Cure found for "Page Not Found"?!

There are some forums that are hardly if at all frequented. Someone with ability could test their loading with no stickies in them first. Next find old posts, about 2-3 years old, and stick a few of them in that forum. Try loading the pages again. Clear cache and try it. Try different browser. See if it makes a difference in time for loading, or getting "page not found" messages. Reason being, I know "page not found" most often comes up when trying to access an older post, so it's reasonable that stickies which age too long would have the same effect on accessing the front page of forums.

I just ran the test in a couple forums, choosing random threads from 2003 to sticky. Page load times didn't seem to change much, with over 75% of the load time attributed to resource files (JS, CSS, and images). Loading the actual forum content consistently took 2.87 to 3.47 seconds, which fluctuated regardless of sticky presence. Blocking CNET's primary ad sites (adlog.com.com, atdmt.com, revsci.net, doubleclick.net and i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/Ads) and Facebook (fbcdn.net, facebook.com, and facebook.net) resulted in the largest performance gain, shaving 4.83 to 7.12 seconds off, cutting the load time by a little more than half.

For you own tests, try clicking the 'fast forward' button in the forum to jump to the last page and see how long it takes to load compared to the first page. The average load times should be about equal once you account for the different ads that may be loaded. I assume a different API is used than when loading an actual thread, so the actual thread content would never need to be loaded, thus preventing the forum listings from suffering from the same caching issues that routinely cause slow page loads and Page Not Found errors.

Of course, I could be overlooking a crucial detail or just have gotten lucky in my usage/testing, but the results I obtained seem to indicate that sticky removal would not result in a noticeable performance increase. I too hoped that may offer some relief and point to a long-term solution, but it seems it was not meant to be.

John