Faster page loading wasn't our imagination. The chart below shows the average load time dropped suddenly in late September, right around the time that the site was moved to another server. At the time I didn't expect any performance improvement from this so-called "upgrade," but evidently it was the major contributor to zippier pages.


Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds), according to google's webmaster tools

Hope this lasts and isn't like a new road -- no traffic jams for the first 3 months, then back to normal.

After weeks of blazing performance, I've noticed a distinct slowdown the last few days. Queries to my host provider yielded the usual "It looks fine from here." If you see consistently poor performance, please run tracert home-barista.com and post the results. The output will look something like this:

D:\>tracert home-barista.com

Tracing route to home-barista.com [316.129.48.91]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     7 ms     5 ms     5 ms  16.48.0.1
  2     6 ms     7 ms     6 ms  gig2-4.rlghncj-rtr3.nc.rr.com [24.29.1.49]
  3     8 ms     6 ms     7 ms  srp5-0.rlghncg-rtr1.nc.rr.com [24.29.2.148]
  4     8 ms     9 ms     7 ms  pos1-1.rlghnca-rtr1.nc.rr.com [24.29.20.29]
  5     8 ms     7 ms     8 ms  pos14-0.rlghncrdc-rtr1.nc.rr.com [24.29.0.5]
  6     9 ms     8 ms     7 ms  son0-0-3.rlghncrdc-rtr3.nc.rr.com [24.93.64.34]
  7    17 ms    20 ms    18 ms  pop1-rdu-P3-2.atdn.net [67.185.134.157]
  8    20 ms    17 ms    18 ms  bb2-rdu-P0-0.atdn.net [67.185.134.146]
  9    17 ms    19 ms    19 ms  bb2-atm-P6-0.atdn.net [67.185.152.30]
 10    19 ms    18 ms    17 ms  pop2-atm-P5-0.atdn.net [67.185.138.43]
 11    17 ms    17 ms    17 ms  ATT-ATM.atdn.net [67.185.147.222]
 12    60 ms    59 ms    58 ms  tbr2032401.attga.ip.att.net [15.122.81.154]
 13    58 ms    59 ms    59 ms  tbr1-cl13.dlstx.ip.att.net [15.122.2.89]
 14    58 ms    73 ms    59 ms  tbr2-cl25.dlstx.ip.att.net [15.122.9.162]
 15    59 ms    60 ms    58 ms  tbr2-cl1592.phmaz.ip.att.net [15.122.10.82]
 16    56 ms    56 ms    58 ms  12.128.108.65
 17    57 ms    59 ms    58 ms  12.128.255.106
 18    58 ms    59 ms    58 ms  mdf001c7613r0003-gig-10-1.phx1.attens.net [63.249.130.170]
 19    84 ms    83 ms    85 ms  63.249.180.254
 20    84 ms    83 ms    83 ms  linhost241.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net [208.109.78.21]
 21    87 ms    83 ms    84 ms  linhost241.prod.mesa1.secureserver.net [208.109.78.21]

Trace complete.

I got indefinite hangups (more than a minute) earlier today; right now it's blazing fast again. I assume it was just a bunch of prize frenzies at it like on a Las Vegas slot farm.

another_jim wrote:Hope this lasts and isn't like a new road -- no traffic jams for the first 3 months, then back to normal.

You said it first:


Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds), according to google's webmaster tools

That's exactly what has happened. There is more traffic than back in September, but I believe the added shared server load is at fault. According to whois records, there are over 1600 sites on this same server. That explains the uneven performance. A dedicated server is probably in the future, but they're unfortunately more expense and admin work.

HB wrote:You said it first:

That's exactly what has happened. There is more traffic than back in September, but I believe the added shared server load is at fault. According to whois records, there are over 1600 sites on this same server. That explains the uneven performance. A dedicated server is probably in the future, but they're unfortunately more expense and admin work.

I wonder when we'll see the first anti-development coalitions for the internet