22 replies to this topic

[CWolf]

A number of users have informed us that the site has been incredibly slow for quite some time. The site was recently moved to a new virtual machine that is configured to be even faster than the shared server it resided on before. We have also made a number of tweaks to the configuration of the site software to reduce the database load. Unfortuntely none of this has affected the speed for the vast majority of the users.

After doing a number of tests with Google PageSpeed and utilizing metrics from Google Webmaster Tools we have been able to verify the slowness. We currently believe a lot of the speed issues revolve around the vBulletin Theme we have chosen for the site. The average size of one page with all of the components loading is > 1MB. In order to test the validity of this theory and specifically to cut the site overhead we are defaulting to an original vBulletin sytle, albeit a much uglier one, to use as a test bed for the next week.

All the features of the site should remain accessible during this test window with exception to small amounts of time (<5 mins) if we are testing certain parts of the site.

I encourage you to post on this thread as everyone's feedback on the speed of the site is very important!

Thank you all for your tolerance of this horrific theme :blushing:

[CWolf]

Ok I have just made some other changes to the forum software that seem to have sped the site up significantly even for me. Can someone please confirm?

[CWolf]

Ok a couple of other fixes to note... one it seems the "reply" and "new post" editor buttons show up... so this is obviously an issue with the theme. I have also fixed the Friendly URL forwarding... it seems vBulletin made an update to their URL setup in the last software release which was not compatible with the old Mod_Rewrite script we have running.

[TheOther1]

The buttons show yup, speeds up the text boxes loading.

Within the last few days I would say the site was going quicker actually, probably not as quick as it should; but functional. Will see how this ugly one is.

[blade]

Even though the site looks uglier, the speed has improved a lot when using a mobile connection.

[beyouz]

i like the new website design :)

[TheOther1]

beyouz said:

i like the new website design :)

Really lol?

[beyouz]

TheOther1 said:

Really lol?

Yes!! :)

[TheOther1]

Well Flameboard ruined my cycle by texting me saying that he can't see the difference lol!

[CWolf]

TheOther1 said:

Well Flameboard ruined my cycle by texting me saying that he can't see the difference lol!

Can't see the difference in speed?

[TheOther1]

CWolf said:

Can't see the difference in speed?

That and the design.

[Fabik]

The only problem I have is that icons when there is new posts are almost the same color as the ones when there is no new posts.

[CWolf]

Fabik,

Just to re-interate this is a temporary design change. We are testing how the proper SaggerWorld theme was impacting the speed of the site.

[CWolf]

Animorphus I can assure the server is configured to properly handle the site... in fact in it's current configuration it is more powerful and tuned than the server that ran it before. After taking an in-depth look at the way vBulletin is built I am surprised we haven't had more reported issues before. The amount of excess crap that loads on each page certainly affects the users experience. Especially for those on older computers or mobile devices.

For me the page rendering, and site loading overall is pretty much instant and has been from the start. It was hard for me to understand the severity of it until I look at Google's POV. We did see an initial spike in load times when the site was moved, but at that point I had made some additional changes that could have caused that problem... After changing the them and moving a bunch of the image serving from the database to the file system we have shaved an average of 4 secs off the load time for users that were affected the worst. I am going to give it one more day to see if the load times continue to drop as Google collects more data and then restore the theme to see what impact that has. As I said I have made a number of changes in the past few days so more than one thing is affecting the speed.

[CWolf]

Ok as the final part of our test I have reverted back to the proper template to test it's impact on the speed. I will be monitoring our google metrics all weekend and let you know what our final decision is going to be on Sunday night.

[TheOther1]

It seems slightly slower but a lot better then it was, uhm 'last week? before it went ugly.

Would I complain about how slow it is currently: No,

[CWolf]

Good to hear... now I just have to fix these damn editor buttons!

[UNFCracker]

Check the internal database calls, 4.x.x has issues and they are worse if the Database is on a separate machine as in shared hosting with a large host. The actual bandwidth and load time is pretty good. It is the database calls for the extensive permissions that slows everything down. It is not significant but it does hinder free navigation and becomes tiresome. As I noted on the other thread kill the successful post notice it does nothing but irritate.