Our new home - post your opinions here

[Jon]

Going to be working on some caching today. There are some options for both guests and logged in members, so hopefully it will all help with site speed. It's a bit complicated so I've got lots to learn!

 

[MajP]

Now that I have been using this a lot, this is a super nice upgrade. By far the best user experience of any forum I have used. Spent some time on some of the other forums recently and they are so busy that they make your head hurt just looking at them. This is also way faster for me. I had a computer at work (not that I would look at this during work) that could not even load the old site.

 

[Jon]

Pleased to hear that MajP. It is an iterative process, but I see improving the user experience as being key. Speed is my current focus, but I am hitting all sorts of tech problems in trying to implement the latest caching improvements. It is kinda above my pay grade.

 

[MajP]

Speed is my current focus

Here in the US, the speed seems great.

 

[Jon]

Yeah, I know its fast now. But I want to make it even faster. I've become obsessed!

 

[Jon]

Yay, we got a speed bump! I upgrade from PHP 5.6 to 7.2 and got a noticeable improvement in page load times. PHP 7.2 is much more efficient than 5.6 and has less calls, thus reducing time taken to carry out its functions.

 

[MajP]

If it gets much faster the post will appear before I log into the site.

 

[isladogs]

Its now blisteringly fast. Well done!
Perhaps you can move on to other site features now?

 

[Jon]

It will probably appear to be a little faster at the weekend because there is less load on the server. Have to wait until it gets busy tomorrow to see if it retains its speed.

I've got other speed enhancements I want to make first.

 

[isladogs]

Really? What's left to do?

 

[Jon]

The roadmap sticky shows what I am working on.

Well, for example I am paying a lot of money for litespeed and cache. I do not know if that is working or not. I set it up today but I cannot verify that it is caching the pages yet, so I am waiting for answers on that. Also, I am looking at caching css. That will help both logged in users and guests. Next, there is session caching, which will help logged in users. It is all a bit complicated in the backend, which is why its not just a flick a switch kind of thing. It requires tons of researching, reading, asking questions etc.

 

[isladogs]

Thanks. Out of interest, where do you go to ask those questions?

 

[Jon]

Xenforo forums, webmastertalk forums, reading forums like those at litespeed, centimin mod. Lots of reading of blogs, hosting knowledge bases, YouTube. Basically, I am a shoe-shiner trying to be an experienced Linux Systems Engineer.

 

[Jon]

I've just added another button to go straight to the bottom of the page. It will appear bottom right as you start to scroll. There was already one for scroll to top. Hopefully some of you will find that useful.

 

[pbaldy]

I like it!

 

[Jon]

Yay!

It was already on the Dark Theme, but not added by default to the default Theme.

 

[isladogs]

Excellent. Thanks

 

[vba_php]

Has anyone noticed a slight change in site speed? Looking for feedback.

this is a bit old as far as a topic in this thread, but the site can't possibly run any faster for me Jon. It's been unbelievably fast ever since you first installed the software that my brain sometimes has trouble keeping up, and that's quite a feat in its own right!

 

[Jon]

I'm going to have an attempt at caching for logged in users today, to improve speed. I will conduct a little experiment and hope it doesn't mess things up!

 

[moke123]

I was thinking that caching was responsible for making my profile avatar doing wierd things.

this is my avatar top right.

this is my avatar in the who's online

and as you can see, I hope, my avatar in this post is red logo