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- Sep 28, 1999
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I have spent the last 5 days solid working out how to speed up these forums - and I have learnt a lot!
Back in the day - perhaps 5 years ago - this site was crawling to a halt. Pages often took 30 seconds to load and it was a frustrating experience for many people. Then I changed hosts and things got a lot faster. I went for premium hosting that specialises in forums and it paid off.
Now, I am reassessing everything again. I did a couple of tweaks recently that improved the index page load, but when I looked further into the data, I was horrified at how slow the thread view was. If you are in India, it takes over 20 seconds to load!
Now, armed with that new information, I have done a lot of analysis and come up with some solutions.
Firstly, I have changed the navigation bar at the top from images to "sprites". This reduces the number of http requests on each page load, down from 6 to 1 (for the navbar). This is far more efficient and it also reduces the number of DNS lookups too.
Next, I have removed the AddThis social media buttons from the thread view. They took up to 200K in overhead on a typical page, which is far too much on an already bloated thread.
Now I am looking into creating further sprite optimisations, possible change of cdn network, removing of the intext advertising and a few other bits n bobs.
I would appreciate some feedback on how fast you find this site, is it worse at work or on mobile or any other information you can give me. Is it consistently fast/slow or does it vary a lot?
Back in the day - perhaps 5 years ago - this site was crawling to a halt. Pages often took 30 seconds to load and it was a frustrating experience for many people. Then I changed hosts and things got a lot faster. I went for premium hosting that specialises in forums and it paid off.
Now, I am reassessing everything again. I did a couple of tweaks recently that improved the index page load, but when I looked further into the data, I was horrified at how slow the thread view was. If you are in India, it takes over 20 seconds to load!
Now, armed with that new information, I have done a lot of analysis and come up with some solutions.
Firstly, I have changed the navigation bar at the top from images to "sprites". This reduces the number of http requests on each page load, down from 6 to 1 (for the navbar). This is far more efficient and it also reduces the number of DNS lookups too.
Next, I have removed the AddThis social media buttons from the thread view. They took up to 200K in overhead on a typical page, which is far too much on an already bloated thread.
Now I am looking into creating further sprite optimisations, possible change of cdn network, removing of the intext advertising and a few other bits n bobs.
I would appreciate some feedback on how fast you find this site, is it worse at work or on mobile or any other information you can give me. Is it consistently fast/slow or does it vary a lot?