have you tried a reboot?

Firefox is still bad at releasing resources and it does tend to get slower and slower the longer it is used without being closed down. Leave it long enough and it will even start to miss out things from pages.

Also – while the extensions are very powerful – they all take their toll especially if they are not that well written. Firebug consumes a lot. Great tool but will slow things…

Noticed this as well.  Our forum is notably faster in IE than it is in FF. After the update to v5.0, even this very support forum has become slower for me than it used to be.

The most obvious example I’ve seen is when loading a forum topic.  Here, I often notice a slowdown/pause in page rendering after the ‘new/recently updated topics’ and ‘select forum’ drop-down lists have been rendered. This sometimes takes up to 5 seconds.  The odd thing is total page rendering sometimes is blazingly fast (2-3s), while another topic can suddenly take 12s to load. Caching doesn’t seem to matter, this even happens when going back and loading the same topic again.

Yellow Swordfish said

have you tried a reboot?

Firefox is still bad at releasing resources and it does tend to get slower and slower the longer it is used without being closed down. Leave it long enough and it will even start to miss out things from pages.

Also – while the extensions are very powerful – they all take their toll especially if they are not that well written. Firebug consumes a lot. Great tool but will slow things…

Hi Andy, yes I did and not only that but a few users of the test site reported having the same issues. In fact I expected slow performance and had not noticed because I was using Firebug and only when a user mentioned it did I switch off firebug and then reboot.

I do feel that something has happened recently to make this worse. There was a plug-in called ajax edit comments that was actually throwing up errors but I have subsequently disabled it. This had a fairly dramatic impact on speed, but still things don’t seem the same as they were only a matter of days ago.

Most of the errors that are reported in the error console are associated with my old theme but they are present on the V4.5 live forum and that is quite brisk in comparison.

I’m loath to dump the errors on a forum post because I’m not convinced that they are the issue.

Conrad

“Most of the errors that are reported in the error console…”
Is that the Errors tab of the console or the Warnings? If the latter then yes – please don’t dump them here as they are generally of low importance and most are usually concerned with CSS and the fact that much CSS has browser specific stuff in that FF doesn’t understand – because there is still a lot of cross-browser incompatibility.
If stuff pops up in the error console and it is SP related then that is differemt although it is always a good idea to clear the console and then retry the operation so that just the one repetition is posted.

OK – I don’t really know what to say. I use Firefox 90% of the time. I use a Mac so I have no idea about the evil IE but I can certainly attest to the fact that of the major browsers FF is by far the slowest. My son claims this is true for PC/Window use as well.

I use it because of Firebug (which is still better than the webkit dev tools) and because I also have a nice little extension that turns off the cache quickly. I actually run it most of the time with no browser cache at all. And I still don’t feel it is that slow….

Oh sorry Andy; typing too fast and not proof reading.

There are no errors in the error console, only warnings. You are right the majority of them are indeed css errors – and no I won’t dump them here, promise!

What I am expecting is parity between the V4.5 forum and the V5.0 forum. That is because the V4.5 forum is on a UK based server with considerably lower ping times and hence latency. I had a feeling in the early days that the SP5 was considerably brisker generally, that feeling has gone. You may assume that I am talking about Firefox unless I say otherwise.

Conrad

I have done been trying other browsers more extensively. The test forum loads extremely quickly with both Chrome and Safari, it’s slow with FF and IE8.

Load times with cache empty from a newly started app is 20 secs FF, 22 IE8, 5 secs Chrome and 3.5 secs Safari.

Question is why? I’m really stuck here.

Not sure I agree with FF the slowest, but its not nearly as zippy compared to the rest as it used to be…

but pretty clueless as to why any browser would have such a disparate difference… unless you are running a bunch of addons for the browser…

I am not sure about the slow forum issue relates to the web browser.

I am also having speed issues and I believe it’s mainly server side (read php/database) problems. 

I’d like to find which part of the page rendering is time consuming to better optimize it or even cache it.

I hope SP team can help us on that so we get a fast forum, having sometimes to wait for more than 5 seconds for a page to display is quite embarassing.

Thanks

Mr Papa said

Not sure I agree with FF the slowest, but its not nearly as zippy compared to the rest as it used to be…

but pretty clueless as to why any browser would have such a disparate difference… unless you are running a bunch of addons for the browser…

IE8 is the slowest, I am not running a bunch of addons. What is interesting to observe is that spQuickLinksForumSelect and spQuicklLinksTopicSelect take a long time to load. The boxes form but they are not the right width and the arrows are incorrect for some 18 seconds with FF from a newly started browser with an empty cache.

I do not see anything like this… 18 seconds?  would frustrate me too…  of course, the js that runs to do the quicklinks cannot run until after the page loads…

sptab, are you on vps or dedicated server?  hosting can easily play here…

you wont be able to cache the forum using a standard wp cache plugin simply because all forum content is displayed on a single wp page… the caching plugins will just cache the last view which will be wrong almost all the time…

5.0 is leaps and bounds faster than 4.5 and we have large numbers of users that have confirmed the nice speed…  so we just need to understand what might be going on in your case…

as to the browser, kind of clueless there as we dont do anything different based on browser…

Steve I agree that my impression initially was that 5 was much faster. I am going to look at the Net tab on firebug when I get home later. It’s no good testing at work because all my connections run through a proxy some 1500 miles away!

I will then try and set up a local copy with XAMPP – never done this before. I will also try a standard install on the same test site server without any of my hacks to see what happens.

There will be something strange going on, as to why it doesn’t happen with Safari and Chrome

All the same, bear in mind that webkit browsers (Safari/Chrome) ARE consistently faster than FF and much lighter as well. Opera is faster as well. But odd.

Well I hope that I can improve things dramatically because the majority of the users on the website proper are using either IE8 or Firefox. As it stands I will get loads of abuse if I was to upgrade the forum proper. Hopefully I will get to the bottom of it.

Conrad

would be interested in what you find…