Are we sure that this is all the fault of FR? I’m no expert, but I never, ever have a hard time getting on FR or posting, no matter what’s going on. Sure, sometimes it’s a little slow, but I never have to wait more than five seconds or so. And I don’t have fancy machinery at all. But I live near DC, Verizon is my broadband carrier, and I have to share my bandwidth with a son who’s gaming. So is it possible that some of the people who are having trouble are having trouble with their particular route to the California servers of FR?
I dunno, just a thought. It’s just that some of us never have a problem, there has to be an explanation for that.
I too am a dummy with most of this stuff, but I do know that whatever the hardware/software FR is running on bears a big portion of the blame.
I'm just up from you outside Philly, on Verizon's DSL, and have no problem or unexplainable slowdowns on other sites. I can see when my line throttles at 3MB download - FR never reaches that level, some of YouTube's frequently do. At link selection it usually takes from 5 - 15 seconds before the window starts to paint the data, and that is if it's held in the cache. If the server has to search out a link from months ago that's gone quiet, it can run 45 - 75 seconds to see a return. That's to be expected, as it's not cached.
Slow as it is, FR is still the best place to grab info on just about anything you desire. Keep it up, Jim and John. And thanks!