General Chat

Its really frustrating.Was trying to look in sent messages to see if one I sent has been opened and getting the Error message each time

About time this bug was sorted out once and for all .

Got to leave it now as have to take the cat to the vet for her daily jabs . :-(

I always have a problem with seeing "Sent" messages - rarely can I view them :-(

Unfortunately it isn't a bug - if it was it could corrected and it would be sorted once and for all.

The issue is one of performance capacity with the technology GR use to support the website.

GR techies tweak things when it gets too bad and the problem goes a way for a while but sooner or later it comes back again.

Problem is that it mostly affects those of us who are long standing members and who have large amounts of data associated with their profile, be it names in their tree, postings on the community board or personal messages in their message folders.

I've had several Error Messages this week.......... posting on the boards! :-(

The error "bug"is not due to a lack of computer capacity on the BrightSolid server. The reason for it likes in a mix of the way the site is designed, the nature of IIS (Microsoft Web Server) and the performance of user computer and connection.

When a user query is executed the results are returned to the user as html which is displayed in the browser. If there are a lot of results eg a long thread then that can be a lot of data to handle. The code could be amended to break up the returned data and this would help a lot.

IIS is really meant for corporate intranets not public facing web servers. By design it expects requests to be handled quickly. Dealing with the sort of delay common on the internet by extending the timeout period before an error condition occurs can seriously reduce the number of connections the server can handlle and of course increase costs.

A GRU user with a reasonably modern computer eg running Intel i5 CPU, 4 GB RAM and even a not very quick ADSL connection of 6 Mb within the UK is unlikely to encounter the timeout error in the UK EVEN WITH a large dataset returned to the browser.

These are the factors which can screw things up. One of them on its own may be ok but two or more then problems are quite possible.

a. slow computer - anything less than Pentium 4 3.0 or Core2Duo 2.4 / Athlon 64 with 2 GB RAM. Minimum to be reliable is Intel i3 / duo or AMD PhenomII/Athlon dual core > 3.0

b. slow connection - any connection using a 56K modem, USB wifi dongle (these max out at 2 Mb ), poor in house wifi - check that this is delivering at least 6 Mb

c. non-uk connection GRU does not have servers dotted around the world there is just one in the UK. The various suffix refer to the same server. Connections to Spain, Australia, NZ, Africa, Canada can have a very long round trip time. When added to (b) this can be fatal in even getting a signon let alone response for a long thread

The best ways of avoiding the problem are to ensure that yr net connection is better than 4 Mb/sec and that yr computer is reasonably up to date. Using old low performance browsers such as IE8 does not help either.

High profile sites with a lot of resources and money are able to do all sorts of tricks to get around these problems. GRU is a low budget site.

I have noticed that people complaining about errors rarely if ever give any of the most basic details of their connexion, computer or browser.