Slow Load?

[jrtatl]

Anyone else noticing slow page loads lately? (last few days)

It could be due to the huge number of people logged in at any given time. This place is starting to get crowded, which is a good thing.

Dan, you noticing any slow down?

Jeremy

[HB]

No, it's not just you. It was much slower this afternoon and the last couple days. Below is the average response times for the last ninety days (text only):



HB is hosted on a shared server where performance irregularities are hard to avoid. At some point a dedicated server may be necessary. I've avoided it because of the added cost and administration effort. Checking just now, the forum index page took 5 seconds to load and forums pages were in the 1.0 to 2.5 second range.

I'll keep my eye on it. If you see problems again, see Site slow to load or inaccessible? for some quick diagnostic suggestions.

[HB]

The site is really sluggish this week. I have disabled the 'recent topics' feature for guests to reduce some of the database queries and will look elsewhere for optimizations. My ISP had this sage advice to offer:

Our administrators actively monitor the performance of our hosting and balance the load on the servers as needed. However, as your site is hosted within a shared environment, you may experience periods of reduced performance. If you wish to have further resources devoted to your individual site, you may wish to investigate the purchase of our Virtual or Dedicated Servers.

I have learned that this is their diagnosis for many ailments, not just performance issues: "When in doubt, recommend the customer upgrade."

[HB]

The site was peppy last month, now performance is off again this week. Some tweaks to lighten the server load helped (e.g., clearing the "watched topics" notifications - sorry!). I'll keep my eye on it.

[HB]

I applied a modification that should speed up site. Since it caches common queries, there's always the risk that live data won't be correctly reflected if there's a bug in the code. Please be on the lookout for unsynchronized data (e.g., you update a post and don't see the change when the browser refreshes). I've already noticed the "View unread posts" sometimes fails to show a new post.

I also added a brief statistics line at the bottom of the page:

page generation = 0.59 seconds, sql queries = 14

This reflects the time it took to create the page and the number of times the database was queried, not the time it took your browser to display the page, which includes HTML, CSS, javascript, and image loading.

[cannonfodder]

Running real slow this evening. I have had several page timeouts.

TTL's on a ping are good so it is not a network issue, must be page builds/SQL query speed.

[HB]

It's always the same story: Performance is irregular on shared servers. But I haven't seen any timeouts. The homepage poll asks about the site performance to help decide if a server upgrade is necessary. It's a lot of work to migrate...

[Bushrod]

It's WICKED fast now!

[HB]

Really? That's great news! It's very hard to say on the weekend since there's not much load anyway, next week will be more telling. My gut reaction is that the performance is more consistent on the new server.

Please do let me know if you still think it's "wicked fast" a week from now. Here's hoping...

[dick-san]

I agree, it's "wicked fast" now -- thank you! Ironically, the only time things slowed down a bit was when I clicked this link...

--dick

[HB]

From my corner of the world, the performance is much better. To collect some objective data, I've added basic statistics of the site's last hour to the bottom right of the page:

overall speed: OK*, current page: 0.68s, avg: 1.5s, max: 8.3s

The overall speed criteria are:

• fast - 85% of the pages are returned in 1.5 seconds or less
• OK - 80% of the pages are returned in 3 seconds or less
• slow - 80% of the pages are returned in 6 seconds or less
• very slow - the site is slower than "slow"

I've noticed some spikes of slow performance. This is indicated by an "*" next to the overall status whenever more than 3% of the pages are returned in more than 6 seconds. For example, "OK*" means 80% of the pages were returned in 3 seconds or less, but there's a small segment of the membership potentially experiencing timeouts.

[cannonfodder]

Don't they have a "coffeegeek" slow rating?

My observations, much faster responses. The only delays are on threads with lots of graphics.

[HB]

To be fair, although CoffeeGeek suffered for more than a year with deplorable response times, it's zippy these days.

Anyway, the graphics should be fast since they're static content. But I think there's a problem with perceived slowness caused by the dynamic reformatting. As phpBB is written, the size of uploaded images are not stored with the thread text. So when a thread's HTML loads, the space reserved for a given image is a tiny block, which blooms out when the actual image arrives. If a thread has lots of images, the effect cascades as the images are loaded. If the image sizes were statically defined, the HTML would flow more smoothly (the "current page" time at the bottom of the page represents the HTML generation time, not the image loading time, which depends dramatically on the user's browser settings, cache, connection speed, etc.). But I think the images look better at their actual size than fixed thumbnail dimensions.

I'll have more hard data in a week, but all early indicators say the server upgrade was worth the trouble.

[HB]

Below is the post-mortem data on the site's overall performance. It's obvious when the new server came online, and why it was necessary. The trend from August through early October was worrisome; I figured the site would really crawl during the Holiday Wishlist Gift run without faster hardware.



I also added some server-side calculations of image sizes to help the layout of dynamic pages. Now the page refresh appears much faster because the images aren't "fluttering" into place, causing a bunch of redraws. That was a side benefit of the switch to images hosted on HB's server (versus the offsite [img] of the past).

As always, I'll keep my eye on the site performance, but for now, it's "wicked fast" at least 80% of the time from this corner of the world.

[HB]

A few months later and again I'm seeing spotty performance:

overall speed: slow, current page: 1.3s, avg: 2.9s, max: 18.0s

Once the beta of V3 goes live, I'll look into upgrading the server.