Is your sight overloaded at night or is the rest of the internet. In the morning I can download one of the 500k pictures in about 2 seconds on my cable modem. At night it takes 5 minutes. What gives? Any ideas?

-- David Richard (davidrichard@home.com), February 29, 2000

Answers

My guess would be your cable modem, as Benoit points out below. Peak traffic time for our server happens in the middle of the afternoon, Eastern time, but it pretty much *never* gets slow. (We pay a lot for connectivity, and it's pretty good.) There is a few-minute period at midnight EST every night when it rolls over the log files, so the CPU is a little busy, but that's only for a few minutes, and I don't think it shows up in download times anyway.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), March 01, 2000.

I don't know about this site, but I have found that when I'm downloading software I'm better off and have more success if I do it at 3 or 4 in the morning! It does download faster then and that is important to me because my service shuts me off after an hour- there were big files I couldn't get completely when I tried during the day or in the evening (to about 2, Eastern time, USA) Chalked it up to site traffic, net traffic and line traffic. (Yeah, I know it is the world-wide-web, but it sure seems predicated on US time!)

-- Eileen Morrisot (we108918@nassaulibrary.org), March 01, 2000.

The answer used to be that at midnight, many servers would send larger email messages across the internet, slowing things down for a time. These days the answer is probably that your neighbors sharing the cable segment are fiends staying up all hours downloading gigs of por

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), March 01, 2000.