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Slow forum caused by avatars

GO Gomlers
Gomlers
Member
Member since Mar 2013
89 posts
Mar 14, 2013 · 9:00 pm · Edited

Hi!

Been working on my site for several hours, trying to find out why the post-pages loads so slow.. finally found that the avatars is causing the problems.

For now, it’s just a test-forum, which contains a couple of forums, 2 topics, and 4 posts in one of the topics.

So it shouldn’t load so slow.. I’m guessing about 8-10 seconds for loading 4 posts in a thread.. My connection is 40Mbit fiberoptic, and my server is about 5 miles away, a VPS with 2GB RAM and everything it needs. I run other sites on this VPS, and everything runs really smooth – even for a large e-commerce site I have, with lots of huge product-images.

This testpage I have simplepress on will be moved to my live server any day now, where I have 170.000 forum posts, about 11.000 threads and about 4500 users. It’s crucial that the forum software works. I’m changing to simplepress from phpbb3, because of the great reviews you have, and the great integration to WP.

I have tried turning the avatars off in the settings, and the site runs as quick as it should.. :) As soon as I turn the avatars back on – 8-10 seconds for loading 4 posts.. (!?) :(

Does anyone know a fix to this? Am I the only one to run into this problem, because I haven’t found any solution to it from searches..?

I would very much like to find out how the forum can run fast, even with avatarimages activated, as most of my users have uploaded their own avatarimages.

4 Answers

New Answer
MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member
Member since Dec 2006
19,448 posts
Mar 14, 2013 · 9:18 pm

what kind of avatars? if local uploaded images, why would the server response time be that slow? A while back we had one user who had avatar images coming off his server that was 10x slower than getting them from another server via http request… made no sense, but sounds similar… if I remember, his solution was a change in the avatar priorities…

so what are you avatar priority settings? and what is your option for replacing wp avatars?

btw… this is not a common occurrence for users…

GO Gomlers
Gomlers
Member
Member since Mar 2013
89 posts
Mar 14, 2013 · 9:28 pm

You were right! No problems at all, as long as I let the gravar-images go. Sorry for shouting out errors, when there was none. embarassedembarassed

“Internal” avatars, uploaded to my site works just as it should, and so does the default avatarimages from Simple:Press.

I guess I can change these avatars to something that blends better in with my forum theme..

 

Thank you for your time, and for Simple:Press. This looks in fact to be as good as you said it would be, before I downloaded the plugin, and purchased the support :)

Thumbs up!laugh

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member
Member since Dec 2006
19,448 posts
Mar 14, 2013 · 10:28 pm

well, that was my point… why on your server, would it take longer to get a local server image than an http request to get an image from gravatar? kind of nuts…

away from computer so cannot visit site… did you do a search for the other case I was talking about?

and you didnt mention your avatar priorities and replace wp avatar option as requested…

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Mar 15, 2013 · 4:54 am

If it is gravatars that are slowing you up then I would recommend you download and activate our SP Gravatars Cache plugin – that makes a great difference to performance as it saves a copy on your local server.