For those of you using Firefox, I recommend the extended statusbar plugin, it will tell you how long and at what speed it takes to load a page.

Okay, I'm impressed by all of the routing data, interesting to know you can do this, are we using a specific program to accomplish these traces?

I just want to iterate that for me at least (and I'm fairly sure there have been a few others that have made similar comments) that this issue appeared pretty much instantaneously. Everything had been working perfectly normally and then suddenly in the Sunday to Monday timeframe (9/7 - 9/8) every page access slowed down to the 30-45 second range.

Clearly something changed but that probably doesn't really limit the scope. It could be an obscure hardware failure or it could even be related to Forum Update v1.6.3174.27495 which *I think* occured within this timeframe or a multitude of other things.

I don't know how feasible this is but has any thought been given to "rolling back" the recent forum changes merely as a test?

They're standard DOS commands.  Just open a DOS window and type PING, TRACERT or PATHPING a space and the destination (forums.stardock.com for example).  If you want to capture it in a text file, add another space and type >text.txt or whatever you care to name the file.  It'll show up in the path that you used to issue the command (C:\Windows\Profiles\Me for example.)

MottiKhan, thanks, could be entertaining.

Seems fixed. 

Last three pages loaded is a handful of seconds. Dramatic improvement. Anyone else noticing it or am I just getting lucky?

Just getting lucky,

I repeated my traces,

I'm getting the exact same results as I posted above!

My TRACERT data is virtually identical compared to when I was running slow.

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>tracert forums.galciv2.com

Tracing route to forums.galciv2.com [209.124.63.234]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms     2 ms    <1 ms  dslmodem.domain [192.168.1.1]
  2    33 ms    33 ms    32 ms  
  3    35 ms    35 ms    34 ms  so-0-2-3-0.CORE-RTR1.BOS.verizon-gni.net [130.81.7.193]
  4    37 ms    36 ms    37 ms  so-0-2-0-0.BB-RTR1.BOS.verizon-gni.net [130.81.20.84]
  5    35 ms    37 ms    36 ms  130.81.17.61
  6    42 ms    48 ms    43 ms  130.81.17.24
  7    41 ms    41 ms    57 ms  so-7-0-0-0.PEER-RTR1.NY111.verizon-gni.net [130.81.17.131]
  8    42 ms    41 ms    39 ms  po2-0.core01.jfk05.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.11.45]
  9    41 ms    42 ms    41 ms  te4-1.mpd01.jfk05.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.1.153]
 10    42 ms    41 ms    40 ms  vl3491.ccr04.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.7.9]
 11    47 ms    45 ms    47 ms  te2-4.ccr02.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.9]
 12    48 ms    46 ms    44 ms  gi11-0-0.core01.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.5.21]
 13    64 ms    63 ms    65 ms  po6-0.core01.cle01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.158]
 14    65 ms    66 ms    65 ms  po6-0.core01.tol01.atlas.cogentco.com [66.28.4.222]
 15    66 ms    65 ms    66 ms  po6-0.core01.dtw04.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25.110]
 16    65 ms    66 ms    65 ms  vl3501.na31.b020673-1.dtw04.atlas.cogentco.com [38.112.37.82]
 17    64 ms    71 ms    78 ms  38.104.38.10
 18    66 ms    66 ms    65 ms  216.234.104.162
 19    68 ms    67 ms    69 ms  forums.galciv2.com [209.124.63.234]
 20    68 ms    65 ms    67 ms  forums.galciv2.com [209.124.63.234]

Trace complete.

I think this low level path stuff is a dead end. I see no difference between this and my previous posting yet before I was running 30-45 seconds per page now its 2-3 seconds.

I posted yesterday saying that it seemed to be fixed too after the forums sped up for at least 30 minutes.  I didn't want to claim a false victory a second time.  I deleted the post when, as if on cue, the forums went from 1.88 second renders to 30+ second renders right after my post.  It took over 10 minutes to delete the post.

It's back to being fast again for the time being.

Still fast for me consistently for the last 14 hours but I also am not declaring victory. Clearly while my access was fast others were slow. This just indicates the variablity of the problem. It also to some extent indicates that this is *not* a client side problem. I've gone from working fine to extreme slowdown and back again without a single hardware or software change to my PC. How can that indicate a problem with my PC, or anyone else's PC for that matter?

It could indicate stability problems with your ISP. I also experience minor variations in the render time, but on much smaller scale, ranging from 0.5 seconds to about 2-3 seconds. Negligible, really.

On the other hand, I have serious problems with Impulse sometimes. Download rates vary from a 350+ kb/s to below 10 kb/s. Extremely annoying when downloading complete games or large patches.

pndrev, please stay on topic. We tend to moderate off topic replies, or tangents in replies in the Forum Issues forum. If you have issues with another product or Forum function, please create a new post.

It's been working fine for me since late yesterday.  A little slower when logged in than when viewing as a guest.  This page loaded in about 2 seconds as a guest and 5.964 seconds logged in.  Firefox also shows about 2 seconds as a guest, but the time went up to 29.513 seconds when logged in. 

In reality though, the page displayed fine within 3 or 4 seconds when logged in.  I'm not sure why the Stardock and Firefox timers show longer times.

Is anyone still having speed problems?  If not, this can probably be closed as resolved.

I concur, and thanks for your reply, pndrev.  All seems ok now.  Something has obviously taken place, but I'm not sure what it might have been.

The number of active users indicating as approaching 700 is a good sign that all is well.  It was in the single and low two digits during the slowdown.

All, this post has shot into a tangent following a discussion of connections to all Stardock servers/services. The intent of this post was to showcase connection problems with the forums, specifically (as indicated by the Title). While I'm not going to (further) moderate out any of the replies made before this one, any subsequent replies **not involving connections to the forums** (ie. some forum address; for example https://forums.wincustomize.com or forums.galciv2.com) will be moderated.

If any of you would like to start or continue a discussion of connectivity to a variety of servers/addresses, please do so in a new post. The 'Forum Issues' forum and posts within it are for diagnosing, debugging and resolving forum issues. If any of you would like to review the moderation policy for the Forum Issues forum/category, we have them stickied here > Forum Issues Moderation Policy