Problems with this website

For awhile I have had problems with the Guru website. Mainly, pages have been taking very long to load for me. I wait patiently for each page but it's a bit annoying. I spend a lot of time here so giving up this site is not an answer.

Does anyone else have this problem? Is there a setting or two I can change to make the pages load faster?

Thanks.

Same here, it's taking upto a minute to open each page and quite often I get this :-

Given the hundreds, sometimes thousands of people that view the site at once, there is probably very little you can do. I've messed with templates to try and fine the least graphically intense, in the hopes it ups server response time; significant difference? Eh.

I suppose this is part of the price we pay reading and posting on one of (if not the) most popular fansite on the web.

Guru was actually fairly quick/stable until just before Factions was released, search worked (the old decent version) load times were acceptable, so if your join date is after Feb-Mar 2006 you are to blame

Yeah, it's ultra-slow, and oftentimes my browser just times out and I have to refresh the page. It's also pretty often that it times out after I post (usually a long message) and I have to re-type the whole thing. I've gotten smart and now I copy my posts to the clipboard before I click the submit button. Still, it seems like they need to add another server or two to the ol' cluster (assuming there is one). That's not a cheap prospect, though.

I also have much problems from time to time. For some reason the reply from the webserver gets corrupted, and firefox offers to download it. WHen I open the file in notepad it is completely empty. (See Azagoth's screenshot)

Please fix this.

it's really fast for me in the morning (gmt) when I got to work, then as the afternoon draw closer guru starting to get slower and slower, then the page won't load anymore in the afternoon. I guess most user just log on at the same time and the server just kinda give in.

Are there any specific maintenance periods? Sometimes I get an error, where GWGuru won't load at all ( forgot to take screenshots, though iirc there was a message that the incident was recorded and sent to technical support, or something along those lines ). They occasionally happen on non-peak times.

I just open them in a batch...once the first page loads, the rest of them loads too...

Yes, the server goes down around 11,30-12Pm GMT for any data repair etc

Anybody know where the server(s) are physically located? This seems like a load issue to me (as opposed to net traffic) as I've used the site from various locations throughout the USA and it's pretty much universally slow as molasses. Some times of day are better than others, but there never seems to be a time that it has (what I would consider) an acceptable response time.

The auction system is even worse. I hardly bother using it because it can take several minutes to load each page...if it loads at all. It just times out about 35% of the time and I have to keep refreshing it until it finally loads.

Of course it's a load issue, where have you been for the last year or so? a lot of people use this site, at peak hours it will be slow. There is nothing that can be done.

Me to, realy slow website. Can sompthing be done about it?

Yes, of course it is. I was just trying to say it in a way that wouldn't be quite so offensive to the nice folks that run the site. It doesn't seem like much revenue is brought in by the site, so I'm assuming they have free ad-based hosting or some generous person (or evil corporation ) is funding the hosting.

Yes, something can be done. However, it would cost money. Server infrastructure can be strengthened, but in the case of a pure load issue you have to add more servers, which can be pretty expensive. If they want to add servers to a cluster all servers have to be identical in most cases. Web farms can work well too as long as there is a central data store for session data. Since this site is a stateful environment, running a farm is a bit more complicated than it is on completely stateless sites.

Actually, I believe that happens when the connection times out. Firefox and other browsers will only wait so long until it gives up.

The .php download thing only seems to happen with vBulletin boards when the connection times out.

yes slow....and trying to click on an image stored on this site is the WORST...I mean for most people they can up load an image and we see it when the page loads, some people use imagesuck or photobutt, but others of us dont have that option so we have to wait...................



and wait...........................



................................................an d wait................

and hope that the image loads before the thing crashes with the white page of death......

now that takes the cake. wait for the image to load only to have the white page of death....and never get to see the image as well.

but I have complained about that in another thread and no one seems to care about images. (but me, the one who cant put images into threads and cant have an outside hosting site )

Just again the trouble returned:

Loading pages takes ages.
Loading pages takes ages, and fails. (Firefox offers an empty page as download)
Loading pages takes ages, fails with a message that the domain does not respond.

An Elite site should not have these type of problems. I just ask that Guru fix the problem as I enjoy the site when it is working properly.

I respond to concerns and questions on this subject and have acknowledged many times the problems this site has. We have numerous threads on this, as evidence that you are posting in one and don't need another thread started. If you are truly invested in helping with the problem then simply state the time and the problem and it allows us to track down more specific problems that are appearing.

Does this site has more visitors than google? hotmail?

How do these sites manage their loads? Quite simply, they have the mula to invest in the networking needed. The more people that visit the site, the slower it gets... of course, the more people that visit, the more money the site brings in from donations and advertisement as well. It would at least be nice to know that my (and others) monetary contributions to the site are going to help fix this problem, instead of in someones pocket...

If there's nothing that can be done I'll stop donating. thx for the info.

No major fansite has been without these problems.
Any time there's heavy load, they crumple like paper balls.

GWOnline's gone down in high volume times. Guild Wiki's gone down frequently as well. Guru's got sustained heavy traffic, so it's to be expected.

(As an additional note, GWOnline addressed its high levels of traffic for a time period by completely disabling searching + preventing unregistered viewers from accessing the forum at all.)

Even the official US Guild Wars site has gone down at least once, to the best of my knowledge, during some event where traffic was intense. I can't for the life of me think of what it was, though.

There's no way you can honestly expect any site run on ad revenues and donations to be able to keep up with the heavy traffic from the Guild Wars userbase with no official site to go to. Especially when a huge percentage of the users see no reason they should load the advertisements that pay for the site, who also frequently come to complain about the server being crappy. Not pointing fingers here, but I've seriously seen posts by people proudly proclaiming the blockage of advertisements from this site, and posts by the same people demanding the site undergo improvements.

I'm not paid one red cent to moderate, and I receive no benefit for saying this, but I feel this needs to be brought up occasionally as people have a tendency to forget.

Again, this isn't directed at anyone in particular; I know there are people who do understand this, and don't need to be told, and are simply interested in knowing an approximate date in the future when major issues can be addressed.

Also bear in mind that GWGuru is part of a larger MMOGuru network. Not involved in the administration of this site, so I can only guess, but I'd imagine resources are shared at least in part across the network. No clue if this is the case, though.

I think Inde's in an awkward position, balancing the wants and needs of the community, with the needs of the site.
A while back, advertisements could have been made more aggressive, with ads either in or between posts, and ample use of intellitext to increase revenues, but the ultimate decision was to remove them for registered users.
Search had to be disabled, as with GWOnline, and we got a lesser, but still somewhat useful search function in its place. Unlike GWOnline, we've never recovered enough to re-enable it. You'll notice that GWOnline has added a captcha (anti-bot measure) to their search to better manage server load.
A big point of discussion by users has been the high volume of guests; If we prevented viewing of the site by unregistered users, as GWOnline did, the forums would be much faster, we could probably have search enabled, and many people would be happy. However, Inde is adamantly opposed to this; All users are welcome to peruse the site freely, without an arbitrary registration barrier.

I honestly believe that if Guru were shut down permanently, you'd see GWOnline crumple under the combined load of ex-guru'ers, and this isn't a matter of arrogant pride. Guru has a lot of users, and GWOnline does too. Put them all on any single site, and you're going to experience problems. (Now, what is a matter of arrogant pride I'll say is that guru has the largest user base of any single US forum fansite, to the best of my knowledge)

Apologies on the impromptu speech. I'd also like to say, I'm not aware of the full extant of any recent problems, as I've been heavily occupied by college lately, so if I've missed something, I'm sorry.

The story of GWGuru is one I think you can look forward to seeing more of in the future. The big online advertising boom is over, though as with many such phenomena, it does continue to have mini booms and busts. Expect to see more sites push to either more aggressive advertising (see GameFAQs's recent controversy) or crippling features and accessibility for free users, and requiring subscription for full use.

though i'm in the "my fault" catagory having joined in like ummm
<---whatever it says over there
it was noticeably way slower after about a month ago. i kinda wish the site sucked so i'd just stop coming back...but there a lot of long loads which (in ie, not firefox) sometimes time out. unfortunately i have to refresh pages to see updates (which is likely more a client-side issue) which involves much more loading. is there some kinda of compression or archiving of old material or something for that?

One could remove some of the user-info on the side, the post-count-status and other user info are extra queries and serve little purpose.

I have to say Inde does a fantastic job at running Guild Wars Guru and the Guru Select Program, it wouldnt still be what it is without her. Tweaks have been done here and there but in the end the fact is we get so much visitors and the site does so much traffic that it simply requires bigger, and more powerful servers. Right now we run the network on 4 servers, and we are working on getting a much more powerful database server. Each Guru Select Subscription helps, running Guru is a fulltime job and everything goes to keeping us up and running. We haven't been able to expand to other games much yet due to the current server situation. The fact of the matter is we've done almost everything we can to generate revenue to keep the site going without putting Gold ads on it, I can tell you I've had offers but have turned them all down and we'd probably have more servers already if we had taken such advertisers but we do whats best for our community as we always have and we know they dont want any such advertisers on Guru.

If you would like to donate to a Gold Ad Free Network and one that isnt owned by IGE (lol), please get a Guru Select subscription and encourage everyone you know to get one. The program hasn't been as popular as we hoped but nevertheless it enables a lot of extra features on our sites and there are monthly prize drawings for Select Subscribers.

https://select.mmoguru.com/

As for the new server, its big, its powerful, looking to be a 2x Dual Core Xeon 2.0Ghz with 8GB DDR2 RAM + 3x36GB 10K RPM RAID5 Hard Drives. We'll let you know when we get it and you'll notice when the load times decrease

I agree dang Factions.