Although it is the holiday period and things are a bit quieter at the moment one of the big problems we have on the site are the demands on our servers when dozens of users are trying to load and re-load very long discussions all at the same time.

This can make it frustrating for users because the site seems very slow and it also means that we are using up a lot of bandwidth repeatedly sending you the same page with hundreds of comments where only the last two or three are new.

Can I recommend Google’s free new Web Accelerator. This uses a number of measures to speed up the web but most relevant here is that it downloads only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.

The biggest cost of running the site is for the bandwidth and if enough of our regular users had the Google accelerator it would make a big difference.

Many thanks.

Mike Smithson