Is DaniWeb *VERY* slow for you?

I haven't had a problem all day.

Seems to be my ISP then.

nope, nice and speedy here :)

Well it depends.
Where I work, Daniweb is kinda slow, but when I go home (which is near the city, ~15 km away), Daniweb is ultra fast... So depends on the ISP I guess.

It has bee speedy for me both at work and at home.

Works fine here.

Nice and fast here

It was sluggish this morning, around the time happygeek reported the spam fest. No speed issues atm.

I havent experienced any issues...

No issues now but this morning was slow prob due to the issue pritaeas mentioned.

It's perfectly fine :)

The problem was on my end. I had to reboot the domain controller last night, and my workstation was having issues resolving the DNS ever since. A reboot cured it right up.

That's because you are running 2012 Essentials, I bet... can you tell I'm not fond of SBS/Essentials..:-)

How did you know?!

LOL, I'm a Windows AD guy since 1996, well back then it wasnt AD....

:-)

So it's just like a known bug that when Windows Server 2012 Essentials wants to perform a reboot to finish installing Windows Updates, all of the workstations on the domain controller also need to be restarted?!

So it's just like a known bug that when Windows Server 2012 Essentials wants to perform a reboot to finish installing Windows Updates, all of the workstations on the domain controller also need to be restarted?!

No of course not... restarting a DC whether running Essentials or Standard --> Data Center should not require a restart of the members of the domain.

The main issue I have with the SBS (now Essentials) family is running all of those unrelated networking services on the same box SQL/Exchange/File SErvices mixed with AD, DNS, DHCP, etc... My experience has been that the scenario i just described exponentially complicates the system related to upgrades, changes, etc...

You know that anytime you introduce a change, there is a risk to the system. So imagine a Windows server and the numerous changes occuring during multiple updates, hotfixes, etc...

There's nothing like running a dedicated DC only servicing AD authentication and DNS.

It varies with me. Sometimes a page loads quickly and sometimes not. For example, yesterday I went to a member's profile to do an endorsement. The profile page came up but when I clicked on the endorsement tab nothing came up even after several minutes. I tried again with the same problem although other pages rendered quickly.

You can also change your Domain Name Server (DNS) from the one provided by your ISP to the likes of Google's or OpenDNS. (my preferred DNS) Changing your DNS does not affect your ISP, but can improve your Internet experience. You can change the DNS at the point of your Router or your computer. If you are interested in the benefits of an alternative DNS, please read more here at OpenDNS.

If you need any help in making the changes on your computer/router then please just let us know which OS and/or Router you have. (It's not difficult, and can't have any adverse effects)

This is probably a really daft question considering your expertise and background. Have you gone over the basics of cleaning up your PC, if it is Windows based? I think you would likely know of all the typical clean-up app's such as Superantispyware, Malwarebytes, Ccleaner. (but don't use the registry cleaner) Windows Defrag isn't very efficient, use something like O&O Defrag. All of this is important to Windows housekeeping, and should be done periodically.

BigPaw, her setup sounds considerably more complicated than just setting the DNS on the router ;)

As she uses a Domain Controller I presume her DNS is set up to cover the internal network in addition to the external network, that requires a little more precise control than a standard router box would offer.

Additionally, on modern operating systems (Windows 7/8), the defrag is performed continuously behind the scenes, most commonly when the machine is idle.
Furthermore, don't ever defrag an SSD:
1. Seek times on an SSD are near-instantaneous due to it being NAND (commonly) flash memory so the position of data is irrelevant.
2. SSDs have a limited number of writes (improved nowadays thanks to wear levelling) so don't perform write operations you don't have to :)

yes! sometimes it doesn't show pictues, comments. everything keep running fine for me, but sometimes daniweb behave very slow, i dont know why. sometimes, it is slow when i need to swap from C to C++ or any other place.

Everything you say here would make perfect sense in a different context.

As she uses a Domain Controller I presume her DNS is set up to cover the internal network in addition to the external network, that requires a little more precise control than a standard router box would offer.

She described an issue she was having with a workstation that no-one else was having, and alluded to the problem being with the ISP's DNS.

Additionally, on modern operating systems (Windows 7/8), the defrag is performed continuously behind the scenes, most commonly when the machine is idle.

Windows own Defrag system is a waste of time. Try O&O Defrag and you'll see what I mean.

Furthermore, don't ever defrag an SSD:
1. Seek times on an SSD are near-instantaneous due to it being NAND (commonly) flash memory so the position of data is irrelevant.
2. SSDs have a limited number of writes (improved nowadays thanks to wear levelling) so don't perform write operations you don't have to :)

Good point about the SSD, but O&O Defrag won't defrag an SSD, it recognises an SSD and optimises it instead.

Thanks for your input though, techies should watch each other's backs. :-)

She described an issue she was having with a workstation that no-one else was having, and alluded to the problem being with the ISP's DNS.

The problem was with my domain controller's DNS server, not my ISP at all. :)

Nope. It works fine to me.....

Windows own Defrag system is a waste of time. Try O&O Defrag and you'll see what I mean.

How so? I've never had a problem with it, but then again I use RAID on my data and SSD on my OS. Still would like to see the qualification or some data about it :)

As far as I'm aware, the Windows one has a little advantage because it knows what you access most often. The built in defragger uses this information to move all that data closer together, with the priority being that the OS is at the start of the drive.

From a compaction point of view, this could look awful, but wouldn't this improve seek and retrieval times in a realistic sense?

How is the O&O one better? I can't look at it in action at the moment as I'm at work, however, I can't see anything in the marketting details that point to any obvious improvements over the standard Windows one.
I also don't really want to test it on my RAID drive as I'm pretty happy with the performance of it currently ;)

Microsoft does some things on a generic level so that its operating systems will function on the most types of hardware environment possible. Is your back-up management the Microsoft integrated service, or something different? Is your Antivirus service only Microsoft Security Essentials? Dedicated software often improves on generic.

As to O&O Defrag specifically, please consider the 'data' by way of this comparison chart. Please tell me if you disagree with what you see there.

There are cheaper options that are better than the Windows generic version, such as Defraggler, though possibly not as suited to a Server environment as O&O Defrag.

Whilst I appreciate that "generic" software isn't often as good as something directly targetted, in this case the OS itself will have a better understanding of how it operates compared to a 3rd party. Wouldn't it be able to make better optimisations with such information?

By data, I really wanted to see a performance comparison or similar.

Also, anything that advertises TRIM optimisation is almost lying in my opinion ;)

Windows 8 and Windows 7 offer TRIM support, however, the execution of these commands is decided by the drive controller and it can, if it so chooses, ignore them.

Btw, I'm not having a go or anything, I'm just interested in seeing what the real-world differences are, hopefully, with some numbers. I've just never seen anything suggesting that the built in one is "bad" compared to competing options. Based on personal experience, I'd say it's just as good now.

Back in 98/XP I would 100% agree, that software was awful. It took almost a day to finish a big drive and you saw nearly no improvement compared to (dare I say) Norton's which was fantastic in comparison.

Just recently I was defragmenting a few laptops we have in different parts of the house and found that Windows Native Defrag was happy that a fragmentation level of over 12% was acceptable. It took a long time to do the analysis, and there was no way of my seeing what it was that was fragmented. Was it the Pagefile, or important applications that are used on a daily basis, such as CS6, one of my video editing applications, Office? Windows Defragmenter wasn't able to tell me. I just had to accept that over 12% was good enough. Windows Defrag does have some extra features if you use it from an Administrative Command prompt with suitable switches, but none of those extra features come close to the features you have simple access to in the likes of O&O Defrag.

O&O Defrag does an analysis in a tenth of the time, allows me to see what is defragmented, and then completely defragmented that drive from over 12% to 0%. It defrag'd the two partitions together and also did the other computers in different parts of the house via the LAN. There is a full report on what it has done if anyone really needed to know that much detail.

SSD's, I don't like them and don't trust them at the moment. Although they read data phenomenally quickly, they write at the same speed as a standard harddisk, or significantly slower than the write. (This is improving in newer models) There are better options already here, such as the reinvention of the RAM drive. I am in the process of critical testing this option myself. Some incorporate the RAM drive into their SSD solution to improve performance and extend the life of their SSD.

But, don't get me wrong, I'm not the sort that follows every chip and change. If people are happy with what they have for now, then as the adage goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." :-)

No fair enough, I can concede to that, the Windows defragger lacks greatly in it's reporting, but personally I'm not interested that. I want it to go fast! ;)
I will experiment with the free version and see if it improves anything. How well does it handle defragging a RAID 0 array btw? I hope it isn't going to just "defragment" it all onto a single drive ;)

SSD reliability has improved in leaps and bounds in the recent two years, so long as you don't buy budget. To quote another saying; "You get what you pay for"

The write speed of my SSD is only slightly lower than my read speed.
Read Seq.
Advertised: 540MB/sec, Actual: 340MB-500MB/sec depending on compression etc
Read Rand.
No Advertised Speed. Actual: 200MB-300MB/sec

Write Seq.
Advertised: 520MB/sec, Actual: 225MB-480MB/sec depending on compression etc
Write Rand.
No Advertised Speed. Actual: 50MB-230MB/sec

Fast enough for my desktop and significantly faster than a single mechanical drive performing the same operations. (Do a 4K random read/write test on a mechanical vs an SSD. The difference is staggering)

For me, SSD is vastly superior in terms of performance. In terms of £/Gb they're shockingly bad, but I guess that's not why Desktop users want them ;)

For a server, I would go SAS tbh. You're right, in that they aren't reliable enough to run a server OS on, unless they're the very expensive SLC (as opposed to the common MLC in the consumer market) Intel drives. Apparently these are built specifically for servers.