[Abraham Chaffin]

Hey Robert,

The pages load virtually instantaneous for me – the page I had noticed loading slowly before was the home page which is fixed and is loading instantaneous for me now as well.

If you are having trouble with the ad load times try disabling javascript as this has fixed the problem for other users who had trouble with some ads.

Let us know if that solves the problem so we can better consider a more permanent remedy.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Thanks for the feedback guys –

We’re aware of there being some slowdowns at times. We have and are taking measures to keep our page load times up. Traffic continues to increasing here – our video tutorials, and podcasts which can be weighty at times are getting more downloads, plus the rest of the site.

A few adjustments have been made to weightier pages and we are planning on adding more machines to our farm in the near future.

Feel free to continue to let us know when you experience problems as it’s our desire to provide the best service possible.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Yea – you can’t use a swf as a background image – because a swf isn’t an image. They might support this some day but not atm.

Using your browser view the source of the page with the swf file and you’ll see how they did it.

Here’s what you should see:

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0&quot;
WIDTH="100%"
HEIGHT="100%"
id="xmas" ALIGN="">
<PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="xmas.swf">
<PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high>
<PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#ffffff>
<EMBED src="xmas.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#ffffff WIDTH="100%" HEIGHT="100%" NAME="xmas" ALIGN=""
TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="https://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"&gt;
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

This page is built using a body margin of 0 so there is no border to the page. The image you see is actually a SWF that is set to stretch 100% wide and 100% tall so it fills the entire page no matter what size the window is.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

It’s a custom built mechanism. It’s run in many different ways over the years but today its backbone is mainly with perl, php and mysql.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Hello Richard,

Thank you for the feedback we’ll look into why this happened.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Have a great 2008 as well Mark –

Remember you will still get the email notices and the posts will show up when reading the entire thread and/or reading individual posts in that thread.

Take care,

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Hey Mark,

Yea – unfortunately any sort of check to the database takes processing time so the goal is to limit the amount of calls you need to display the information. If we were like a Google corporation with 200 machines serving up each page that wouldn’t be an issue, though even Google attempts to streamline their processing work flow.

The issue is more in server processing time than bandwidth. The processes run to determine what data needs to be pushed to the end user – the data is what uses the bandwidth. I’ve made a version of the forums pages that does the sort of calls we’re discussing and it loaded much slower, especially the FCP and AE forums which have tons of threads every day. I won’t go into detail but building the forums like that has potential to bring our servers to their knees.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]

Hey Mark,

I see what you are saying –
It doesn’t show up in the page
https://forums.creativecow.net/forum/applefinalcutpro/2
The reason for this is the way the thread view is built – only the posts within the time range chosen are grabbed to build the threads. So when you go back in history only choosing a small range of time you won’t get responses out of that time frame. The reason it was built this way, rather then taking each thread individually, is to limit the number of quarries performed to the database. There’s only 1 quarry needed to find all the posts in that time frame rather than having to ask the database for each threads responses which could end up being hundreds of calls and would cause the forums to load much slower.

If you view this page
https://forums.creativecow.net/viewforum/8?age=14
Which shows the last 14 days of the forum you will see the newer posts show up in that view as well as the older ones. The default view for the FCP forum is 7 days so if you are viewing respond to a post 10 days old your response won’t be seen in the default forum view but will show up in searches, thread view, read post view, etc.

Your post also shows up in the read post view if you look at the thread on this page
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/967171

Your post also shows up in thread view
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/967171#968364

it is active and all who subscribed to receive a notice would be sent one.

Thanks for noticing this – these historical forum pages that let you click and see older threads is rather new as you know so we’re discovering their strengths and weaknesses together.

Abraham

[Abraham Chaffin]