Speed of downloading images on these forums

Started by Tangled-Universe, October 11, 2018, 09:56:01 am

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Is anyone else noticing that downloading images on the forums became a *lot* slower since this year-ish?
Even at work where we have an insanely fast connection the forums are as slow as at home, so there seems to be a bottleneck somewhere.
Ulco, if you read this, does it also take you 5-10 seconds to load an image here?


That's about how long it takes for me, too but I guess that I wouldn't call it excessively slow.  I'm in the States and Planetside is based in the U.K. I'm supposing.  So possibly yes, there may be something that prevents an instantaneous reaction.


It may be server related. I know that I would limit the bandwidth of serving images or files considering the nature and size of them (someone could put up a near 5mb image).


I didn't notice it, Martin. Jpg's like 1900x1200 load in half a second here. May also depend on your own provider? I'm on a simple phoneline from KPN, no glass fibre, but still pretty fast.


Yeah, to add, I don't really notice a slowdown. Images from the forum open in a popup window for me most the time (sometimes a download), but when I click the window, even for a 1080p window, it's loaded already. And I use cellular 4G internet off my phone in a rural area -- in general my latency is high but download is decent at about 1 - 5mbps (20mbps peak during a random blue moon)


Png's are another matter; they load slowly because they're heavier, and I remember staff not really appreciating clogging up the server with those heavy files.


Me neither. No slowdown. Only at work, when I-net connection is really lazy. Maybe it's a question of some maintenance period Tangled Universe. I mean, of course applicable only if your work and home have the same provider!


Quote from: Dune on October 12, 2018, 02:11:19 am

It's just a image. If the max is 5mb it's to be expected. They  are the best web format for quality preservation. Even a max quality jpeg creates jpeg artefacts. For little details and stuff it can get in the way. For example night sky's look like garbage in JPG.


You're right, I know the quality issue. But for some images it's just not necessary to show the very very best, and use unnecessary space. In busy renders you won't see the artifacts at a casual look. It's not to be printed or so. But of course 5Mb = 5Mb.


We are no longer based in the UK, and the server has been hosted in the US for... oh about a decade. :D No maintenance issues that I'm aware of, certainly not consistent ones. And although we switched servers less than a year ago, it was an upgrade, and not to a different host. We've been on the same host in the same datacenter for several years now. So nothing on that side that could explain the issues you're seeing.

I just downloaded an 845MB file from the server at an average of 14MB (that's *bytes" not *bits*) per second. It took about a minute to download nearly a gig. :D I'm on symmetric gigabit here in the Bay Area, California, US. So the bandwidth to the server itself probably isn't an issue. However the route to your ISP may not be great Martin. I can't test that easily, but you could. Do a ping test to start, and maybe a tracert, to our server. See what comes up. For me it's about like this:

Ping average: around 60ms
For comparison Google is 3ms, Adobe.com is a surprising ~150ms (after repeated tests).

Tracert shows 20 hops, which is kind of a lot considering I'm in the US already. To be fair 8 of those are within my ISP though and are very low latency, and hops to Google are 16, so not much better (and yet 3ms ping time, so all is well there). Curious what you'll come up with.

The other thing is anecdotally I have noticed more PNGs, large JPGs, etc. over the past year or two. So it's possible that your expectation of "it's only a 1920x1080 image, it should load faster" is sometimes not aligning with reality just because someone chose to save a 3MB image at that resolution, which is entirely unnecessary in 99% of cases.

- Oshyan


October 13, 2018, 07:03:07 pm #10 Last Edit: October 13, 2018, 07:23:45 pm by WASasquatch
I don't have 20 hops, but I do have timeouts along the way, and the latency is pretty high for connections. I'm in Seattle though. Pretty sure the first route is my phone and subsequent unonfigured nginx.

Also when you post cmd results in a code bracket, the forum says the post is empty, even though the text above was there...


If I ping to LA I get 167ms and tracert to your server is 101ms. That's not very good, is it?


Thanks Oshyan for clarifying and suggesting to ping/tracert.

I performed a ping once and a tracert twice and especially the tracert is interesting.
Something's off at hop 6.
Perhaps I should ask my ISP (Ziggo, do you also use that Ulco?).



Ulco, a hop is basically each step the traffic goes server to server over the web.
Would you be willing to perform a tracert as well?