We ask because it affects various traffic statistics collected by our web server. All the numbers have gone up dramatically (double in many cases) since the fix that speeded up the site late last month. We think this is due to increased traffic -- and, maybe, due partly to the growing popularity of Mozilla Firefox with multiple tabs that can be easier to manage than IE with many windows. Hence this poll.

I often have lots of tabs open, bad habit from pre-broadband days.
It sometimes scares me how much memory firefox uses when you have over 5 windows open!
I got 5 tabs open at the moment and it's using 66Mb of memory!!!

Do you want to know the number of tabs I keep open on this site or in general?

I actually only use one tab for this site in order to keep my throughput much more managable. No reason for me to hit the site 5 times simeoultaneously when I can spread it over time.

But if you guys don't mind if I pop open a bunch of tabs to this site, I just might do that. I'll wait until I hear the final word from MikeC.

When I still used IE I used only one window. Now I am using Firefox with at least 4 tabs while reading and additional tabs when searching for answers to a post.

I started using more tabs because "back" is not really back within the phpBB forums. What I mean with this: when hitting the back key on my keyboard, the page isn't retieved from the local cache, but reloaded from the server. With IE this problem existed too, but using more windows made too big a mess of my already crowded taskbar.

Excuse my complete stupidity/ignorance ... but what's the difference between 'tabs' and multiple I.E. windows?


Pete

Tabs are, well, many windows iin one really. Instead of having loads of stufff on your taskbar its in the toolbar of the browser., thats the thi ng uder the place where you typer the www adress you are going to Quite handy really.

Great... so it makes your viewing window smaller (because of an extra toolbar) whilst providing no discernable benefit...


Thanks for the answer though.

Are you for real? How is it not a benefict?!

Pete,

It's a great feature, does benefit me a lot.

Here's how I browse SPCR (MikeC, if this is taxing the system, advise against it ASAP )

I go in, click "view posts since last visit"
I right-click and "open in new tab" every thread I want to read/comment on on each new-posts-page. That usually comes to about 10 tabs open.

Now, pete, imagine doing that with IE. 10 windows open. Chances are, windows will pile them all together into one taskbar button and you've got to go through a menu to see where you were. With Firefox, it's easy

Only if you're using it, it disappears if there's only one tab open.

Since you're rather concerned about space for the page, how are your toolbars set up? On mine the buttons(small icons, no text), pull down menus and adress bar are all on the same line.

Well, 10 tabs probably does tax the server more than 1. At this point in time, the server is handling the increased traffic very well, but certainly, every open window does count. If you can reduce the multi-tasking to fewer windows/tabs, it will probably make it easier for others to get on and browse at the same time, especially as traffic continues to grow.

There is no question that SPCR is drawing more readers than ever, and the rate of growth has accelerated since our server fix last month. At the rate we're going, we'll serve up ~30% more data in Jan than Dec, to about 20% more unique visitors.

So yeah, keeping your open tabs/windows at SPR down a bit -- maybe to a max of 4-5 will help. Mind you, we're probably only seeing the hardcore users responding here, so it might not be much of an issue...

Pete, this reminds me. One additional benefit is that you can quickly move between tabs by hitting CTRL-<1-9 depending on number of tabs>. This is better than ALT-TABing between windows.

WOW! i didn't know you could do that!
Now i'm even more productive, the question is what to do with all that extra time i'll have on my hands???

I know, i'll visit SPCR more!

Firefox, 1-3 SPCR tabs at a time average, 3-5 tabs in total, average, but I spend a whole lot of time here in the forums.

^ What he said.

Avant Browser (IE)
~ 20 SPCR tabs

There goes the server.

Ditto - this is my way of browsing many sites in general (though it's much easier to just click the mouse wheel - no need for the right-mouse menu, works with Opera too I think).

Open the main page, dit-dit-dit with the middle mouse on anything that looks interesting, and then ctrl-W to close each tab down as I finish with it. That's why I love tabs.

It does mean a little screen space lost, but then again, you can customize the Firefox toolbars quite easily, to minimize them but still have plenty of functionality. Here's mine, including a whole bar just for bookmark folders and the search box. Not too onerous, and well worth it.



Edit: narrowed the image - seems a wide image sets the minimum width of the entire thread table!

I sometimes have more than ten...

I have a habit of glancing through nearly every thread, so it's a matter of opening two or twenty at a time. To my defence, I've done this since I moved to MyIE2 (~2 years). So I cannot be blamed for increasing traffic.

Cheers,

Jan

You can always put firefox in full screen(F11) and the tabs are still visible Personally i would not even need the search bar, the mouse has back/forward and i use Ctrl+L to go somewhere Its wery frustrating using IE in full screen imo. As jimmyfergus said, clicking the mouse wheel to open tabs works very well

I was mistaken: It's been confirmed that the counter accurately reflects the number of unique IP addresses in the forum. The number of browser windows open is also counted, but the stat about how many visitors we have is not that number; it is the number of unique IPs.

So it seems safe to say that SPCR forum traffic has genuinely at least doubled on average, and as you can see from the peak number of 474 on Dec 30 at the bottom of the forum home page, the daily peaks have more than quadrupled. It appears to be mostly from "pent up demand." (ie, people tried but couldn't often get on before and were frustrated becuase the server was so unresponsive, and now they can and they're romping all over the place in droves.)

Multiple windows / tabs do put higher loads on the server. For the sake of our busy server and the rest of the SPCR community, it would be appreciated if you'd limit the number to a handful rather than the 10 and 20 some people are talking about.

Thanks.

Mike Chin

Idle curiosity, but does this imply there is some sort of session resource that's used for each window open? I know it's a back-end implementation detail, but I'm curious how having multiple pages open changes much.

In terms of downloading pages, my tab usage means that when I visit, there's about a 1 minute burst when I load, say 3-10 tabs, and then nothing while I read through them. If I didn't load multiple tabs, I'd view the same pages, but the page loading would be spread over the whole reading time. So is there some back-end load in addition to the generation and transfer of the HTML, or is the problem just that I may be loading 2 or more pages simultaneously?

How do multiple tabs put higher loads on the server? If you open K tabs isn't that the same bandwidth as staying in he same tab and browsing to the K topics one after the other? Or is there something else?

I'm not knowledgeable enough about the details of the back end to answer authoritatively, but your last comment is probably correct. Also, if a handful of people are doing this, the extra load is probably not a big deal -- the server seems to be handling recent peaks fine, tho I do see occasional hesitations at such times. But if everyone was doing it, then it could be quite significant imo. I'll see what Richard has to say about this.

AFAIK FireFox has only one active "request" per time per server, whereas IE has four. There are (unsurprisingly) few hacks for FF which enable more than one request per time/server. I've understood that even then there is only one active "connection" to the server.

I'm no expert on this matter either, hence the quotation marks.

Cheers,

Jan

Can some webserver guru explain it in understandable words pls?
I like to open whatever number of IE/FF windows my pc can handle, sometimes friends are surprised that I have 47 windows open, but if that means an error page on spcr site sayng "sorry the site is unavailable please Ddos this ip" I will take it into consideration. But provide the tech whys first !
The little I know is that if I leave 100 spcr windows open for 2 years and do nothing, spcr server will not know it. And about opening 10 pages in 20 secs, ok not nice but the next hours I make it up with very few requests, and if all of the spcr readers do like me, we do it at random times and average out.
Going back and forth and back to the list page for example, doesn't it cause many unnecessary requests to load the list page, wich does not happen with my multiple windows browsing.

Mike, do a quick Google on this:

Antec P180

no quotes, nothing. You'll see that the mass majority of results that come up link directly or indirectly to SPCR, some place or another. I think this is part of the contributing factor to the sudden rise in traffic. Do your server stats indicate which pages are most popular? Even my own web site's hosting service provides such a stat filter.

Opera shouldn't be lumped with "other", it's such a terrific browser. (40 bucks is not too much for something you use so frequently-don't be cheapskates!).

Anyway, I do usually end up creating about 3 or four windows in Opera when navigating your site.

It's the nature of the information, you're comparing products and opinions and the best way to do this is with multiple tabs(windows).

I'm 2 to 4 with Firefox. I tend to middle-click (with the mousewheel) any links that take me to other threads as that opens the link in a new tab. I then read it through and either middle-click to close it again, thus returning to the original window, or middle-click any more links. That can result in more than four tabs but usually it doesn't.

I find Firefox so much easier to browse with than I did IE.

I also have an extension installed that opens all the tabs I had open at last shutdown but it doesn't connect I don't believe; simply reloads from cache. A refresh is required and I'm glad about that, otherwise starting up the Browser with SPCR appearing when I didn't have time to give it its due attention would result in all the threads being marked read.

Kerio Personal Firewall displays active connections, and I can see that opening a page in Firefox starts several simultaneous connections. They close soon after the transfers are complete, but in the meantime the server gets a big spike in load. Part of that is due to the network tweak I had installed, which brought the max simultaneous connections from 4 (default) to 16. IE shows about 10 connections opened to the SPCR server at a time, but that's probably because I tweaked IE's settings too. I think IE's default is two, because if I started two downloads from the same server, then the server's webpage stopped responding until one download completed. The IE tweak removed that limitation.