Replies to post #53243 on The Question and Answer Board (IHUB)

[gotmilk]

re: [Premium IH members] should only fetch from the ad server
the iHub logo at the top of the page.

Above is grubmasher's responce to:

Posted by: Zeev Hed
In reply to: IH Admin [Matt]
Date: April 16, 2005
When the system get "stuck", on the bottom of my screen (where it usually shows
the various servers your server is accessing, or states "transferring data")
it shows [an] ad server that is slow to respond. You may be blocking the ads to members,
but your server still fetches those ads somewhere, and unless those guys get
their servers in shape, I believe they slow I-hub down.
[end]

ok,
A better (aka scientific approach) grubmaster should of taken:

Dear IH Members that Experience Stalls in IH,

We need to collect data like Zeev did, and reported to Matt.

The Question and Answer Board (MATT)
Posted by: gotmilk
In reply to: NovoMira
August 7, 2004

Driving a truck or surfing the web, one needs to know status of the parts we use
having potential to make us discombobulated.

... you see the IE thing in the top right of your browser turning
... but you never get redirected
... can the IE browser displayed something more descriptive?

My Opera browser has them, telling me lots of "whats happening."

A status line at the bottom of my Opera browser,
Document: % done
Images: [how many done]/[total to do]
Total: [number of bytes transfered]
Speed: [of bytes being transfered]
Time: [seconds elapsed since request was submitted]
Receiving Data From: [the names of the web sites]

Matt, Bob & grubmasher can better and quicker identify slowness and hangs
if those that experience these during this troubled time after the server move
if someone experienced with the Bells & Whistles in the IE browser similiar
to those mentioned above in Opera could instruct them on the how to turn them on
so that data can be collected.

ok, enough
but,
anyone need'n an instant headache,
for whatever reason,
here is the gotmilkSpeak post of above, unfiltered
#msg-3754169

D:oug

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Content expiration is disabled both for that file and the directory it's in. So unless a user has changed the defaults and their browser is being very aggressive about not caching, the logo itself should very rarely get sent. And it's only 2745 bytes. From a server that's pretty busy but always shows very low utilization. 4-5% right now.

I just double-checked, and am very sure that a subscriber browsing through messages never touches that server except to get the logo if it's not cached.

To anyone curious about how the ads/no-ads thing works, it's one of the beauties of ASP. If the programs determine that you're a subscriber, they never include the HTML that'll pull up an ad. That's why response times (when the ISP isn't flaking out) are MUCH better for subscribers than non-subscribers. The logic doesn't go "Grab an ad but don't display it if they're a subscriber." It goes "If they're not a subscriber, grab ads and display them."

Subscribers are only interacting with our servers, which are very fast. Non-subscribers can be interacting with as many as 4 ad servers that're far slower than our servers are. Our own ad server is extremely fast, but when delivering an ad that we're not hosting in-house (Schwab and Refco are the in-house ones), there can be a big delay while waiting for an ad to arrive from one of our agencies.