This thread is for readers to tell us about performance issues with the web site. If you are reporting a problem please include the following information when you post:

- Description of the problem
- Your source IP address
- The site you were trying to reach
- ping stats (eg. ping -c www.o3magazine.com)
- traceroute (eg. traceroute -n www.o3magazine.com)
- When you tried it

We are using bleeding edge open source software to do what is commonly called “Global Server Load Balancing”. If you are interested in finding out how, check out Issue 6 of o3 magazine. The system is designed to send readers to the fastest local server, it does this by classifying IP subnets and making decisions based on the classification.

Some readers in Asia and Oceania have reported site slowness due to how their ISP routes traffic. Readers in India and Pakistan can often reach our European servers faster than our servers in Asia, but other parts of Asia reach our servers there much faster. If you are experiencing “slowness”, and you are in Asia, there is a good chance you are being routed to our server in Asia by our system, but your ISP is sending you around the planet (Europe -> United States -> Hong Kong). If this is happening to you, we will adjust the system once we receive traceroutes / ping information in here.

We are working on a system to automatically tune the classification based on real-time traffic, we expect that to be in place later this year.