In the last time, I noticed that the loading times of posts in this forum are horrible long mostly. The server itself is fast enough and doesn't cause any problems. The long waiting times arise from externally connected resources.
1. Signatures containing animations with 1-2 MB size that reside at imageshack.us, as used by Sentic and Ghost (Ghost seems to have removed his one - thanks!).
2. ICQ status queries directed at status.icq.com
Unfortunately, both servers, imageshack.us and status.icq.com, are terribly slow and/or have long reply times. So what usually happens is that I click at the symbol that brings me to the new entries of a thread, the thread loads and hangs at the top of the page, because all external connections must complete before the page jumps to the location where the new entries start.
Although I have a fast internet connection that should even load 2 MB animations in less than a second, I must wait about 1 minute most of the time, until the page jumps to the new entries location. This is truely annoying, because it happens all the time.
So what can we do against it?
First of all, I want to ask Sentic to remove the animation from his signature or at least move it to a faster server. Ghost was reasonable enough to do it himself, as it seems (correct me, if I'm wrong
).The second problem, the ICQ status, is a little harder to solve. The reason why the forum connects to status.icq.com seems to be that there are these ICQ buttons below each user's posts who have an ICQ number configured in the profile. When loading a page, the JavaScript functions of the forum seem to check the current ICQ online status of all users with an ICQ number that have posted on that page. I think, the purpose is to load alternative picture elements as ICQ buttons that shall display the user's current online state.
The question is: Can we do anything against this? Loading times of 50-60 seconds per page are intolerable in my view. I get rilled from this each time when I read the posts here. I already thought about blocking status.icq.com, port 80, in my firewall. But there may be useful services that access this site from other pages and I wouldn't be able to use them anymore.
Coco.
