I was wondering if the comments work to slow the games down. I noticed today that playing a game in the archive with only a few comments ran well but then I came back to todays game with a lot of comments, it was running very slow. Would a chat room inserted on the page help the games run faster. The down side I suppose would be no avatars with the comments.

I've noticed a lot of people use large pictures as avatars, maybe there should be a size limit or auto-crop function when uploading avatars so the site isn't dishing out 2MB images for every post by someone every time someone views the page.

That most likely is the problem, the avatars, also because they are animated. It may also be the time of day. When alot of people open/play a site at once it will slow it down. So peak times are slow, like right now 3:30pm.. usualy lasts for a few hours, and in the morning i find.

I love the avatars, and did not realise that they cause a problem. A horse forum that I am on has a helpful function that stipulates that the avatars have to be jpegs and a maximum of 90x90 pixels, before they are loaded. I dont know if this would help.I do love looking at them.

All the avatars are 65x65 as far as I can see and you can of course check the size in MS IE by right clicking and then looking at the properties. Most of them seem to be a reasonable size even the animated ones llike @Christina 's which is only 1867 bytes so I think @fizzbut may be right about the comments slowing down games.

Ahhh. Ok. Point taken. LOL

Usually the animated ones aren't that much of a problem because they've been designed to be small to start off with. It's the custom pics like the self pics or cat pics that get big and slow things down. I don't think the avatars are the main problem, I just don't think they help and they use bandwidth which could be costing Adam money. If I had to guess I'd say the main culprit is being on a shared host. This site seems really slow since I started playing again after it was moved to this new host.

Wasn't it on a shared host before or maybe it just us who are slowing down.
Today it seemed to run comparitively well compared to the last couple of days and it seemed that the comments were not quite as many. Now I know nothing of what makes this stuff tick but it's just my observation. But it wouln't surprise me if it weren't a combination of factors.

Another observation, I went back to yesterday's game and it was running faster, so maybe it doesn't have to do with the comments/avatars.