I use the time to make a cuppa 

I have an idea (if the problem is the Index Page of the Forum), but I will need to test things, and confirm what I suspect.

If you are talking about the Front Page of YaBBforum.com (the site Index page) I can only say - you have to ask?

BTW. I just 100% cleared/flushed a copy of IE8.

I typed in "http://www.yabbforum.com/community/YaBB.pl" by hand, and used a stop watch - <Enter> 2 seconds later the Front Page of the forum was built.

Just tested an overloaded Win 7 machine with Google 4 seconds-

That one I had a cookie in - I suspect Guests do get a faster load, as they fail all the tests - thus there is much less work for YaBB to do.

If you both are in Scotland it could be a BGP or routing issue, have you run traceroute?

Wow. seems like it just took forever to load

ok this is only a suggestion but can we run the forum in
Debug Mode everyone sees out put for a maximum of 30 min
at a set time so we can all copy and post the output back here.

Before we get off on any wild goose chases, I need documented facts.

Id Est:

How long, with a cleared cache, logged out (no cookie) YaBBforum.com does it take to load the 'Front Page'?  IN seconds. measured, not guessed.

Then repeat experiment with cache cleared, but a cookie set before entering.

Finally - enter the forum with the cache intact and and a cookie set.

Please test on IE8/9, Google, and Latest FF (what would that be 267.18?)

Also please give your rough bandwidth speed down/up.

I appear to not be suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or perhaps I am more patient).

Thanks

Thank you -

OK -

Here's the deal - personally, I have rarely had the issue you describe. 

I have listened carefully and thought about this.  I also did my own (albeit limited) testing. It looks like the average load time for a Staff user (lots to build for YaBB) runs around 3-5 seconds (acceptable) and the Guest load runs 2-4 seconds (very acceptable).  The fact it loads OK for me almost always says - not a bug.  Everyone gets the same code, so it has to be one of a limited number of things.

A. General Traffic load related - those in the UK may be on primarily when the server farm is most loaded.

B. Specific node related - even though we have a VPS, it is sitting in a containerized physical server co-residing with other VPS's - we might be sitting on the same node as a UK based e-commerce site for instance.

C. Traffic shaping/routing related.  If all our problem loads are geographically close - could be a routing/BGP/Circuit issue.  Unless you do a circuit/peering analysis, there no way to understand likely causes in this area.

D. Server Backup related. According to our host, the whole server is being 'tarred' up daily. IF its a 'plain tar' (uncompressed) that's a four hour job, if that was poorly timed - it could be the cause.

Speaking as a systems engineer, I'm betting on 'its time related' in some fashion.

If you have a 'slooooow load', please go to this Topic and note 'roughly how long' to load and the both UTC time it happened & what your local time was.  I think we will find a pattern

If you have a good load, also please note the UTC time.

SOOOOOOO - as we know there is nothing wrong with the code, and this is mostly a 'lets see' issue I am going to move it to ServerSide. (where the truly geeky go)

Thanks to everyone -