30 April Website Speed Issue.

[TransAmDan]

I noticed yesterday the forum was running a little slow. i just thought it was my home internet connection. Today I try it on the work PC, and its still sluggish.

Has anyone else noticed it performing worse over the last day or so?

I'm currently looking into why it seems slow. I believe its the web server, as all other parts served from other sites, appear to be supplied quick.

 

[Laceytree]

Yep mines slow too and like you thought it was my computer/internet. Thats a relief. I am sure you will sort it out

 

[TransAmDan]

I thought it was my end too, thinking it was my home internet connection. Doing the same at work.
I've got the web hosting people looking into it. They cant see speed issues at their end yet.
Hopefully I get to the bottom of it, and we will be back up to a semi whizzy standard again.

 

[chris68coupe]

Slow on mine too. It seems to be related to the time it takes to show the adverts top and bottom every time you click on a post or another page.

 

[TransAmDan]

I was wondering that too. I disabled the top and bottom Google Ad's on mine, and it made no difference. I have disabled these totally now. There is certainly something holding it up but not sure what yet.

The web server suppliers suggestion....

it could be your area is affected, even though your colleage is on different isp you both probably route through the same backbone, sometimes there can be issues with LINX for example which can affect users in one part of the country but not another.

I suggest you leave it for a few hours and try again later.

 

[TransAmDan]

First 4.5 seconds eaten up with waiting for web server.

1	Solent Renegades - Solent Renegades Car Club	text/html	0.131 s	79 ms	53 ms	2703 ms	-	0.7 KB	301	95.154.221.40	United Kingdom
2	http://www.solent-re...gades.co.uk/content/	text/html	2.837 s	-	-	1730 ms	168 ms	15.9 KB	200	95.154.221.40	United Kingdom
3	http://www.solent-re...orumrunner/detect.js	application/x-javascript	4.598 s	-	55 ms	158 ms	1 ms	3.1 KB	200	95.154.221.40	United Kingdom
4	http://www.solent-re...pts/vbseo_ui.js?v=a4	application/x-javascript	4.663 s	-	53 ms	296 ms	190 ms	7.3 KB	200	95.154.221.40	United Kingdom

 

[chris68coupe]

Definately quicker without the adverts in my opinion.

 

[TransAmDan]

I seem to get spurts of speed, some pages may load in 3 seconds. This page took about 15 seconds. I'm using yet another internet connection method, still simular results.

 

[TransAmDan]

I'm still looking into this. Been testing the website from various areas around the world. Most of the time seems to be waiting for the web server, rather waiting for various parts from other sources. I have got this forum with a test skin (stripped down to basic, no add ons) and its still slow. May be time to change web server. I have various backups of the forum, migration to another server shouldn't be a problem. Will it cure the problem, or just present a different set of problems. Well it wont happen over night, I will think of an appropriate path. I'm my opinion the forum is almost useless at this speed, over 10 seconds for a page load. It may be something that passes with time, could be fine tomorrow. Mind you I thought that yesterday and its still the same today.

 

[TransAmDan]

I decided to move servers. Moving the site from the Windows server to one running Linux. It will be faster anyway, as PHP (this forum language) is native for Linux.
I will keep this thread up to date, of when. etc...

 

[TransAmDan]

Downloading the 65000 files from the current web server, only 11000 files to go. I have a new Linux hosting account now. Just need to increase the space limit, as this website is about 5Gb.
Once its uploaded I can test it independently, and then when I'm happy do a quick copy of the current database (forum posts etc...) and switch over to the new one.

 

[TransAmDan]

Also during the transfer, I will uninstall the games and reinstall only a few. I will find the popular played ones. We will loose the scores though. 1.5gb of games currently installed.
Hosting size has been increased to 7Gb, so we will be okay for space. Just giving things a tidy up during the move.

 

[TransAmDan]

Copying the files onto the new server, 17000 files to go. Of course uploads is slower than downloading from the old server. This will be an overnight copy by the looks of it.

 

[TransAmDan]

4000 files to go.
I've copied the database over, but cannot test until all files are there. The database copy takes onlay about 30mins. So I will recopy the database when everything is working to bring all the threads up to date.
To the user, you wont know when the site has swapped to the new server, apart from the speed increase.
I will stop the forum for 30mins during the final database copy. This may not be tonight, but in the morning instead. As I'm sure I will need to tweak many things to get it working on the new server.

 

[TransAmDan]

The copying process is complete. It's getting there, one problem is running two sites, but not going to disable this one until the other is fully working. Need to tweak database connection, there is something amiss causing an unauthorised error message.
I will take a look in the morning, ah its already morning.

 

[TransAmDan]

Forum is all running on the new server. I will do a final database copy in a bit. The new server feels very whizzy, and its serving all images and other files locally . It will ne even faster when I set up the content delivery network. So its all going better than planned. There will be little tweaks to be done like directory permissions so we can upload images.

 

[Darren]

Certainly much faster now

 

[TransAmDan]

URL rewrite is installed and working well (this if for website search engine optimisation)

The CDN (content delivery network) appears to be functional too.

We have no Games section at the moment. That was over 2Gb of games, so some day soon I will reinstall just a few games. We will have lost all the scores. Well I do have them backed up, but filterins out what scores are for what games could take a long time, plus a clean start isn't all that bad

 

[chris68coupe]

Still seems a bit slow compared to other forums I use, could this have anything to do with it.....

There are currently 90 users online. 3 members and 87 guests

.....Just a thought.

 

[TransAmDan]

Hi Chris, there may be more things I can do to make it faster. The amount of users shouldn't effect it too much. The 87 guests is mainly search engines looking though our pages to index them, if they have visited in the last 30mins they are counted in this 'Guests' count.
What browser do you use?
I use Google Chrome as it gives me a break down of speed for all the elements that have loaded. Firefox is a little slower, and Internet Explorer is even slower. I will try it in the same browser as you and see what i can do to speed it up.
What do other forums use? there is 'phpBB' which is an alternative forum, but has less features. Usually at the bottom of their forum page it tells you what forum software they are using.
Our images are served from an alternative server, which is a caching server, this is meant to speed things up. There are various plugins which get executed on the page, perhaps one or more of these is slowing it down.

Thanks for letting me know though, I want to make it as whizzy as posssible.