Earlier today the slowdown was already in progress: the slowing down of Gather by way of active ads and banner ads which also style themselves as active. Active!
Thing is, a member could be more active on the site if wiggly ads weren't gumming up the works with every page load and every click. My style is cramped, Gather, and mama's not happy when her style is cramped.
Plenty of other Gatherers have written on the issue while I have kept politely silent even though I was biting my tongue-in-cheek...but tonight, I make an appeal:
Active ads which cannot load properly can completely keep members inactive--so it's better to show a stable ad you can depend on than continue to annoy with squirrelly ads which ruin the Gather experience to the point of a member's slowburn.
Yes, slowdown causes slowburn, you see, even in the most patient person who finally reaches the end of her tether, which may also cause ropeburn unless I miss my guess.
Slowdown + slowburn = ropeburn...it's a sad case which has befallen me here at Gather.
Even my slow dial-up connection isn't this much of a bother ordinarily so I think it has more to do with the active ads which are annoying at best and off-putting at worst. And that's off-site-putting, more's the point.
Appearing Once Again on Gather...There's More to Grouse About:
It's the long bands of color dripping from each graphic like piles of molasses but not puddly or sweet in the least...tres aggravating when you're already irritated at the ads-which-won't-load-in-this-century.
But Gather--ya know I love ya, so I'll add an image of some sort to turn my bark'n'bite into a kiss'n'smooch--but if there's anything that can be done about these ads, please don't hesitate to improve the frequent and regular slowdown of what is one of my favorite places to hang out on the web.
Please and Thanks!
Jude
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Comments: 18
Thanks again
Tonight seems better. I suspect it's a server problem, because late at night, it's very fast. I live on the west coast, so midnight here is 3AM anywhere east of Chicago, and most Gatherites are are in dreamland by then.
I notice how much bandwidth these banner ads eat up because at home my computer is very old and the fan has to come on to be able to process the increased overhead of the ads. I can here my poor laptop struggle to make sense of all the data being broadcast into it in the form of FLASH movie ads. At one point the ads were consuming so much of my processing power that I could not have gather and anything else on the screen at the same time.
If you look at your processors output when you load gather, you will clearly see a big percentage goes into playing those ads, and since they don't stop playing the processor has to continually allocate processing power to render them.
I would ask gather to be more considerate and take into account that not everyone has high-speed internet and a fast computer.
For all you nerds out there, you know that an Intel Celeron 600Mhz only has 127K of level two cache, today's top of the line Intel Dual Core 2 processor has 4096K of the same stuff. That processor would not even notice the extra work but mine struggles and coughs and heats up.
I know the feeling, I just left the lab for 5 minutes and I felt like my feet were incased in concrete.
called Tune Up Ultilies 2006 and I think that really cleaned up stuff on computer .
I've cleared my browsers' cache, I've cleaned up utilities and useless files, I've deleted cookies and history...and all runs better everywhere but at Gather...so---
Dear Santa,
Please bring us all a smoother-running Gather with lots of chocolate cream drops, molasses cookies, and a new yo-yo under the tree....
Also, I'm on a broadband connection. :-( Very disappointing.
grrr-rr-r-rrr and arghh-h-h!
And here I thought it was all because I had my foot on the freak'n brake!!!!
;)
It reminds me of an old Ford van I once had that wondered all over the road. Point it to go North and you'd end up going East! East brought you South. South got you going West!