Is anyone else experiencing a really slow connection to UMD? It's taking ages to load pictures or download purchases. All other websites seem fine, but UMD being very slow. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Sometimes it is very slow... I have a really fast broadband (lucky me) but sometimes it is just so slow you have to refresh your page again and again...it is just so frustrating when other websites cope so well. Perhaps someone more techy can sort this out.

Same here, the site has been terrible especially so this last 12 hours, I am not uploading or making purchases until it is ok again

There are a few things that can cause a slow connection. The first thing is your system and internet connection. But since it is not happening with all sites, that might rule out your stuff. There is a packet size thing that can happen where your packet size is too big and your ISP is fragmenting the packet in a funny way. The default packet size is 1500, but some ISP's do douchey things like set their packet size to 1480 so that all packets are fragmented which leads to re-transmission and other things that cause the website to run slowly. There are apps that require a bigger packet size like sql that use jumbo frames. ISP's should have their equipment configured for jumbo frames to get around this 1500 thing.

The other thing that can lead to this is your path to the site. There may be a link further down the line from your connection that is causing issues. I will assume that you are on windows. If you press the windows key on your keyboard and then press the letter R an run box will come up. Type in cmd and hit enter. You will get a black box with a blinking cursor. In that box type in tracert www.umd.net then hit enter. What that does is show you all the hops between you and the umd. You do not want any of those hops to be above 100 ms if you are located in the united states. Do not post your results here. Just look at the numbers.

The other thing that this could be is server response time. Companies sell equipment for tens of thousands of dollars that monitor networks and tell you from the information in your packets what is happening and how long things are taking. It can tell you how much time your traffic spent getting to the server, how much time the traffic took waiting for a response from the server, then how much time for that data to get back to your machine. The closest thing I have found to this is https://tools.pingdom.com/ If you put the UMD in there you can then choose the region to test from to get something close to you. I will let you know that they rate this site a C because of all the redirects that happen, there are far too many of them.

Hopefully this was the kind of techy response cakeyfacey was looking for.

There's definitely been some slowdown and lots of folks are noticing it. If I had to guess I'd say the site's server resources are getting hammered by AI scrapers.

https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/2025/06/ai-scraper-bots-are-disrupting-online-collections-report-finds/

Yes, I was chatting with Rod yesterday, and for both of us its been virtually unusable for the past few days, which isn't ideal.

I am confident that MM knows this is an issue and is working flat out to address it

Same for me too - nice to know I'm not alone!

I am glad to see that I am not alone in noticing that the site has been really slow.
I have noticed the site has been extremely slow to access and navigate for at least the last month or so.

I had it so slow yesterday I gave up but it's fine today. Seems to happen from time to time

Well said! The last few times I've been on I've had to give up. Especially the chat bar is unusable often taking a few minutes to post a reply. And often not appearing at all. Viewing an album is impossible, each one freezing the feed while it loads s----l-----o------w-----l-------y zzzzzzzzz

It is really slow.....

even posting the latest message took about a minute!!

Things seem to be back to happy. Huzzah

Connection has gone back too snail's pace for me in UK this past week or so.

Same. Site has been barely useable this past few days (am on Mac)

I have noticed the slowness as well the last couple of days. I have noticed it is different areas of the forum. Non-WAM is not as slow as Messy or Wetloook. The stories section loads the fastest. This was reported around the time the way pictures are handled changed. I wonder if this is a side effect.

Very slow for me over the past few days too, only this site x

Yeah the site has been wicked slow the past few days now. I have notifications that wont go away at all either. I can't tell if I actually have a new message or not.

First two attempts to load this page timed out. Managed at third attempt. Took about 3 minutes in total.

I didn't see this thread before I started my own here:

https://umd.net/groups/i/umd-site-super-slow

As I say at the link, I LOVE this site and really cringe at criticising the hard work that goes into it and this community. I just want it to be the best version of itself it can be.

These pages are taking so long to load that I feel like a Messygirl model waiting to get paid!

Last time it happened I messaged MessMaster about it and it turned out he'd been doing some work under the hood and it accidentally resulted in some instability. I'd recommend reaching out to him and see if there's anything else going on

Doing this will surely carry more weight coming from producers who offer a streaming option as they are losing money from people like me who (desperately!) want to stream their content but won't because it is currently an unusable service.

I realize that Messmaster is a very busy guy and that he will be working hard to get the problems sorted asap, but I think it would be reassuring to members if, say, the Home page contained a brief note informing them as to the reasons, and how long any problem is likely to persist.

It was pretty slow for me all last week, but I was away in a remote area. However, returning to my home connection, it's still sluggish, especially on mobile.

Yeah it's basically unusable right now. I love this site but compared to something like Fetlife it's painfully slow.

For me UMD has been very slow ever since, but I also noticed it getting even worse in the last couple of weeks.

Much faster today - likely due to the intercession of some talented back-end work. Thanks!

This site is basically unusable most of the time recently. It's really unfortunate but waiting over a minute for a page to load makes me not even want to check this site out anymore.

I have a fast connection in the UK and have noticed UMD get slower and slower over the past nine months or so. It used to be lightning fast before then. Its hard to know if its the coding behind the scenes - clearly things have changed, if you look at photos they are now in a pop up - or whether its the host provider. I even wondered if it was deliberately slowed down for non subscribers

Having said that, I find pages do load - eventually, normally 20s rather than immediately.

Thanks all of you, for comfirming its not just me..


Patrick

We have all experienced slow connections in the past few weeks and I know Messmaster is doing the best he can to fix things. I messaged him and he responded quickly. It is a huge task to keep all the plates spinning and technical issues can and do arise. It is frustrating, but this is the last true WAM site and we don't want to lose it, so hang in there, be patient and I have every confidence the guy will eventually resolve the issues. I post a large volume of material ( all free) on here so I am probably one of the reasons things are slowing down as the site content grows.
I am not technical, I do not care for AI, but I appreciate Messmaster and everything he does to keep this amazing site going.