Site Load Times

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi all,

If any of you are running Firefox with Firebug, could you load the main page of the site, open Firebug, select the Net tab and then refresh the main page. Grab as much of the Net tab as screenies as you can and post them in this thread.

I've had a report via Twitter that the site is taking a long time to load so I'd like to get some feedback from other members to see how you thinks it's performing.

Thanks

[SilverWarior]

Hi!
I don't use FireFox but I did similar profiling using Google Chrome and its Developers Tools. Maybe this could still help you out.

EDIT: I have to repeat the process as screenshots weren't complete

EDIT2: Here are the results:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1o8ryux76wp29r3/AADgFaFp2Zq1t2b3jgo9V3-Xa

I tried refreshing page for several times and this one time was the worse. Usually load times are below 3.
Also it takes loner time for page to load if you clear up the browser history and chache.

[Christian Knudsen]

Thanks for the help! I'm pretty sure the issue is on my end, though. I'm on another computer now and everything's running smooth and loading fast.

[code_glitch]

Things feel zippy as ever here in ff land...
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Edit because its a bit small, i'll point out that the number on the far right is 3.20 seconds. So All things downloaded, processed and finished in under 3 seconds, roughly what I'd expect from most other sites.

While I have the gripe on my mind - is there not an option to fix the size of image uploads? It gets a bit annoying to have to upload to dropbox and embed a link all the time :(

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Thanks for the help! I'm pretty sure the issue is on my end, though. I'm on another computer now and everything's running smooth and loading fast.

Wish I could say the same, but I am sat on the end of a personal WiFi hotspot at the junction of the A1 and the A194 just south of Newcastle Upon Tyne :-) Oh the joys of having to go to customer sites... but on the flip side, this place does have nice beer and incredibly good food :D

Performance seems to be OK generally but there are times when it seems to crawl too.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback guys, I'll leave this open a little while and see if anyone else chips in.

[pitfiend]

Wish I could say the same, but I am sat on the end of a personal WiFi hotspot at the junction of the A1 and the A194 just south of Newcastle Upon Tyne :-) Oh the joys of having to go to customer sites... but on the flip side, this place does have nice beer and incredibly good food :D

You must come to Perú, to taste our amazing food... whenever you can!


Performance seems to be OK generally but there are times when it seems to crawl too.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback guys, I'll leave this open a little while and see if anyone else chips in.

Since I remember (and I have been here for a very very long time before joining, every time with ff), never had a complain about loading times, even with my crapy internet.

EDIT: BTW, I got 5.19s, which I think it's acceptable, at least for me.

[dj_sharp]

I did not attach images to forum message because forum engine resizes my images to smaller size, so they become unreadable
http://hinst.noip.me/Screen/PGD_TEST_01.png
http://hinst.noip.me/Screen/PGD_TEST_02.png
http://hinst.noip.me/Screen/PGD_TEST_03.png

[User137]

I don't even remember last occasion that the site would have felt slow.

[Legolas]

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140518_E0_7AJ/

The website definitely needs some (easy to do) optimization:
http://www.webpagetest.org/performance_optimization.php?test=140518_E0_7AJ&run=1&cached=0

IMHO a CDN for the static content and using gzip could be a good idea

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Thanks for all the feedback guys, when I'm done with my final assignments/exams in a week or two, I'll look into this in more detail. There are a number of tweaks we can make to the site that may have an impact on performance, so I'll look into those as well.

[code_glitch]

Don't mean to revive a dead thread but just wanted to let you guys know PGDs been gradually slowing down over the past couple of days for me when everything else has a ping of 10-15ms for me to the point I'm now getting a couple 503s loading the front page...

[SilverWarior]

I have also encountered some dificulties today with opening PGD page. But I thought they might be related to some problems with ms ISP. I gues the problem might reside elswhere

[dj_sharp]

mee too
sometimes it's slower then usual

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Thanks guys, I've just had a 503 myself. I'm going to be investigating later this week when my exam is out of the way.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Hi all,

I've made some significant changes to the server configuration (as far as you can on a shared platform) to try and improve the performance of the site. I'm noticing some improvements but I'm a little concerned about the big pause that seems to exist at the start of each request.

Please can you let me know if the changes have made any difference and if so whether the site is performing better than it was.


Thanks

[SilverWarior]

After some more observation and more testing I see that the only problem is that initial pause.
I suspect that the reason for that pause is the limit of concurent connections that are alowed on server are reached so you actually have to wait for one of active connections to be freed up so server can handle your page request.
But on the other hand shouldn't GoDaddy load our page to multiple physical servers and then take care for load balancing automatically? Becouse current behavior definitly points to load balancing problems.

EDIT: There is deffinitly some isue with load balancing and cross-server synchronization. How I know that? When I posted this unedited post I could not se it in the thread as it was never posted (I gues at that time page was feed from different physical server to me). So I had to refresh webpage a few times.
Also I saw that yesterday laggyluk has posted same post twice and then deleted the second one. So I suspect that after he posted the first post for the he also didn't see it posted (similar as me) so he post it again and then realized that he double-posted when page showed him both posts.

EDIT2: It happened again. And I have noticed that when it happned again site was loaded just fine without any delay but the site wasn't up to date. So I would gues that one of GoDaddy's physical server is having a hard time. This prevents page from loading in proper time and probably prefents proper cross-server synchronization.

So I gues it might not be a bad idea of contacting GoDaddy about these isues as they are probably somewhere on their side.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

I've been checking the new posts regularly because I'm on holiday and I've not seen this post appear or laggyluk's.... will keep my eye on it and get in touch with GoDaddy.

The caching changes have made a huge difference for me though so I hope that everyone has noticed that.

Thanks for the feedback :)

[SilverWarior]

I've not seen this post appear or laggyluk's.... will keep my eye on it and get in touch with GoDaddy

The reason why you can't see laggyluk's deleted post is becouse after seing it is duplicate I have physically deleted it.

Anywhay the overal site loading times has been improved a bit since initial waiting times usually stay around 3 seconds but sometimes they still exceed 10 seconds.

EDIT: But it seems that servers are still not in sync as it happned again that after posting my post I could not have see it until refreshing page.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Ok, well I'll try and keep my eye on it.

[SilverWarior]

OK today I encountered a new problem with PGD site. While site opened fine when I tried login I got next error shown:

Your submision could not be processed becouse you have logged in since the previous page was loaded <br/>

<br/>

Please reload the window.
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I remember seeing similar message shown in the past. If my memory serves me correctly such message has been known to sometimes show at that time when PGD site was hacked.
So doing thoural check on site integrity might not be a bad idea.

EDIT: Christina can we do a Skype chat today sometime after 15:00 UTC (16:00 BST)? I have encountered some other isues with PGD which I would not like to post here due to posible security reasons.

[dj_sharp]

better slower but stable than faster and unstable & buggy if you ask me

[Mirage]

15 seconds is too much. Hosting provider definitely has problems.
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[SilverWarior]

After reviewin site statistics that AthenaOfDelphi shared with me it seems that main cause for slow loading of PGD are two bots which are causing huge trafic load out site. It is even posible that they are using most of the sites bandwich.
We were discusing about blocking these bots but unfortunatly this probably won't be an easy job.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

As I explained to Silver, I'm not in a position to do too much of anything on the site this week. I'll certainly be digging deeper into those stats at the weekend though. To put it into context, these two bots appear to have been responsible for something like 500K hits. This is a significant chunk of the 1400K hits the stats show as the total for this month.

This is clearly unacceptable, so I'm going to be doing something about it :)

As a side issue, the caching changes I made the other day to try and improve things have had to be taken off-line. They were causing major problems with the log in/log out process and effectively meant it was practically impossible to log off.

[User137]

After reviewin site statistics that AthenaOfDelphi shared with me it seems that main cause for slow loading of PGD are two bots which are causing huge trafic load out site. It is even posible that they are using most of the sites bandwich.
We were discusing about blocking these bots but unfortunatly this probably won't be an easy job.
Well, you have the bots IP so you can trace to their operator. They could be contacted to in order to make them stop.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

I've banned three 32 address netblocks... all registered to the ahrefs bot and all operating from the softlayer.com cloud service. Hopefully that will greatly reduce the server load.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Server load has been greatly reduced. We were consistently being restricted... that no longer appears to be the case. I am finding the site more responsive and less prone to big long pauses when I start surfing it. Please let me know how you're finding it.

Thanks

[SilverWarior]

Today I still expirienced intitial long puase.
Surfing the site still seems a bit slow but it is definitly better than it was.

[Mirage]

Agree with SilverWarior.

[AthenaOfDelphi]

Ok, thanks for the feedback guys, I'll let it run for a while and have another poke around the logs and things :)