Celestia Forums

Is anyone else noticing that the forum response time is *very* slow? Its taking me one to three minutes to load a topic. Is it just my DSL connection and/or net hop-routing, or are other folks experiencing the same kind of delays?

-Don G.

Hi Don
Yes it is slow for me too, but other times was even slower.
I'm waiting a pair of minutes for downloading each page.
Surely it's a temporary problem.

Bye - Paolo

Yes, same here Don.
This forum seems to do this from time to time.
It's very frustrating.

Yep, here too very slow ... it takes over 1 minute to load one page, even with my 3000 Kbps Cable .... and besides that, somehow I get suddenly logged off automaticly?

I just ran a couple of TraceRoute (tracert in command mode in XP) tests to http://www.shatters.net. They each took 18 hops with most times being in the 23-87 ms range. However, the last 2 (63.224.48.70 and 63.224.48.65) took in excess of 1100 ms (1.1 seconds). These are both the shatters.net server, so maybe it has a connection problem or needs to be rebooted or something. Time (and Chris) will cure the problem I'm sure <smile>.

-Don G.

Well, I think it's slow sometimes too, but certainly not for waiting minutes, at least not for me. Lately it takes ~10/20 secs to load a topic with my DSL lines. I thought it was due to the bandwidth limit of shatters.net -crowds entering at once here, we are dying of success -.

Yes, for me it has been a pain, too. The only way out consisted in writing long posts in the Physics and Astronomy department;-)

Bye Fridger

Yes me too... very slow. I don't mind waiting too long though.

Another topic... does anyone know what this means... 'The procedure entry point SMapLS could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll'...

It only comes up when I try to run the old Spitfires...

Regards...bh.

Traceroute does show a very long pause while going through Shatters.net's gateway. It used to be we could blame other people using Chris' network for Kazaa filesharing. But supposedly they're not there any more...

bh,

As best I can tell from a Web search, your error message usually means that the multi-media audio library winmm.dll is missing or it's corrupted or you have the wrong version. Sometimes the problem actually is in kernel32.dll. You may be able to fix the problem by getting a good copy of one or both of those libraries from the Windows installation CD. I've seen winmm.dll offered for downloading by various sites, but I'm not at all sure I'd risk that.

Selden...thanks for your research...I'm not sure I'll risk it either!

What the hell ..here goes!!!

The problem today was just that shatters.net was getting a lot of Celestia-related traffic. That by itself is enough to really slow things down these days. It seems now to have let up somewhat, however.

--Chris

chris wrote:The problem today was just that shatters.net was getting a lot of Celestia-related traffic. That by itself is enough to really slow things down these days. It seems now to have let up somewhat, however.

--Chris

Howdy Chris,

It was actually very slow at 4:00 am (MST) thru 4:30 am as well. I don't know about from then to when I got up at 1:00 pm or so though <smile>.

Right now, 11:00 pm to 12:40 am, it's been screamin', like it usually is.

-Don G.

Chris,

Response has been incredibly slow while I've been trying to browse the forum between 6:30 and 7:30 am EDT, which would correspond to lunchtime in Europe.

Is there any possibility of offloading some of the traffic to SourceForge? (I.e. how much of it is actually downloads of Celestia? Would a new "final" release make any difference? Or perhaps making prereleases available there?)

chris wrote:The problem today was just that shatters.net was getting a lot of Celestia-related traffic. That by itself is enough to really slow things down these days. It seems now to have let up somewhat, however.

--Chris

There was an article on Celestia on PressofAtlanticCity.com that was relayed by various Linux news sites including NewsForge, but hopefuly not Slashdot. That probably explains that traffic peak.

Well, over here it is still VERY slow. It actually takes over 1 minute to load a Forum page ... and that is no joke.
Did a tracert to http://www.shatters.net and all hops were between 10 ms and 200 ms .... but then the 2 last hops:

18 1322 ms 1219 ms 1063 ms 63.224.48.70
19 920 ms 1016 ms 1219 ms 63.224.48.65

I live in the Netherlands, so there is some slack in US connections. But then I am talking about a 10 sec delay of loading a page and not over 1 minute now for the forums.

Ping to http://www.shatters.net:
Answer from 63.224.48.65: bytes=32 time=1371 ms TTL=47
Answer from 63.224.48.65: bytes=32 time=1426 ms TTL=47
Time out
Time out

Other pings give the same result.
Ah well, it will be sorted out soon enough

The forum was incredibly slow between 6:30 and 7:30am U.S. EDT this morning. Enough, that I had to give up responding to a post. I'm guessing it might be a result of lunchtime accesses from Europe

It seems reasonably responsive at 11:00am U.S. EDT (3-4pm European)

I think it'd be worthwhile to give this NNTP gateway a try once it's out of beta (probably in a couple of weeks).

I suppose NNTP is less bandwidth and CPU consuming than phpbb, but that would have to be benchmarked.

Christophe,

A NetworkNews server (often miscalled Usenet server) certainly would use much less network bandwidth than a Web Forum server, but the user interface is much different. For many reasons, I do not think it would be appropriate to create a public Usenet newsgroup, although a private Celestia NNTP server would be quite acceptable to me.

[added slightly later]
Let me be even more explicit: I would not be able to continue to contribute if the forum becomes gatewayed to the public "Usenet". Spammers, address scraping, trolls and flamewars are just too common there. The (usually ) curteous and open exchange of ideas that take place on a private server like this one would no longer be possible.

Well somebody flipped a switch somwhere.

Because at the moment it is running as fast as i have ever seen it run in a long time.

OK, I definitely give up now... I was spending an unjustifyable amount of time waiting while preparing a number of lengthy posts in "Physics and Astronomy". The system is again dead slow for me!

I simply do not have enough time for this fuzz. This apparently is the prize for Celestia's "fame", precisely as I predicted about a year ago...

I can also tell from an email "head wave" I get from people that are definitely too lazy to spend more than a minute or two to find out how Celestia and add-on textures might work...

Also reading the [developer] mails from all those "advocates" of the various Linux distributions, who request us to "clean up" every tiny source of textures in order that they are legally able to make money with Celestia, makes me kind of sick...

Sorry, I seem to be the last idealist...

Bye Fridger