Better Server Hardware

User Interface (UI) / User Experience (UX) · Api · Created by SeeleyOne
closed

What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

World Anvil often runs slowly. This is not a server connection issue, but has symptoms of a server that cannot keep up with its load. Me, and the other users that I personally know, often have to spend minutes while waiting for the server to finish a request. Sometimes it was so slow that we have to refresh for it to render properly after loading the request.   A server with better CPU processor and RAM capabilities would help a lot. Maybe other server upgrades such as a faster hard drive? That part, probably not as you want to use hard drives that are designed for constant server use, and those are usually platter drives.   Another idea would be to have mutliple server locations, maybe by region.  

How does this feature request address the current situation?

The server(s) would be able to better meet the demand of the growing user base.  

What are other uses for this feature request?

Users will be less frustrated with using World Anvil, and therefore more likely to continue their subscription. Mine is up in October, and I am not so sure I will renew it as the slower than slow user experience has been very frustrating and has created errors. For example, if I create a tag folder in images (each image loads VERY slowly), it will often create two or three instances of the folder even though I only clicked the creation button once.   It is not an issue of my brower nor my connection. It is not that my cache needs clearing. It is the high server volume. It is great that World Anvil seems to have been growing, but its available resources need to grow, too.

Follow up


It affects me every time I am on the site. Not sometimes. Every time.

The Team's Response

Hi! If something's not working as expected, please report it as a bug and give as much specific information as possible. As far as we can tell, there are no issues with the hardware.   We're closing this as this is not a feature suggestion.
Current score

18/300 Votes · +700 points

Votes Cast

  • +100

    by donpedicinijr
    on 2024-06-17 02:00
  • +300

    by developertboyd
    on 2024-06-12 01:50
    I concur. Often takes 5-10 minutes to load a single page. I dont close the BB code reference pages out of fear that they wont load again when I need them.
  • -300

    by HunterChristmas1247
    on 2024-06-11 17:48
  • -1

    by deleyna
    on 2024-06-11 03:36
  • +300

    by SnowKT
    on 2024-06-10 15:45
  • -300

    by Those2Nerds
    on 2024-06-06 14:20
    As others said, this should be a bug report. This slowness some have reported seems to affect only some people and only sometimes. I've seen the devs responding to slowness reports when the servers were barely at 30% capacity and nobody else was having issues.   It's generally inadvisable to diagnose a problem you don't have personal ability to assess, or tell others how to do their jobs. You don't know the kind of hardware and infrastructure the site is running off of, nor what the capacity and usage are. It's much better to report the issue and let the staff figure out the cause and solution.
  • +300

    by RyleiDreemurr
    on 2024-06-05 14:29
  • -300

    by Nubs
    on 2024-06-05 05:05
  • -1

    by DMFW
    on 2024-06-01 00:11
    It'd be interesting to know a bit more about any specific pages that show these symptoms. Speaking purely personally WA has (almost) always been pretty responsive even for my biggest pages with the most pictures, and although I do try and be careful not to go completely mad with images on a single timeline or page (in both their size and number), these are still rich pages with a lot of visual content. The couple of times I did have issues, I am prepared to attribute that (without much evidence) to some specific temporary server condition (backups maybe?) since subsequent performance has been fine. Certainly I have never had to wait anything like "minutes" for a page to load. Even in the worst cases I have experienced, it was low double digit seconds at the most. I have a world with more than half a million words spread over more than a thousand articles but they all behave "reasonably".   Performance can be complex topic and impossible to analyse from the outside. I'd suggest that if you a specific and repeatable issue it would be worth reaching out for help via a bug report.
  • +300

    by Ricowitz
    on 2024-05-31 19:28
  • -100

    by Amancham
    on 2024-05-31 13:24
    World Anvil runs fine for me. Maybe it's an issue with the size of the world or the amount of pictures used or whatnot. Either way, it feels like this should go in bug reports more than feature requests.

    Also, while better, bigger, more servers surely would be amazing, that would come with increased costs. Since that has to be paid somehow, it would likely come down to higher subscription costs for everyone.

    If it's not a bug and something that the majority of users are struggling with, then upgrading servers certainly is necessary.
  • -1

    by WeStanNikolai
    on 2024-05-31 13:10
    I feel like this is not the kind of suggestion this feature is meant for...
  • +1

    by bphilippe
    on 2024-05-31 05:51
    It runs perfectly fine for me too. But it sounds a complex question. On the internet side of it, there are many things to consider between the server and the home connection. On the server side, size of the worlds can also have an influence.
  • -100

    by A Sneaky Devil
    on 2024-05-30 21:13
    It runs perfectly fine for me?
  • +1

    by Scalenex
    on 2024-05-30 19:11
    This is not a bad idea, but the World Anvil team will almost certainly certainly reject this. They want suggestions for very specific things they can change. A broad "You should be better" will not be well-received.
  • +100

    by Gaëlle S.
    on 2024-05-30 12:22
  • +100

    by norselyqueer
    on 2024-05-30 11:00
  • +1

    by Exarx
    on 2024-05-30 06:19
  • +300

    by SeeleyOne
    on 2024-05-29 23:07