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.

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."

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.

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.

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...

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...