forum is slow?

Community Website and Forum
1

i just wanted to confirm is it my connection or is the new forum really slowing things a little bit.

thank you guys, anyways u do a wonderful job

2

I think during the first days things will be a little slow while we are tweaking the settings. One thing is having an offline version of the forum running in a controlled environment, a different one is having one user every 4secs getting access to the database. Right now we have to figure out if our current dataplan is good enough for the new infrastructure, if mySQL is behaving and reacting quick to user requests and so on.

This will be optimal soon.

/d

3

cinnamon:
i just wanted to confirm is it my connection or is the new forum really slowing things a little bit.

I also noticed this - I was just accepting it as new stuff = new issues :smiley:

4

It's also scanning all the old forum contents for replies to users' posts. I'd imaging that for every user this would be quite some load.

Every now and then I get a list of replies pop up for old postings. Don't know if this is a one shot thing and it's not doing it constantly.

5

defsdoor:
It's also scanning all the old forum contents for replies to users' posts. I'd imaging that for every user this would be quite some load.

Every now and then I get a list of replies pop up for old postings. Don't know if this is a one shot thing and it's not doing it constantly.

Yeah I dunno but you can turn it on/off in your user options.

6

Enotify doesn't come with that option, however you pointed out an important thing: we need to make sure the old forum is listed as read for everyone. We didn't realize when importing the database.

Good point, thanks

7

I wonder what I turned off then :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Seems speedy enough to me.

9

You can also get caught up on all the new posts, then run down to the very bottom of the main forum page and click "Mark ALL Read" to stop getting notifications from the imported old forum.

10

an apache is running here but it is not optimized for speed!

  • missing GZIP (wasting 180kb per pageload => speed lost!)
  • no expire set, so NOTHING cached! (wasting ~25 of 30 http requests => speed lost!)

the admin should put a htaccess like this in the Arduino Forum path:

#Compresses everything:
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript
</IfModule>

#sets the Cachetime to sometime from now, so the browsers cache them files!
# A604800 = week / A2592000 = month
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A604800
ExpiresByType text/html A0
ExpiresByType text/text A0
ExpiresByType text/plain A0
ExpiresByType text/css A604800
ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
ExpiresByType text/javascript A604800
ExpiresByType application/javascript A604800
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A2592000
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A604800
ExpiresByType image/x-icon A2592000
ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon A2592000
</IfModule>

mod_deflate and mod_expires must be installed, but that should be an easy thing :wink:

on my forums this boosted the pageload time from some 5secs to below 1sec, independend from usercount!
so you can get the "instant" feeling, with just a little tweaking 8)

11

designer2k2:
an apache is running here but it is not optimized for speed!

  • missing GZIP (wasting 180kb per pageload => speed lost!)
  • no expire set, so NOTHING cached! (wasting ~25 of 30 http requests => speed lost!)

the admin should put a htaccess like this in the Arduino Forum path:

#Compresses everything:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript

#sets the Cachetime to sometime from now, so the browsers cache them files!

A604800 = week / A2592000 = month

ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault A604800 ExpiresByType text/html A0 ExpiresByType text/text A0 ExpiresByType text/plain A0 ExpiresByType text/css A604800 ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000 ExpiresByType image/png A2592000 ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000 ExpiresByType text/javascript A604800 ExpiresByType application/javascript A604800 ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash A2592000 ExpiresByType application/x-javascript A604800 ExpiresByType image/x-icon A2592000 ExpiresByType image/vnd.microsoft.icon A2592000 > ``` > > > > mod_deflate and mod_expires must be installed, but that should be an easy thing ;) > > on my forums this boosted the pageload time from some 5secs to below 1sec, independend from usercount! > so you can get the "instant" feeling, with just a little tweaking 8)

Oh you're good at this :smiley:

12

mowcius:

you might be right, Enotify might give you that option :slight_smile: (my plan for world domination via Javascript notifications seems to be over)

designer2k2:

we had a long discussion about your proposed patch for .htaccess and our conclusions are that:

  • compressing the data we send, considering the amount of requests we attend, will mean a lot of CPU waste, unless you have some studies that prove us wrong (and I bet you have them so please please pass them over) we decided to wait with that

  • things are made so that they can be cached on the user side, the forum is not generating a lot of load when it comes to images, but the reference page does!!! So we might introduce this idea for the wiki --> thanks a bunch!!

13

how loaded is the server now? compressing will increase the server load, but not extreme!
this is hard to predict, you will need to analyse the load and see if thats get you into trouble...

if then php will be the limit or the db, there are caching tools (like xcache) what will help you out on this :wink:

for example this page while i type has 84 HTTP requests, with the mod_expire this would be reduced to around 5!
even when the stuff is cached currently, there is still a HTTP request to check the cache...
as w3c said only 2 requests per domain are paralell, that means the user will make a crazy 40 requests in series... :roll_eyes:
and your server must handle all this useless requests! making load for nothing...

to test it out, take ff, install (in that order):
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/firebug/
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/yslow/
http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/speed/page-speed/download.html

this tools will show you the pageload times, tranfered volumes, HTTP requests and much more.
get your server stats (get into ssh, "top"), look at the loads and then insert the htaccess and watch what happens...
check on the site if it works like expected, [STRG]+[F5] and look into Yslow "Statistics" there must be a significant drop in requests and page size.
if your cpu gets overloaded take the htaccess down!

i can only tell you that on my biggest forum (record ~ 10k hits per second) on a crapy shared server handled it like a charm with this htaccess (and some other things) 8)

for detailed things, pn me, for details i need your hardware and software config and some load figures...

lets make this page fly 8)

14

That's an argument for sure.

I will check how to install those modules during Sunday (which is our lowest day) and we can then check all together if the performance improves.

/d

15

did you had problems? still hoping to see things speed up here :wink:

16

Hej,

you might have noticed the SSO server was down for 15m yesterday morning (CET time) it was because we needed to recompile apache in order to introduce the modules mentioned in this post.

This message is just to let you all know we are going to be testing the speed when caching in the following couple of days.

/d

17

The system has been running for the last 12h with the proposed modifications to .htaccess for the forum, wikis, blog, and old forum. I have to say that it is not lasting the CPU specially, seems like we have a constant CPU consumption of 80% of the hired capacity (yes we're reaching the limit again). On the other hand I have the feeling everything goes faster, can you guys tell me what you think?

/d

18

The forums feel a little quicker compared to the previous set up, but I've still have a noticeable delay when selecting a forum or thread, but its not as slow as before.

19

Just to give credit to designer2k2, this pic shows the stats for the Arduino forum since we started caching the images. We have the same amount of visitors, half the bandwidth use.

20

cool thing to cut down the bandwith in 1/2 8)

it feels quicker, but still there is some more to gain :wink:

your 80% processorload is a lot, can you find out whats the hardest bite on it? (ssh, top)