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Jon

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I'm working today on something called a Redis cache. It helps speed up some server processes, caches some elements in RAM and hopefully has a little impact on speed for logged in members too. Here's hoping it all goes to plan.
 

Jon

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I've made a little discovery with my DNS setup that should shave off about 100ms from page load time. Yay! :D

Will implement that after I've got some other techie stuff sorted.
 

jdraw

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I thought I noticed a notable quickness in page loads!!!o_O
Every 100 ms counts.
Good stuff Jon.
 
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Jon

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I haven't implemented it yet!!
 

Jon

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I have to pay a monthly subscription for the changes, but I figure it will be worth it. It will provide more reliability for DNS look-ups, so there are less chances of an error. And the DNS lookup speed will be significantly better.

My current average DNS lookup speed is:

1582216352837.png


With the changes, I can get that to an average of 2.65ms. :p

Grease lightning!
 

Jon

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I've implement the Redis cache. All the config is done and I am assuming it is working, although I haven't check that yet because my laptop battery is about to die.

Redis helps guests speed but also has a little impact on logged in users too, I believe.
 

Jon

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I've done an analysis of AWF page load times all over the globe! It used to be 6s in the USA, but it is now down to 2s. In the UK, it is currently 3.7s. Part of this is DNS distance from the single DNS POP it is currently using and partly due to the distance from the server. With the new premium DNS set up, I hope to shave 0.1s off that. I know it doesn't sound much but everything mounts up! Then, using a better CDN supplier, I can go from 39 worldwide POPs to 200. That means more people will have a POP close by. This will help some of the static elements of the site to get delivered quickly. Another feature of using a premium CDN supplier is that it compresses images before sending them to you. This does not currently happen, and so that should help page load times. I am assuming it would compress the avatars too, as well as images pasted into threads. Also, I think it compresses attachments too. The page load times in places like Australia are not great. They are poor in India too. If the images are compressed, that will help people in places where the overall speed is poor. I hope it all works!

I got some ideas from this video:

 

Galaxiom

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The way it caches unfinished posts automatically and allows you to continue later is awesome.
 

Jon

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Yeah, I think everyone likes that feature.
 

Jon

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I'm going to try the premium DNS and CDN today, if I get time. We already have a CDN, but one with 5x the number of POPs. The propagation might take a while since the IP addresses will be changing.
 

Jon

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I've just found an additional bit of caching I can do. It refers to the post and thread counts, meaning it reduces the database queries required to list that information. It also caches some CSS stuff. It everything goes wrong soon, you know why!
 

The_Doc_Man

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I didn't mention much in the thread because I was otherwise distracted, but I have to say that your site speed has improved tremendously. After my own headaches with disk crashes and a failing SSD that had to be replaced, I didn't care that the old s/w was slow to load. The fact that it loaded at all was good. But now that my PC has settled down and stabilized, my extra memory and the SSD have combined to make things much faster. Add to that the idea that you have been tweaking with caches and finding a good distribution for DNS sits and I have to say that at times this site will load in less than a second. Page switches within the site are nearly instantaneous.

Jon, based on some of the comments I caught up on, you should feel free to ask me questions if you run across networking or security terms you don't understand. I can't claim to be a UNIX sys engineer but I do know two other O/S internals to different degrees and can discuss at least some concepts if you have a problem. No guarantees because different implementations of TCP/IP stacks and UNIX O/S exist and each one has its quirks, but I don't mind helping you. And if I can't help directly, I might still be able to come up with a web link or two.
 
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Jon

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Thanks Doc, appreciated. Much of the problems with the old site was due to the host reliability and what their package included. In short, they were heavily overpriced and extremely low grade. Service was a 1 out of 10. New host is competitively priced, so I've got a huge increase in horsepower. Just switching hosts helped speed a lot. But there are also the bunch of tweaks I have done. I hope to do a big tweak today to help the DNS lookup times, improved CDN POP count and image compression on the fly.

Here is a graph of page speed timings in the USA:

1582386252420.png


You can see how they have come down from 6s to 2s. January is slightly lower because we switched hosts and platforms part of the way into January.

After I do the next tweak, I am not sure if there is much else I can do to increase site speed. I will have done nearly everything.
 

Jon

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Ok, making the switcheroo as we speak. May take a while for the changes to propagate, but if things go wrong you will know the reason and I will try to troubleshoot.
 

Jon

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Eek! I have a bunch of new stuff to learn. Here is the control panel:

1582388896988.png


Nothings simple!
 

Jon

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Ok guys, I got the new thingymajig setup. The DNS is now super quick!

It has gone from this:

1582398163309.png


...to this:

1582398193539.png


😁

Also, the new CDN is setup with 200 POPs. More site security with an improved firewall. Now we have image compression too, so that if there was say an image that was say 1MB, using lossy compression, it could be like 70k now instead. So, everything should have a slight bit more zip. It is hard to tell perhaps if you are already finding this place fast, but it has improved.
 
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Jon

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Like some kind of time-travel!
 

Jon

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Sometimes I wonder if all these extra things I am adding actually slow the site down! I will look to the Google Analytics stats to see if the new CDN improves load times for those in Canada, UK etc. Hope it does, else it is money down the drain.
 

GinaWhipp

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I'm not experiencing any slow down, quite the opposite. I would be interested in what Google says.
 

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