Is this site sloooow?

[Matt. K]

Is it just me?.........this site is taking sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo long to load up and display posts! It's been like this for about a week now.

[radar]

Not just you Matt, same here on a fast connection. By far the slowest forum

André

[ATJ]

I find that the performance varies greatly. I can open one post immediately and then next one (less than a minute later) can take a minute. Same with refreshing the index. Sometimes it is quick, sometimes it is slow, sometimes it times out.

I think we should blame Gary.

[Alex]

Has been really slow for me for the past 1-2 months from various connections.

Alex

[phillipb]

Yep, me too.
I can't understand why this site get's singled out. it happens far too often.

[Jonesy]

I have good and bad days. Last night around midnight it took forever to load front page, yet at the moment its fine.

It has been like this for last month or so with the same things as ATJ described

[paulmac]

The site was having issues a month or two ago, which seems to have been fixed.

The speed problem I see with the site now (so as to describe it to you Gary) is that it takes a looong time for a page to launch, or to even refresh the portal page, but (for me at least) when it does finally come to you, it's pretty quick to load.

[norbs]

Probably the most random site I know of. Sometimes fast, other times hopeless.

[gstark]

The problem is that there is a script that runs - and I do not know which bloody one it is - that seems to take up too many CPU resources, slowing down the rest of the site.

I suspect it's a site spider bot that is out of control, and I'm trying to identify which one it might be: I frequently see bots from google, yahoo and msn here, and while I have my suspicions, tracking down the offenders is not an easy task.

[sirhc55]

I agree, today has be terrible but that applies to Engadget, IMdb and many other sites I visit as well.

[scott s]

it's certainly the slowest to load up for me. abnormaly slow.

[Alpha_7]

Yep, super slow today.

[mozzie]

its very very slow for me -- or rather very slow at home... and still slwo at uni... grrrrr

[Big V]

It is unuseable today, I am giving up and hopefully it will be better tomorrow.

[mozzie]

for me its gone slower

[biggerry]

super slow now....portal page consistently takes ages - typically 60+ secs......

Engadget, IMdb

no problem for me with those sites....

[Oneputt]

I am experiencing the same problem here, but several other sites I visit are currently normal. The problem actually has the effect of cutting down the time I would like to spend here, because being old and cranky I get frustrated.

[big pix]

because being old and cranky I get frustrated.

..........you can get pills for that

[sirhc55]

This has to be the slowest site on the www and the most frustrating ATM.

[gstark]

I'm still trying to isolate the issue.

My first suspect has been proven innocent, so my next step is that I may need to do some recoding of how the portal page works, so that I can eliminate that as a suspect.

That will require some effort on my part, which needs to be scheduled.

[sirhc55]

I don’t know what you have done Gary but it is now flying

[phillipb]

Totally unusable for me now, can someboby please pm me when it's half decent again.

[chrisk]

yepp, has been terrible lately in general. every now and then it goes fast for a little while but then goes back to slow loading pages in more than a minute. i'm sure it annoys gary more than anyone else.

[sirhc55]

I don’t know what you have done Gary but it is now flying

Spoke too soon, must learn to keep my mouth firmly shut.

Timed it at 2 and a half MINUTES to open from woago. So, FTTB, au revoir

[gstark]

I'm having a play with the code now, with the portal page completely disabled.

I want to see if it's the queries in there that are causing the problems. They look ok to me, but that is a very slow page, and if we have several people hitting that page at once ...

[mozzie]

its soooo much faster today - so Gary what ever you did seems to have worked at least for the time being....

[norbs]

its soooo much faster today - so Gary what ever you did seems to have worked at least for the time being....

Not everywhere.

[Marvin]

That seemed to do the trick for me. It was super slow about an hour ago and with the front page gone it is very quick.

[whitey]

That seemed to do the trick for me. It was super slow about an hour ago and with the front page gone it is very quick.

Seems much better for me too. Not back to normal but much better.

[ozimax]

I suspect it's a site spider bot that is out of control,

Would Roundup work? Mortein?

[gstark]

Oz,

As my suspicions were wrong, probably not.

What's the general feeling right now? Is the site faster without the portal page, or not that much different?

I don't like it without the portal page, and I'm examining a couple of options with different portals, including upgrading phpbb3 to the latest version, but if the current situation isn't a whole lot better ...

[dviv]

Not fantastic - but a LOT better

[radar]

Gary,

it is better without the portal but I wouldn't say blazing

thanks

André

[ATJ]

Opening this thread still took 20-30 seconds.

[chrisk]

front page loads super fast now. some threads are still slow though.

[phillipb]

front page loads super fast now. some threads are still slow though.

Same here.

[Glen]

I still find most of the threads slow and occasionally get a quick loading one

[gstark]

I still find most of the threads slow and occasionally get a quick loading one

Basically, that's what I'm seeing as well.

The question for me whether or not I think the portal page is impacting the overall performance of the site.

I think that the portal page is slow, but I'm not convinced that its slowness is the cause of the other slowness that we're seeing. If that were the issue, we would have seen a really significant improvement in speed today, with the portal's queries out of the way. I don't think I've seen that, so my inclination is to put that page back up, and to try to look at other solutions.

Please understand that the portal page contains a lot of custom code - a lot of which is mine - and thus it's the first place I have been looking at to see if it's where the bottlenecks are being created. I have no problem with reviewing my own code and pulling it where needed, but again, I'm not seeing compelling evidence that it's this code that's at fault.

The rest of the site is 99.7% standard phbb3 code (first release though), and thus, if the issues are not within the portal page .... they must be within the general code, or they're physical.

Now ... I'm flying blind in trying to find the problem, because I don't have the tools that let me see what's happening in memory; I can only rely upon what DH tell me, and if they say that the site's scripts are being killed because of resource overuse, I can only accept that as a given, and I don't have too much in the way of diagnostic tools that will help me find the specific problem.

That means that perhaps the best way to try to isolate the problem is to try different options, and to see how they affect things.

As we've been on this code base for ten months, perhaps it's time for me to look at using a later version of the code? That will require some scheduled downtime, as well as some work on my part.

That's probably where I am right now, pending your input. .... putting back the portal page, and then upgrading the code.

[Frankenstein]

Gary, I'm sure everyone on the site appreciates the time and effort you're putting in to resolve this issue.

Frank

(geez, even previewing this post before posting it took ages to come up)

[sirhc55]

A bit faster for me but still slow as

[chrisk]

i have no idea about web hosting but the VBulletin boards i have been to are all fast, all the time. i dont know if that is relevant in any way shape or form.
the strange this is that its sometimes really fast. i have checked the users online bit when it has been fast to see if there is a relationship between the number of people online and speed but it doesnt seem to make any difference.

[gstark]

i have no idea about web hosting but the VBulletin boards i have been to are all fast, all the time.

Part of that is the system, part of that may also be the hosting.

But there are aspects of their license agreement that make it a non-starter for me.

i have checked the users online bit when it has been fast to see if there is a relationship between the number of people online and speed but it doesnt seem to make any difference.

No.

That's one of the first things I've checked, and that isn't the issue.

Portal page is back; my earlier post took about 30 seconds to post ... I'm 90% sure it's not the portal that's at fault.

The next step is to stage the server for an upgrade. That may mean some significant data movements between LA and SYD; I'm not sure how gracefully the DH servers will handle the conversion of the data; they were not able to handle the upgrade from phpbb2 to phpbb3, but that was a major change. This one should be less onerous, but I've not yet looked at the 3.02 codebase, nor at how the portal that I have in place might be affected by anything newer.

[big pix]

we now have a screamer...... very fast ATM

[christiand]

This site is just extremely temperamentfull

[big pix]

........ I lied a lot...... sorry

[aim54x]

I still find most of the threads slow and occasionally get a quick loading one

That is the case here as well, and it has seemed to get slower in general to get to the site lately. Portal vs No Portal, not much difference

[surenj]

It wants to me log in for each and every post! That's something new...

[norbs]

I nearly gave up trying to post this. Maybe it is DH. I know of 3 forums that have moved from them to BlueHost and they all reported improvements.

[gstark]

I've already been looking at them and a couple of other hosts as well

The problem is that DH provide a lot of extras and many others don't provide the little bits.

But as I've said, the problem still seems to be within one of the scripts, and if that's the case, the problems will persist even if we move. I've always been one to try to find and address the actual problem ... I'm not about to change now.

In that realm, I'm still trying to get a working test phpbb3.02 environment up. That is proving somewhat tricky because of the database changes we already have in place.

[phillipb]

I still think that in the meantime you should remove the portal page. Not many people will wait 3 minutes for it to load up. At least without it you can quickly see if there are any new threads that you may be interested in and worth waiting for.