30 replies to this topic

[niner]

Forum response time to typical user input (opening a thread, posting a response, refreshing Recent Topics, accessing notifications...) has become extremely slow. This occurred sometime over the past month or two, I don't exactly remember when, but it has gotten to the point where the forum is frustrating to use, and I'm afraid it's deterring people from participating. It seems like forum usage has been down since things have gone south. What changes have been made to the forum in the past couple months that might be causing this?

[Mind]

I noticed the same thing. The latency is on the order of several seconds. I would say in the 5 to 10 second range. Studies have shown that the average internet user will only tolerate a 3 second delay in any website before leaving.

[Robert C]

I'm fairly new here but I've noticed it also. I wasn't sure if it was my computer or internet service. I'm not sure but it seems to me to be pretty consistently slow, maybe does not have much to do with a peak time???

[brokenportal]

Here is a graph from Google analytics of average time on site. It seems to have dropped around March 17th.  time on site Longecity jan to jul 2011.PNG   22.01KB   42 downloads

Here are the titles of modification topics that were made or considered around that time. If ads in first post was implemented then that looks like some potentially problematic code.


subforum bb -april 7th
google search box at bottom -april 7th
topic sponsor -april 3rd
pav31 post history -april 3rd
istream & ustream media tag -april 3rd
who posted in topic -march 21rst
(sos31) last post subforum v2.0.0 -march 8th
ads in first post -march 8th



Any ideas from this?

[niner]

It seems to have dropped around March 17th.
Any ideas from this?

No, it didn't get bad until the last month or two. The only thing I can come up with is that in addition to my browser telling me it's waiting on longecity.org, it also tells me it's waiting on facebook, linkedin, a couple google sites, something that looks like youtube and several sites I don't recognize. I don't know if I'm seeing the waiting messages because of slowness that originates elsewhere, or if they're causative. Anyone know when that stuff was added?

[nameless]

I noticed it becoming slower a long time ago, when they switched the format (sidebars, little doodads all over, etc).

But lately, I agree, it's been horribly slow. I click on a link and then usually open a different tab to look at a different site while I wait. It feels like I've gone back 10+ years and am using dialup, and slow dialup at that, when I visit this site.

[rwac]

Also a recent occurrence, allowing guests to search the forum.
The server seems to have high load going upto 3.xx, which means approx 3 people are waiting to be served on each cpu.

Time for more cpu?

[niner]

Also a recent occurrence, allowing guests to search the forum.
The server seems to have high load going upto 3.xx, which means approx 3 people are waiting to be served on each cpu.

I thought that guests could always search... not true? When was that change made? Sounds like something that would be easy to turn off for a little while to see if it matters. It seemed to me like the slowness happened all of a sudden, or if it was gradual, then it happened over a fairly short timespan.

Do we have a change log for the forum software?

Tonight I had a Recent Topics refresh take 34 seconds. Then maybe 15 or 20 minutes later, I had one that was really fast. It's not consistent. It gets better when there are less people on. Still, unless we are sharing cpus with other users, something that changed on our end is loading them more heavily.

[niner]

Just now things seemed to hang for quite a long time while waiting on static.ak.fbcdn.net. That's facebook. I think that the really bad slowness happened around the time the icons for 'Share This Link via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Buzz, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon' showed up. When was all that added? Could they be temporarily blocked to see if they are the problem?

[rwac]

Is it better? I disabled the social icons.

[niner]

Is it better? I disabled the social icons.

After trying some threads and Recent Topics refreshes, I think Recent Topics is faster. I don't know about going into a thread, though. During that process, I still saw waits for facebook and linkedin (also gravatar and some google stuff) so some of that must still be around.

[1kgcoffee]

Are we getting more traffic than in the past? Not enough throughput? Time for a server upgrade maybe? Something definitely has to be done about this...

[niner]

Are we getting more traffic than in the past? Not enough throughput? Time for a server upgrade maybe? Something definitely has to be done about this...

If anything, it feels like we have less traffic. At least less posts. It might be that we have more visitors. There used to be a count of number of users logged on, but I don't know where it is anymore. I don't know if we have sole use of the servers, or if we share them. It might be that the servers are shared and are just more busy. Time for a call to Canaca? Do we have any stats on usage? Do we have a software change log? (Somehow I doubt it, but I hope we do...)

[rwac]

Are we getting more traffic than in the past? Not enough throughput? Time for a server upgrade maybe? Something definitely has to be done about this...

If anything, it feels like we have less traffic. At least less posts. It might be that we have more visitors. There used to be a count of number of users logged on, but I don't know where it is anymore. I don't know if we have sole use of the servers, or if we share them. It might be that the servers are shared and are just more busy. Time for a call to Canaca? Do we have any stats on usage? Do we have a software change log? (Somehow I doubt it, but I hope we do...)

The user count is at the bottom of the forum page.
200 people in the last 15 minutes is fairly average I think.

[caliban]

I link this problem to the last week or two. There have been no significant changes on our end.
Looking into server issues.


EDIT:

Also a recent occurrence, allowing guests to search the forum

disabled for now

[caliban]

It would be good to get feedback on whether loading times have improved a bit now.

[niner]

I'm seeing a distinct improvement. When rwac disabled the social media icons, the response to Recent Topics improved notably. Now I'm seeing a significant improvement in load time for entering a thread as well, and also for checking notifications. It's possible that what I'm seeing now is a function of the number of people on the forum being lower; it's early morning on the US east coast, so most North American users probably aren't on yet. Was anything changed in the last 12 hours or so?

[1kgcoffee]

its faster for me this morning

[Bonee]

it is still unacceptably slow for me :(
immins . org loads fast, then i click forums it takes 4-5 seconds to load and searches are still as slow as hell...
yes it happened in the last 1-2 months or so

[nameless]

Still slow for me.

I tried sending a PM yesterday, which I managed, but ended up waiting about 20-30 seconds per click.

My ISP can be a bit sluggish (3mbs/sec or so), but it shouldn't be that slow.

Edit: And it took about 15 seconds of waiting after clicking submit for this post right here. I've not encountered any forum on the net so far as slow as this one.

Edited by nameless, 29 July 2011 - 05:56 PM.

[thughes]

My wait time on the forum is usually between 2-12 seconds. 2 is rare.

For a comparison, the james randi forum is normally about 2 seconds or less for me, all links. That's acceptable for an internet forum. The slowness here discourages use. Well, it discourages me, and I take myself as an average internet user, patience wise.

Longecity link:
- Firebug shows 4-10 seconds searching for a "back.gif", and a highly variable 6-12 seconds on the initial GET of longecity.org. When really bad I've seen 20.

Some time could be saved by figuring out whats wrong with back.gif, which is a url() in your css. Why isn't it caching? Why does it take 4-10 seconds to load in the first place? Granted, the page will partially/mostly display before back.gif is loaded...

As to the initial GET wait time... If you've got efficiency issues in your back end scripts/programs, that's going to be magnified by server load. Might want to profile whatever is producing the forum page (you probably already had someone do that). If its all 3rd party stuff, probably just need a more powerful server.

[kenj]

Yeah, it's very slow for me, too. :(

[kenj]

So, I'm the only one having this problem now? It seems to be worse with this new layout. Waiting time is several minutes now, or the forum page won't load at all which obviously makes the forum useless to me. HALP!
I'm running newest versions of XP, and Firefox.

[Brainbox]

I have a problem with firefox as well (on iMac); it takes forever. After changing to Safari everything is fresh and fast. Maybe there's an issue with FF compatibility?

[kenj]

Brainbox,

Thanks for your post, I just tried loading the forum in IE, and it's much faster here, plus the font and graphics are much nicer! However, I'd like to use FF as my main browser, and I can't be the only one with FF?

Btw, would you know why my avatar doesn't show up, and how to fix it?

Edited by kenj, 28 August 2011 - 12:46 PM.

[Brainbox]

There is a problem introduced with the avatars during the upgrade procedure.

You can upload it again, but I also saw on the invision website that the avatar problem could have been fixed. I don't have access to the details. Maybe just wait a while for a possible fix for this.

[michael0505]

Sucks I have to include a code every time I log in and that I have to do it 2-3 times because I cannot read the letters the first couple times....Certainly discourages usage

[Elus]

Hey,

Just thought I'd drop by to say that I really love the new layout. The load times are excellent in google chrome, but I have not tested out other browsers. Thanks goes out to Caliban and whoever else contributed to make this possible. Lovin' the autosave feature too. Only thing I would change is to make the Longecity headline at the top of the forum slightly smaller so that the letters fit neatly into the light blue band and don't partially overlap with the dark blue band beneath it. This is a minor thing though, and I'm very much content with what we have going now.

Cheers,
E.

[The Immortalist]

Hey,

Only thing I would change is to make the Longecity headline at the top of the forum slightly smaller so that the letters fit neatly into the light blue band and don't partially overlap with the dark blue band beneath it.

^ This times 1000

It seriously needs to be changed. It's a big problem.

[Robert C]

A weird thing happened to me. When the forum changed to the new format a couple of weeks ago I could not get logged on. I did not forget my password. I tried to reset my password but the forum did not even recognize my username. To make a long story short, I wrote an email to, I think, the forum administrator and now I'm back on. I wonder how many others this happened to?

I even tried to start over with a new user ID but it would not let me use my existing email address and I didn't feel like starting a new email. I thought I was lost in the shuffle until I got an email from the administrator today.

Edited by Robert C, 07 September 2011 - 01:50 AM.