Site performance enhancements (1 Viewer)

Jon

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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?
 

boblarson

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Thanks for your work on this Jon. It definitely is running faster for me and now doesn't require me to sit and wait or refresh to see my page. I'm very happy that you've been getting in and digging around and finding places to improve.

 

pbaldy

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It has been reasonably fast for me for some time, but I use FF with an ad blocker. I found it unacceptably slow with IE and no ad blocker. I hated waiting for it to load and seeing "waiting for xyz ad site" or whatever in the status bar. I might not have minded if I was here getting help, but since I was trying to help others I felt it a waste of time.

I will say that lately on my iPad it has been better, so I'd say your efforts are paying off.

Thanks for all the effort you've put into the site!
 

Jon

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Actually, for both you two guys performance should be better anyway. Beyond certain post counts I have drastically cut down on ads. But for mere mortals, it is a different story. Would love to hear from those with a post count below 1,000. They get the full blast! :)
 

bob fitz

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Jon,
Most of the time the speed is OK but some times it is so painfully slow that I have to go elsewhere. When it is at it's slowest I wouldn't even use it if I needed help.:(
Anything that can be done to reduce the number and size of adverts is, of course, very welcome.:)
On the whole I think the forum is GREAT. It's certainly my favorite.
 

Jon

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Thanks Bob.

The intext adverts are the ones where you see a double underline. I have been trying to get them removed but I am tied into a contract with the company and they haven't been responding to me after requesting the end of the contract. I managed to speak to someone on the phone today, they said they would call back at 2pm, they didn't. I previously sent them two emails, both with no reply. They promised to call tomorrow morning (just like they promised to call at 2pm today). I think its astonishing how bad some of the customer service is on these companies.

Anyway, they are trying to say I have to give them 3 months notice, but I edited their contract before signing up to reduce that clause to 1 month.
 

bob fitz

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Jon,
Can you tell me what differences I might see/notice when I reach 1000 posts because I'm getting close now.
 

Jon

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Not much. I think maybe 1 advert less. Then at 2,000 posts maybe 2 adverts less. Its gradual. :)

In any case, I want the site to get a little faster for everybody, but particularly for those who are experiencing bottlenecks. The thread view is priority and also those in places like Asia get a rough deal.

Some of these issues are hard to get around. For example, some of the advertising networks have slow code. I removed one of them from the index view to increase page load times somewhat. But thread view is where the main problem is.

Removing the intext adverts will help a little with speed, although we will take a hit on the revenue. I hope its made up with more people liking the site and so returning.
 

pbaldy

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I'm not good in web stuff, but is there some way to make the forum itself load and be visible, then let the ads fill in as their sources allow? I wouldn't mind waiting for the ads to load if the thread I was trying to see was visible. When I used IE, it was like it wouldn't show you anything until the ads were done loading, so it was frustrating.
 

Jon

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That is called asynchronous javascript. Most of the ads already do that, I believe.
 

bigalpha

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The forum has always been fairly speedy with me.
 

Galaxiom

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I have noticed a massive iimprovement in the site performance.
 

Obe

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My post count is <1,000. Speed is not a problem when I'm in Linux and using FF, in fact the site loads pretty much instantaneous. I do get slow responses this site from time to time when I'm in W7 and using IE but its not detrimental to my productivity. I haven't noticed much of a difference when using IE over the last 12 months but I'm not on here every day. I just view this site on my Linux machine which is right next to my W7 machine where I'm working in MSAccess.
 

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