Slooooowwww loading - is it me?

[sunkissedhealey]

Same for me. I couldn't access this site since Sunday.

Rob

 

[AlanT]

Ditto.

Alan T

 

[AUSMHLY]

Yikes, spoke too soon. Me too. Two days down. Glad to see it up again. Good luck Basil.

 

[SHG]

couldn't get on for 2 days from one computer, but another worked immediately now. Coincidence?

 

[Ed_K]

I did a lot of poking around in the last few days to try and understand my slow reponse time to the BCF ( when it is online ). I found a problem in my TCP/IP configuration options on my laptop, ( winXP ), using one of the several tools found on dslreports.com , (tweak test and speed test). This is something that I checked and adjusted a long time ago but must have been changed by something. To make a long story shorter, RWIN was set to a much smaller that optimum value ( 7K ) I changed it to 64 k and that helped my performance a lot to the BCF plus my speed test times improved a lot. I used DRTCP ( free from dslreports.com ) to adjust these tcp/ip settings. I used the default settings for everything but you must manually adjust the RWIN value using the tool. XP apparently defaults to a value that is much lower than optimum for broadband speeds. It is probably right for dial up.
I also traced a connection attempt when it was still very slow. I found that the BCF server apparently has the " do not fragment " bit set on. This is probably why a lot of us noticed a slow response time. This bit on when your TCP/IP values are not optimized will result in slow/no response. If anyone wants to check their settings because of slow response times, sign up on dslreports.com and start reading and using their tweak and speed test tools. They are all free once you simply sign up. I now have reasonable reponse times when reading or posting on the BCF.

 

[Ed_K]

I am still investigating this as my previous work has not eliminated the problem. The reponse time is good for a while and then it progressively gets slower and slower. It reached the point that I never get any more screens to load from the BCF. I just tried something that seemed to change things for the better. I changed my MTU value to 576 in case there are any " black hole " routers in the path between me and BCF. If a " black hole " router is the cause of this. It should not happen anymore with MTU set to 576. This setting will get around a bad router but it will also slow down regular traffic. The normal MTU value is 1492 for DSL.