I'll try to explain this again. The page loading times are FASTER with the ads being loaded this way, than when they were loaded the old way. The pages do NOT wait for the ads to load to complete. They are in iframes and don't have to wait. You can see this yourself if you watch the spots when pages load... sometimes the ads don't appear until later. Pages load most of the time for me in 2-3 seconds, even when the site is very busy. That is faster than most forum sites I visit. Once in a while it takes longer and can probably spike up to 10-15 seconds, but that is the exception rather than the norm, from what I've seen. I am pretty sure this is just database loading depending on what is happening on the server at the instant you load the page. I have noticed that the first visit to the forum will sometimes take longer, but that has nothing to do with the ads. I've tried a couple of things to get that to speed up and thus far haven't found a solution. It will probably require a site redesign to lighten the pages, but I don't have the resources to do that at present.

By having ALL the ads loaded from a separate server, it has greatly improved the database situation. There were times in the past when the site would get so overloaded that it couldn't keep up and it would prevent anyone from getting in including me... this happened often with the old setup. I appreciate that it annoys you to see the ad load 5 times, but if the ad loading has no effect on your ability to read and input your post then what difference does it make. In the last month, I know that one of the other PDA sites has been down about 3 times for several days at a clip because of overloading and such. I don't believe that will happen here with our dual server setup anymore, but it did happen to us from time to time in the past. If you don't want to use the site, I can't make you, but I don't share your view on the page loading situation. The current setup has performed much better overall than anything we've tried in the past, and two high end servers do have a price.

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Mike - Been Converged?