:
To explain why this works - basically the slowdown is due to calling the banner advert in the header. Something's obviously not right at that end, therefore the website rendering is delayed whilst it tries to render the advert that must be coming at the speed of half a snail.

Adding the line to the hostsfile, or enabling adblock means it disregards the banner advert and gets on with rendering the page.

Originally posted by Umbongo:
For me it loads the menu and the SI community forums header and logo then takes ages to load the rest, assuming infopop still handles the actual forum database/processing I would think the problem is perhaps on their end rather than with SI's servers.

Originally posted by KevinLFC:
I blame the half time Orange for this board running slow.

Shhhhh!

:thup: Many thanks to Willigogs for his excellent explanation

and to everybody else who contributed to this thread

[Serpico]

Adblocker alone sorted me.

[aaberdeenn]

127.0.0.1 web.sigames.com

Since I just added the above to the correct place, things seem to be running much better.

Addblocker also did the trick, I just disabled that to see if this had any real impact and both seem to do the trick. :thup:

[Mikealdo]

Adblock is making a huge difference, kudos for the recommendation :thup:

[Nadessico]

Originally posted by aaberdeenn:
<BLOCKQUOTE>127.0.0.1 web.sigames.com

Since I just added the above to the correct place, things seem to be running much better.

Addblocker also did the trick, I just disabled that to see if this had any real impact and both seem to do the trick. :thup: </BLOCKQUOTE>

same here, thanks for that info ^^

[Pawel_lfc]

Not just a Windows problem. Slow in Mac OS X. But I guess this can be expected its a problem at SI's end.

[Canabary]

what the? why would you want sigames to be your localhost???? now that's confusing.... and why would that work.... Seriously, I need some technical information here. It all sounds a little too odd for me to really.. grasp

[sean_oc16]

The adblock option works perfectly fine, sorted it that way in less than 10 secs.

[Gundo]

I tried the Adblock thing in firefox a while back and it worked a treat.

[Greg Andrade]

Here's an idea: maybe SI could realize that its advertising on the forums is destroying performance. Either remove the ads or change them so we don't have to reconfigure our PCs or download a browser extension to work around this. Wouldn't you want people to load your forums and your website as easily as possible?????