Why is AM seemingly so much slower than other websites?
It almost always takes much longer to respond, and sometimes it doesn't respond at all and a message about the server appears. Have any of you also experienced this? Perhaps JA can best address it.
Do you want the long version or the short version? The tech version or the non-tech version?
Remember those old "choose your own adventure" style books? You'd read a chapter and then decide based on your preferences where the story went. This site is kind of like that. Except, imagine, if you will, that this is fan fiction, meaning lots of authors created new potential adventures and built off one another. As you probably know, those stories make sense because they follow a linear pattern. But, if lots of people were writing and sending you to various chapters written by other authors throughout the book, you'd start to notice inconsistencies. For example, maybe in Chapter 1, the original author says the main character goes to work every day at 8am, but perhaps you land on Chapter 8 Version Q, written by a fan fiction author, and that author says the main character is leaving his house at 9 for work. You'd probably catch that and it would mess with you some.
Now, let's say, within the same book, the authors also tell you to go look at charts to help you better understand what's happening. Some of those charts are in the chapters, some at the end of the book, and some in other books or online, and you have to go hunt them down in order to understand what the authors are trying to explain. After a while, you'd get irritated with having to reference all these other places. Life would be so much simpler if the danged authors had taken the time to file their new charts all together at the back of the book for you.
Or, imagine that, instead of being told the author leaves for work at 8, your book then says "John left his house at (see page 593 to view John's work schedule)." So, you stop, go to page 593, find out he leaves at 8, and then continue reading the passage.
Maybe some parts have it wrong because the author missed a detail. Or, maybe sometimes the author attempts to ensure their answer is always in line with the original author's by telling you where to look. Or, maybe sometimes, the author throws white-out on the page and then writes in his own time because the character leaving at 8 doesn't fit in with his story line.
The more chapters you have, the more these errors and inconsistencies throw off other parts of the book. You need an editor. Someone who can read through all the pages and chapters, refine it so it makes sense and you're not looking to page 593 or referencing another manual, but have the information right there as you read it. But, if the book isn't fully written yet, your editor can't help much. They can fix some parts, but not all of them.
That is, in essence, what's wrong with the site. Lots of authors, no editor. Lots of people writing code, nobody going through and streamlining it. So, your browser is literally reading through everything that should appear on a page, then checking numerous references to determine how to present it. What's more, every browser reads things differently, so while one might display the site well and fast, another might decide it's done looking for references and chuck the book into a dark corner.
We still have lots of things that need to be fixed before someone can fix the speed, and there isn't a budget nor dev to do it. And, that stinks. I don't have a way to move forward at the moment. I've explored lots of options, but none have come through. So, we are, in essence, stuck with what we've got for now and all we can do is make the most of what we have. I, personally, use Chrome and have very few problems. Internet Explorer is garbage. Safari is tolerable most of the time. FireFox is ok.
On rare occasions, there are small hosting issues, but that end of things is generally ok. In fact, I've eyeballed changing hosts to cut costs because I could save a fair amount of money doing so and then apply that to development, but our host has been really good to us. I don't have confidence that another more affordable choice wouldn't totally tank speeds or leave us dead in the water.
Just Asking 