Hi all,
We do take any reports of slowdowns seriously and do a full investigation and troubleshooting when such problems arise.
Unfortunately, it does not appear to be a problem with the server. Why is this unfortunate? Because it means the problem is somewhere outside of our control (possibly within your internet service provider’s network) which makes it much harder to identify and takes longer to fix.
I’ll explain what I think is happening in more detail below for those interested, but in the mean time while we continue to investigate, you can try the following to speed up the website for you:
- Try generating your flight plans with the “Flight Maps” option set to “None”. This will significantly reduce the amount of data that gets transferred to the SimBrief Downloader, so it should help users who are are getting stuck on the Downloader loading screen.
- If you have access to a VPN, try enabling it and connecting to a VPN server in a different country. This should cause your requests to be sent via a different route and possibly bypass any faulty networks.
Now for the longer technical explanation:
When your PC downloads something from SimBrief, it sends a request to the SimBrief server. That request travels through thousands of miles of cable, across oceans, and through many routers before finally arriving at the server. The SimBrief server then responds, and the response travels through another few thousand miles to get back to you. All it takes is one problem in that whole sequence of cables and routers to potentially cause an issue like this.
None of this is “visible” to us. We only know when your request arrives at the server, and when we send the response. We don’t know how long it took for your request to get to us, or how long it took for our response to get back to you. I’ve triple checked the server logs again and all of the responses sent from the server to you were completed in fractions of a second, which seems to suggest that the slowdown is occurring somewhere along the way between the server and your PCs.
We have some clues however:
First, it seems like this is quite a localized issue. Over the weekend, > 60,000 users logged on to SimBrief, but there are only a few of you reporting connection issues. In addition, it seems you are all located in the same country and using the same internet service provider.
This would suggest that the slowdown lies somewhere in your ISP’s network perhaps. To be clear, there are countless routes that ISPs can send website traffic (kind of like there are many roads you can take to drive from one city to another), so it’s quite possible that SimBrief is the only website that is slow for you. It might be that SimBrief is the only website you use that is being routed through a particular faulty cable or router.
Please note that I am only saying this to explain the situation, and not to dismiss or brush off the issue. I have some ideas on how we can reduce the likelihood of this happening going forward, but these aren’t quick fixes. The reality is that the issue will probably resolve itself at your ISP before I am able to put in place any of my ideas.
Another thing you can try is to contact your ISP technical support and ask them to investigate the route that they are using to connect to SimBrief. They are much better equipped to diagnose routing issues from their end, and if they start receiving reports of connection problems for a specific website, they are more likely to investigate and potentially find the problem.
Hope this makes sense. And please try the mitigation ideas mentioned above (generating with “Flight Maps” set to “None” and/or using a VPN to connect to SimBrief) and let me know if they help at all! Also let me know if you happen to contact your ISP and get any feedback from them.
I’ll post here if I think of any other ideas in the mean time.
Cheers,