That's a complicated question.
This website runs on it's own server. So it's got a lot more resources available than most other sites. One of my businesses is a web hosting company, so I am able to do this...
As of now, Vampire Rave is only using a very small portion of it's bandwidth capacity (probably less than 1%). This server has Tier 1 level connectivity with redundant OC-3 backbone connections through Time Warner, SBC and Allegiance.
Even so, net congestion occurs and things will be slow from time to time. But this should be rare.
But... As I have said before, Vampire Rave is a PHP database driven site. So there are 2 other factors relating to "speed". The first is, being a PHP site, webpages are generated on the fly. They are not stored in traditional fashion. This allows for all the neat dynamic pages we have here. There is a small trade-off in response time, but it should be less than half a second.
The second factor, is the database. Every page you load here makes hundreds of database calls. (All the little [new] markings, stuff in the User Menu, etc.). Database calls, in bulk, consume server processing resources. In volume, they will slow down a machine.
This is somewhat of a factor now. I am aware of it, and I will be making modifications to optimize the DB calls.
If the site is running slow for you, and then you log out and it runs faster, that means the DB is over-worked (too many people are trying to access it at the moment).
I probably just confused things more for most people... But as I said when I started out, it's a complicated question. The framework here is to handle thousands of users simultaneously, and I will work to make that a reality.
