I'm finding the Forums are slow, again.

[#1]

I've noticed that the 404s are gone,  thanks...

Quote from: Kelly

The browser shouldn't be waiting for 404s.  The webserver should return a 404 immediately, in fact, faster than loading and returning a blank file.

Something occurred to me about this,  the reason the 404 responses took more time was because the server was returning the 29KB content of the 404 page  (the one seen on pages that don't exist).

[#2]

you're right there.  I was being dumb.

[#3]

I tried forcing a 404 to see how long it took by changing a forum URL to http://community.plus.net/forum/test
I didn't get what I expected!

[#4]

[#5]

I see Random doesn't appear in the Tag Cloud 
Thanks for getting the 404's sorted Kelly.

[#6]

Having said the above, I noticed on just refreshing this page, things that took between 4 and 6 seconds to load were all the png's, gif's & jpg's that the page carries. Speeding them up might be a good idea 

[#7]

Why is it fetching all the graphics all the time? Looking in my browser cache I can see things like the emoticons gifs with significant fetch counts but an expiry date of April next year, however it's also showing a modified date of when a displayed a page containing the gif. Is there some peculiarity of the way the images are delivered that means they are not being used from the browser cache but fetched every time? That would slow down page delivery and increase server load.

[#8]

Just a selection from this page

[#9]

All those 304's suggest my look at the browser cache is painting a misleading picture!

[#10]

Your system seems to be spending an excessive amount of time waiting...
While I see a similar mix of '304 Not Modified' and '200 OK',  most are completeing within 40ms.
With the 304s and the browser cache, the last modifed date is probably updated every time it checks.

[#11]

I've now installed Firebug and all I am seeing is 200's so the cache wasn't lying!

[#12]

I do see some 304s on refreshing the page, but even refreshing this page several times I'm seeing a mix of 200 and 304's - and I haven't any other open tabs or been to any other page.

[#13]

This is getting odder.
I've been watching just this image: http://community.plus.net/forum/Themes/plusnet-brand-refresh/images/header/community_logo.png and repeatedly hitting F5.
Sometimes it gets a 200, sometimes a 304 - I can't see any pattern.

[#14]

Right I've figured out what is going wrong. The files have slightly different time stamps on the community servers - that means depending upon which server you hit you might get a 200 or a 304.
For example I've seen the image file http://community.plus.net/forum/Themes/plusnet-brand-refresh/images/plusnet.gif with these time stamps:
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:01:41 GMT
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:01:17 GMT
You need to make sure all the images and cacheable items have identical time stamps across all servers.
Edit: How many servers are there?

[#15]

uuum.. I'll check this.