Mr Papa said

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…

 

I am using a dedicated server (Dual Xeon, 24 GB Ram, Linux Debian) which a reasonnably well optimized.

The traffic on the forum is rather small 50 to 100 users (according the the currently online page, which takes a large time window I suppose) of which 80% are guests. There’s also a Blog on the same machine but it has a small impact on the performance as most trafic hits cached pages.

I have enabled slow query logging on mysql and did not catch anything. Is there a way to easy get a timing of the rendering of each part of the forum page ? How about caching parts so they aren’t recalculated before there is new data in ?

Thanks for your help.

PS: if you need to check, my forum is linked on my website part of my profile here at simple-press.com forum. 

I’ve just spent 5 or so minutes trawling your forum.

Mac/Firefox 9/No browser cache on. Max 2mb ADSL broadband connection (we’re more rural here!)

I only found one page that took longer than 2 seconds to load up. In fact, I was rather envious and proud at how fast it was all loading. The one blip was on a topic view that had 29 posts. I would seriously consider dropping that and paging. It does go without saying that the more posts you display per page then the longer it is going to take to compile the display… that’s what paging is really for across all web apps! It”s a trade-off… show more data slowly or less data quickly but your users need to load more pages. The end result may take the same time but loading quicker is a better user experience.

The only other relatively slow page was just waiting for an ad to get loaded and you are pulling in data from multiple sources so you have to expect that to happen. But on the whole I would be over the moon with the kind of performance I was just seeing so I really do not understand your issues. And as I say – that was with my browser cache turned off!

There are quite a few WP plugins that will perform timings, query breakdowns etc. We do not litter production code with debug breakpoints but have been using them extensively through the development process.

We also have a mySQL long query log active of, I believe, anything over a second. Ironically, it mainly just reports a couple of WP core queries if it ever reports anything at all – especially the early grab of the WP Options table which is just about the most inefficient mess you could encounter. Keeping that table clean of garbage is a good idea.

One thing I will recommend that we know can be a performance killer… if are using Gravatars then download and activate the SP gravatar cache plugin.

And finally – yes we are caching more and more internally and it is the one area where I continually look for improvements and opportunities to do more.

Update Edit:  By the way I should have added that the ‘slow’ page with the 29 posts took just under 5 seconds so it was not actually a go and make a cup of coffee moment!

you aint seen nothing regarding rural as me!  I might get 1MB!  but my experience is the same… typically 1-3 seconds per page load…

and if you look at alexa (wow, we rank as 10,000ish site in US??? and 25,000ish in World???) they show our site loading time at about 3 seconds…  which they (and us frankly) rank as slow…  but it was significantly larger loading times in 4.5…  my only point is they are not exorbitant loading times…

I run the net tab on firebug and have seen 37 seconds for a full page load. Steve have a look at http://www.g0ruz.com/ABF_Test you should have a password. See how long it takes for you.

As an aside I have got another domain on the server where I have the live site and I’ll be copying it there so we’ll see how that goes. That server is fast the V4.5 install loads in under 2 seconds on there.

Conrad

you did? I dont see in my PM inbox…

the site, without logging in, came up almost instantly in FF

a bit odd.. but with a http header view (ie live http headers addon) you can watch things coming across… http requests to your server, namely images, are taking a very long time…  even though the images are quite small…

have you made any changes to your httpd.conf file?  or .htaccess file?  you do have some non standard (not wrong, just not default) settings it appears (etags, etc)…

No I have not made any changes to those files in fact I was not even aware of httpd.conf, how can I reset them to be standard? Is it possible that my host providers have been messing with these files?

please note, I did not say wrong or incorrect… was just checking if you had a plugin or other that might change some stuff… and yes, every host may set up their httpd.conf the way they want…

was more of a curiosity question…

I do not know of any changes to your .htaccess was just curious as to the contents…

just thinking up ideas…

Steve please keep thinking. As is often the case with plug-ins I don’t actually know what they are doing most of the time.

Maybe I should re-install WP and start again? Perhaps I should have a word with support at my hosts?

well, I would gather some more info first… so you can at least see what I am saying… did you grab something to watch the headers as they happen? Live HTTP Headers for firefox works well… and you can see if slowly loading stuff from your server… just need to understand those delays…

I moved everything to a new server and the difference is quite simply staggering! It loads in about 2 seconds for the first time in FF and literally in a blink on Chrome. Chrome is quite simply a faster browser, but the site is absolutely 100 fine in firefox on this new server.

Those with passwords can find the site at

http://www.abftest.co.uk/forum

The whole issue was a very slow server. I will be castigating justhost who host the old site, in fact I will move g0ruz.com I think.

Conrad

good to hear!

Mr Papa & Yellow Swordfish: thanks for taking some time to check my site performance.

I have done some extra optimizations on my hosting and I am getting a little faster page loading time. As you said, I will probably decrease the number of topics or posts dislayed at once, to speed up things a bit. Also I noticed that removing “New/Recently updated topics” and Forum lists listboxes is another small speed improvement.

I hope that future release will have more and more cached data, so forum page won’t take more than one second to load, when used on a proper dedicated server.

items like the new/unread post list are more expensive as they are unique for each user and unique for each page load which does tend to make db caching more difficult.

I have to say that I’m astonished at how fast my test site is now. I will have to get around to updating to the latest release now that is sorted out.

Just host who hosted the original test site are insistent that there is nothing wrong even when presented with a site that is quite literally over 10 times faster. I guess that we’ll never know but I will be transferring all my domains of just host now.

Anyway the forum is now very fast and slick, I’m impressed!