Hey Pete,

I’m not sure if there really is an average load time, but what are you getting roughly and where exactly?

Are you running the combined caching of CSS / JS? (Forum > Options > Global Settings) If either are disabled for any reason then re-enabling could speed things up a bit.

Have you got any jquery conflicts? Even something that doesn’t affect usability could still affect load times.

Hi Ike.  

Yes, we do have the combined caching of CSS/JS enabled.

We’re getting clients that are complaining of slow load times and slow times for saving posts.  When it’s happening it’s sporadic.  Most of the time it’s fine, but I did experience a Save Post that took 20 or so seconds yesterday.

How would I find out if there’s a jquery conflict?

Thanks.

If it’s sporadic and not experienced by everybody all the time, I wouldn’t have thought it’s the forum, more likely maybe a hosting thing?

If you want to check for a jquery conflict, open the browser console, in FF for example inspect element, then click the ‘console’ tab. Not saying it’s the cause but it’s definitely worth ruling out!

Thee are so, so many, many things that can effect performance. It can come down to how many WP plugins you have active (and what they are). How many SP plugins you have, How much RAM you have for php to run in. Whether you are making use of what caching there is available. And, as far as SP specifically goes – how many forums you have defined. How many items per page you are choosing to show. What sort of data the forum contains. Actually the list is long…!

But performance always starts with your host. if you have a busy ‘ish forum and are using shared hosting then, to be frank, you get what you pay or and it will be affected…

Thank you both for the input, we appreciate the support.

No problem, best of luck!

Hi guys.  Do you guys have recommended PHP / server settings that we should have to run Simplepress?

We have a dedicated server (with no other significant sites), but the hosting guys aren’t always the easiest people to work with.

We have PHP version 5.4.26

PHP Memory Limit: 256M

PHP Post Max Size:  32M

Would it be useful to get either one of those settings increased?

Also, what would you guys consider a “busy-ish” forum?  number of users? posts/problem-with-post-edit-buttonour?

Pete

Not that I am aware of. PHP 5.4 is still current (latest version update was 11 June ’15).

The memory limit at 256m is more than you should need (you will be notified if it’s exceeded). I think the majority of PHP memory limits I’ve seen have been default at anything between 8m and 128m and most complaints come with a huge site running lots of plugins. The post max size relates to the maximum limit of post body data so it shouldn’t affect site speed.

They are bigger values than we use here! And we don’t use a dedicated server either but a VPS.

Three people will give you three different answers to this question. In my personal experience it usually comes down to what is being loaded. For example – quite recently we noticed a terrible decline in the speed of our site and spent a long time trying to work out the cause. Turned out it was the smallest of WordPress plugins that had simply not been updated for 2-3 years and had become horribly sluggish. When swapped with an up to date plugin that performed the same task things went back to normal.

It can easily happen. And, as it happens, that effected mainly the forum page. Sop question is -what is being loaded and is it all good? Is your forum totally private or can we have a link to the site and the forum page so we can look at it?

It is a private forum, but I’d be happy to send over login details if you’d be willing to take a quick look.

We do have a lot of WP plugins, but it’s a bit harder to dial in the conflict since the issue is sporadic. I will check to see which plugins have not been updated in awhile.

Thanks.

It would definitely be interesting to take a look, if you can – PM login info to myself, Yellow Swordfish and Mr Papa.

Mostly it does not come across as being that slow to me although I did see the odd and sudden slowdown where it looked like it was waiting for a server slot to become available. I don’t know what sort of contention for the server you experience of course nor how well your hosting copes with it.

I did see the same odd (and it really was occasional) sudden wait on all areas pf the website not just the forum page. Considering that the forum loads dynamic data that is also compiled specifically for the user loading the page and the rest of the site tends to be static data then it is clear that the forum page would take a little longer to display but I didn’t really notice much difference. Yours is also pretty light on the javascript files being loaded which came as a surprise after you saying you used lots of WP plugins.

I do not know how your mySQL is set up and I have no experience of optimising mySQL but if you have a high contention rate and lots of concurrent users  on the site much of the time then you might want to consider switching to InnoDB tables if you are not using them now. Most hosts seem to always set up and default to the MyISAM engine which is fine most of the time, But when things get busy – especially if there is a lot of db ‘writing’ activity as one can experience with a forum, then InnoDB tables are better placed to take the strain. When myISAM needs to lock data for changes it locks the whole table whereas InnoDB only locks the table rows needed. But this would be a minor change on the whole.

The bottom line for me personally was that if this were my site I would be relatively happy with the performance bit would want to try and solve that occasional longish wait that seems to randomly happen.

Thank you for taking the time to take a look and giving us the feedback.  That’s awesome.

Gives me a good bit to go on. Much appreciated.

Pete

I hope it goes well. It is a good looking site that’s for sure.