good hosting is the best way…

but make sure you dont have a ton of forums on group view, a ton of topics on forum view and a ton of posts on topic view…

if you are using gravatars, be sure to get our gravatar cache plugin…

Thanks for the quick response!

We’re using Site5. Their service is good, but I have no idea if their servers are.

Don’t use gravatars.

So, you’re saying to make sure to subdivide the groups/forums in such a way as to spread the topics as evenly as possible? For now, there’s not much going on. It’s a new site, with very few members.

I don’t have traffic issues, but I’m already having speed issues. So I’m trying to figure it out so that any traffic doesn’t get upset with waiting and leave.

Thanks again

Joe

Is it shared hosting?  shared hosting doesnt hold up very well to any kind of traffic – at least most…

I am saying dont have 50 forums on the main page…  every forum increases the amount of db query…  and dont have 50 topics in each forum on single page…  the default should be fine… and dont show 50 topics per forum either… default is fine…  but some make both those numbers high to minimize page loads… but it actually increases query time…

instead of 50 forums, have 10 forums with some subforums… it will improve main page performance…  but by same token should be no reason why you couldnt have a dozen forums or more forums…  its really dependent on the host… 

something you can play with anyways and see if any performance delta… easy to move forums around…

There are other little things that all help as well. For example – never leave old plugins hanging around if you are not using them (WordPress plugins I mean). As a rule – if you don’t use it – get rid of it completely.

Keep your database optimised – I would say at least once a week.

Watch out when pages are loading for that little tell-tale url in the browser status bar that sometimes takes forever to load. Connections to and loading stuff in from Facebook or Google or Twitter can cause massive drag on load times sometimes. Fine if you really want it but if not – cut it out.

As to Simple:Press then again – I would say consider if you need all the plugins you may have activated. Choose with care. The template driven nature of SP means that it is easy to cut out whole display sections if you don’t want them thus cutting out some priocessing. Turn on the combined CSS and JS cache (global options). If this screws up the display of the forum then turn it off again – it means you host will not allow it but hopefully they will and that can be a good time saver.

But hey – you said right at the top 3 seconds? Seriously? Unless you are on fibre with a dedicated fast server then 3 seconds ain’t that bad at all!

Thanks guys,

It sounds like my forums are probably set up fine. It’s a pretty logical and not too extensive outline – http://allaboutchile.com/forum/. 

Traffic isn’t an issue right now. That’s my concern. If it can’t handle just sitting there, what happens if we’re successful?

We have dedicated server space since we’re running several sites with them, and host a few for others. Shared server? Not sure. My son takes care of those details, so I’ll have to ask him.

I have just a few plugins left activated at the moment. Inactive plugins don’t affect it, do they? 

Swordfish – optimized? Not sure how to do that?

Three seconds was for SP alone. The site’s taking about 10 at the best, but usually 15 or so. It was around 30, so I’m gaining. Something’s really bogging it down though. I’ve run P3 on it, which shows SP as the plugin that takes the longest to load. And I’ve run the http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bCfUrR/problem-with-post-edit-buttonttp://www.allaboutchile.com speed test on it repeatedly with various plugins activated/deactivated. The WP core shows up as the main time consumer, by far… whatever that means.

Thanks again. 

mmm. At the moment your site is not actually loading for me at all so I will try and come back later to make a visit.

Inactive plugins CAN have a small effect on WordPress as it does scan the folders every now and then – at least it used to. Not sure I remember why now and they may have removed that so i can not swear to it. But it has always been my policy that the less clutter the more efficient things will be.

DB optimisation is one of those things that most people never do and most probably do not know about but it CAN have an impact in performance over time. It is not a great analogy but think of a database table as a  bookcase. Books get loaded onto the shelf and sooner or later it gets pretty full and then a really big book comes along and there is no room so you lay it aside and then more and more books get laid aside when what you really need to do is add more shelves. In other words the data can get fragmented and the more fragmented it gets (1) the slower data retrieval becomes and (2) the more likely you are to start getting db errors reading data.

It night not be much of a noticeable slow down at first but it can build up. Wp plugins like db-manager allow you to schedule an optimise to run in the background. Or tools like phpMyAdmin which you almost certainly have, allow you to do it and see the results – usually from a drop down menu at the bottom I seem to recall.

And finally. You do have to bear in mind that SP is built on top of  WordPress. There has to be a certain amount of WP code and processing first before the forum starts to load. This is inevitable as SP IS a WP plugin. Only a completely stand alone forum application – with no connection to WP – will be able to avoid this. And forums are – by their very nature – data ‘heavy’ and dynamic as the data is changing all of the time – unlike a blog where the data is pretty static.

Thanks Swordfish,

I’ll check into this as well. And I’ll start deleting some plugins I loaded just to “check them out.” I have quite a few that just sit there waiting for me to investigate them.

The theme I picked up had rave reviews regarding it’s ability and speed. And I think the tradeoff for Sp is fine, as long as it’s not on top of 10 to 15 seconds. That’s why I’m trying to find some tweaks to help it.

My site wouldn’t load for you? It’s loading for me right now, but that’s hardly encouraging considering we’re pursuing an international audience. sigh…

Thanks again

OK – well I don’t have a particularly fast broadband connection here but iut is supposed to be 8mps but we never get that of course!

Randon test just now: It took 30 seconds for your Home page to finish loading completely. 10 register. 10 blog and, at that tome, 9 for he forum! Then the next attempt at the forum I abandoned as it never loaded.

The problem was the call the site is making to wd-dge-share-this. And then on the next attempt it was ssl-gstartic. Your site on every page load is making a LOT of remote http requests to various services and on my tests there is hardly a page loaded where at least one of those services is responding very slowly.

In the general mix of things I actually thought the forum pages were loading up OK but too many page loads seem to get stuck…

Thanks Swordfish!

I appreciate you going the extra mile to help me with this. It’s looking like I’ll need to find someone to go through my site and make specific changes. I’m doing little things here and there, but those load times are horrible and this is definitely over my head.

Regards,

Joe

we try to help!   the issue with offsite http requests is that you are beholding to them for the response and the time they take…  but if its a service you need…

Yeah, I’m trying to figure out which ones might be doing this. We have adsense, Amazon and a couple other affiliate ads that might be drawing directly from their site. There are a lot of external links. And I’m importing from several sources in order to post blog entries and various articles. Maybe there’s a cleaner way to do it.

Swordfish, I installed WP Fast Cache and the plugin you recommended to optimize my site. And I’ve turned on both cache options on SP. They’ve helped quite a bit. I’m getting pretty consistent 4 second load times. Still not my goal, but far better than forgetting what I was going to do next because my mind wandered while I waited for a page to load.

Plugins are consistently less than a second now, with SP representing about a quarter of that. On the occasions when the plugin load time jumps, it does seem like SP is the culprit, often representing as much as 90% of the total plugin load time.

I’ve looked around for faster hosting companies. You get what you pay for, don’t you? I’ll need to get some traction with this endeavor before I can justify those prices.

Thanks again for all the help.

we were talking about the http requests to services on every page load…  you can watch them in browser when they are loading and see the time they are taking… or run an http headers add on for the browser to capture and look at later…  yes, the adsense, amazon, ads etc… but not external links they just sit there until clicked…  and the importing should be happening in the background too… not on page loads…

Oh, I see. Hrmm, I have no idea why some of these are loading.

I have no idea what wd-dge-share-this and ssl-gstartic are.

Several of my affiliate links are showing up. I also realized that I’m using some images (especially banners) that are on another one of my sites. Is it likely to be adding time to have to retrieve these from another domain?

I’m learning a lot. Thanks guys!

loading them from external is an http request… loading from your server much faster… bring them over and host locally – worth the disk space usage… make sure they are not huge image files too…