Sorry techs, but at 12 noon it is taking around 30 seconds to load a thread and 42 seconds from pressing post to message being shown

No, but I like being called young!

It has been suggested to me that "If it makes you feel better to keep having a go at me then please do feel free" is overly confrontational (despite the smiley and link to self deprecating thread). It was meant to be a light hearted quip. If anyone found that confrontational I do apologise.

Any frustration that I feel about this thread begins and ends with my wish that we could fix it instantly and make you all happy. In the mean time, the least I can do is be your own personal MNHQ whipping boy! (Except for for BoysAreLikeDogs who might take it a bit too literally)

Whatever buzzocks are.

No problem - like I said, I know it's a hassle so if you're too busy don't worry.

Off home to put my son to bed now but if you want to slap me around a bit more I'll probably have a laptop to hand whilst I watch Never mind the Buzzocks later.

FAQ, the Firefox plugin you could try is Firebug. Once installed, click Tools, Firebug, open Firebug. In the window that appears click Profile, and Net on the line beneath it, then All on the line above again. You'll see a bar chart showing the load times for each component on the page. Ignore the blue bars but look for the longest grey ones - the times will be recorded next to them. If a page is taking 30 seconds to load it'll likely be that one or more of them will have a time of 10 seconds or more. That's where the problem is for that given page. Report back if you see one thing consistently causing problems.

Obviously I do understand that that's a whole load of effort and if you'd rather not then no worries. We'll be working on fixes anyway, but hard data is always good if we can get it and our users are the biggest source of it.

Thanks.

"i don't know if you realise how 'off' your tone is on this thread."

I absolutely realise that some people might not like everything I write, but I am not completely sure how much more I can do right now. I've apologised, I've explained what's going on, I've explained that we're trying to sort it out and I've offered to help individuals if they can provide me with a bit more info.

I certainly don't mean to offend or upset anyone (and I can't recall actually criticising anyone, except perhaps Lapin a tiny bit for having a go at me, but she's smart enough to stand up for herself!). Unfortunately I can't give you what you want which presumably is for all the problems to disappear. I would love to wave a magic wand and make it all better but it's not all within my direct control, so I am afraid I can't. As I've said a few times, we're working on it and we're spending money on it.

If it makes you feel better to keep having a go at me then please do feel free. There are some amusing digs over here if you want to chip in!

FAQ, I am making it a personal mission to at least provide you with a genuine explanation even if we can't immediately change it.

When I click Refresh on this thread it takes less than 3 seconds to load. That's pretty typical in my personal experience.

How long does it take you? If it is much more than 3 seconds, what browser are you using? If it's not Firefox are you willing/able to switch to Firefox to experiment with it? Also are you willing/able to install a plugin in your browser? No problem if not, but it might be helpful in trying to figure it out.

FAQ, to be clear, sometimes it's an ad problem and sometimes it's a "being too busy to cope" problem. We're working hard on the latter, because we know for a fact that at peak times (after the children are in bed but before you are) the server is running slowly because of how busy it is. We're spending time and money fixing this and we can only ask you to hang in there in the meantime.

The ads are a separate problem and it is more difficult to solve. We have some long term ideas of how to fix it, but in the short term pretty much the only thing we can do is take reports of a specific ad causing a problem and ask the ad supplier to remove that ad. The trouble with that is that it's not obvious to our lovely users which ad is causing the problem. In the meantime, sorry for the troubles; hang in there and we'll keep trying to improve matters.

Ad blockers are of course the worse solution, because without the ads there is no Mumsnet.

MrVibrating, thanks for the suggestion, but alas an absolute width won't help. The nested document.writes (which are not our choice, but that of the advertisers) cause rendering to stop whilst they execute. I wish they executed asynchronously, but alas, they don't.