Loading pages slow

[cn1234]

Operating System: Windows 2000
RAM: 640MB
Wingate version: 6.6.4
KAV version: 3.04
Users: 12 users

Users connect from a PC through this program to the Internet.
Users don't log-in and all users are in the users tab, groups and assumed users and everything appears to work correctly.
Can connect to the Internet bypassing the Wingate server without any problems.

Have been having problems with pages not downloading/showing correctly. It appears that the CSS has not been downloaded at the 1st attempt and after a ctrl+F5 the page loads correctly.

Viewing other pages and getting a "this page cannot be displayed" and doing a ctrl+f5 solves the problem.

The downloading speed on each client pc (Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) varies but almost everyday there is some timeout on the pages, even on days when the network is quiet.

Have checked settings on clients and it's set to Automatically detect settings.
Drip feed is set to 200kb and antivirus is enabled. (are there any settings that we can change here?)

Are there any settings we can change/turn off to increase a faster connection?
Are there any network card setting we can alter to increase connection?

We only use Wingate for viewing webpages, POP3 (standalone PC) and FTP.

New to Wingate itself!!

[adrien]

Hi

The partial page issue sounds like what I've seen with cache problems.

Does this happen on all clients? If so, try clearing the client browser cache.

Also try emptying the WinGate cache.

What sort of hardware is that WinGate running on? KAV could be slowing things down if on a slow machine.

Regards

Adrien

[cn1234]

Adrien,

Many thanks for the quick reply. Here are the answers to your questions:

Does this happen on all clients?
Yes but it varies from page to page. First visit to bbc.co.uk for example comes down all basic and incorrect (like the css hasn't loaded and it just shows down the left of the page and a ctrl+f5 then loads the pages correctly) Also images are showing the broken red cross, yet they appear correct on another client machine)

Try clearing the client browser cache.
I have cleared out the cache on client computers.

Also try emptying the WinGate cache.
How do I do this? Under the cache properties tab in Wingate it is set to:
"Enable cache lookups" - unticked
"Enable additions to cache" - unticked
"Limit cache size to..." - unticked
"Purge cache when full" - unticked

I guess this is could be where the problem is???? Should I have these set at all?

Under "What to purge" what are the best options for this to be set to?

I have also just read about the "DNS resolver cache" so when I'm back at the Wingate PC I will check this checkbox as well.

What sort of hardware is that WinGate running on? KAV could be slowing things down if on a slow machine.
Operating System: Windows 2000
RAM: 640MB
Intel Pentium III
20GB HDD

Last edited by cn1234 on Jul 04 11 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[rboynton]

What sort of hardware is that WinGate running on? KAV could be slowing things down if on a slow machine.
Operating System: Windows 2000
RAM: 640MB
Intel Pentium III
20GB HDD

Though Wingate can run on older hardware, that box you're using is a pretty minimal one for sure. Do you have any newer hardware that you could test with? Those old small hard drives were slow as a goat, and being that it probably has lots of miles on it, might not be performing as expected. Though WG only requires a minimal hardware configuration, you're never going to get snappy performance out of bottom-end hardware.

[labull]

You also might want to turn off all WinGate logging to see if that makes a difference.

[adrien]

another quick test would be to disable KAV for a bit and see if it speeds up.

scanning content for 5 million signatures has to chew some CPU, and a P3 doesn't have a lot of that.

[cn1234]

Many thanks for all the replies

After going through every setting, I have found that EVERYTHING was being logged!!! No wonder it was taken ages for pages to load with the system being slowed down!!
Also after reading about the "cache properties tab" settings, the content of webpages now appear correct and we can see an improvement of speed of downloads etc.

Once again many thanks for your suggestions everyone.

[labull]

That's great news. Thanks for posting the update.

Hope you enjoy using WinGate for a long time!

Larry