General Flakiness All Round

[#1]

Is the dropout rate/downturn in traffic linked to the migration to Lithium by any chance? The new site layout sure was a culture shock for desktop users. I only really come on here now if I'm on a tablet or phone as that's what the site appears to have been optimised for 😕

[#2]

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@aesmith wrote:

Right - first try at replying here, composed the reply and hit "Post" ....

Secure Connection Failed

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

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Whoops!  Missed this post earlier.  This was a major problem with FF46.0 and FF46.01, I used to see this error several times a day and I've not seen it since upgrading to FF47.

I see others have already suggested this as an option - it should remove many of your problems and enable you / us to focus on anything that occurs?

[#3]

Thanks.  I'm running FF 47.0.1 now, and creating this reply I just had the screen-refresh-zap-what-I've-already-typed issue once again.

Regarding the SSL error, we'll see.   I wasn't seeing errors on any other web sites, and I'm not really a fan of sites where you need to run a special browser or special browser version.  However I've updated it now and we'll see if it fixes any other the other issues on this forum.

[#4]

... with this Forum have learned to wait until the page is fully loaded before attempting to interact with it. 8 - 15 secs is about the norm.

Do you mean leave it for 8-15 seconds after the screen has apparently completely loaded?   If so that's a hell of a condemnation for a website!

[#5]

Using Waterfox 64-bit on W7 Home 64 and not having any problem. Couple of seconds max for the reply box to load, and the cursor stays in the reply box with no re-drawing.

[#6]

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@aesmith wrote:

Do you mean leave it for 8-15 seconds after the screen has apparently completely loaded?   If so that's a hell of a condemnation for a website!

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Not quite thatbad, but about 10 secs from when you first think the page is loaded.  I.E.  You can see the posts in a board, but there may still be background activity to take you to, and settle on the "last read post" if you have that option selected in your preferences.  And yes, it is annoying.

[#7]

A lot of users were having consistent issues when running FF46. Updating to FF47 seemed to resolve a lot of these issues.

With the screen redrawing, that sounds to me like TinyMCE (the HTML text editor) being loaded. This does happen momentarily when loading the text editor but should only take a second to load in. It depends on how fast your computer is I guess? Older hardware might take a little bit longer to render the text editor.

[#8]

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@woodm wrote:
Is the dropout rate/downturn in traffic linked to the migration to Lithium by any chance? The new site layout sure was a culture shock for desktop users. I only really come on here now if I'm on a tablet or phone as that's what the site appears to have been optimised for 😕

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Its a shame that some users have not returned but we were expecting to see some not come back after the migration. As for optimising for mobile... yes, this site is optimised for mobile but I concentrated most of my efforts on making the desktop version as thats what most of the users here are using. We get a lot of anonymous traffic via mobile but I wanted to cater specifically to the existing users as best as I could. Still got a lot of mobile optimisations to do but I am mostly doing stuff for the benefit of desktop users.

[#9]

Jaread83 , Whilst i applaud your work in improving the forum   i do use desktop and mobile  the worst thing i would say is the Visual look

Whoever decided on the Terrible colour scheme / corporate colour   the PINK is overpowering !! its about time they decided a revamp is needed Desperately .

Ps yes i know its possible to change colour with a third party software , But we shouldnt have to

[#10]

@aesmith Poor MauriceC is on a very slow connection unfortunately for him, hence why it takes so long.

Are you on a BT Retail connection? - some BT Retail connections have been seeing the type of issues you mentioned recently (Connection Reset etc) aside of the FF46 issues, and those connections are only just being resolved.

[#11]

Just did a little test with Wireshark,  hitting the Reply button and waiting till the screen finishes drawing results in receiving 655051 bytes of data at the IP level.   That seems a lot, and certainly explains a certain degree of sluggishness.   It wouldn't in itself explain having to wait an extra 10 seconds after the page loads, after all the whole lot should only take around 3 seconds on a two meg line.    There are quite a few TCP threads opened and closed, and swapping of ciphers etc, but testing from here (high speed Internet) the throughput doesn't seem to stutter.  I wonder if on a slow connection these stops and starts stall a bit more.  

Will have to try from home and see what happens.   Even on a high speed link there were a few drops and out of order packets, so maybe if the Lithium platform has flakey fast retransmit or something it might disproportionately suffer on slower links.

Unfortunately I think a lot of developers test their products only on high speed lines, and have no concern for bandwidth use.

Seems better with the new Firefox, but still the delayed redraw that's a pain if posting or replying.   It's not a BT retail service by the way.