DG seems slow ... or is it me?

Dave... the sight seems really slow to me. I don't know why but I can't seem to click around as speedily as usual. I don't think it's my server because I'm getting around the web Ok. I was going to work on my journal but the pages are loading so slow I think I'll try again some other time. Just thought I'd let you know.

Mine's been that way too for about a week now. I just thought it was my server or my connection number. I'm use to slow modems. Don't like 'em, but I'm used to them.

Oh dear this is not the kind of news that I need to hear. :(

The CPU load on the server is less than 1% (I start to worry at 5%).

Of 256 megs of RAM, I have 14 megs free (unallocated).

I'm getting 50ms pings to rr.com, so the bandwidth latency isn't the problem.

I'm on dialup here, so it's always slow to me. I'm relying on you guys to let me know when this kind of problem happens. Please post again tomorrow how things are.

In the meantime, I'll try to find anything else that could be causing the problem.

Dave

Dave, this thread just took several seconds to load. (Now for those of you on dial-up, I'm sure you're thinking "so what's the problem...too fast or something?) But I'm on an ISDN line, and I usually have zero wait time for a page to load. But to be honest, everything I worked on today seemed to take a long time to load (relatively speaking....), and I thought it might be something here locally. (They're blasting out tons of lovely Tennessee bedrock at the other end of our street to widen a highway. Occasionally they hit something and it knocks out our power . Kind of like living in a war zone. I thought it might be that they nicked the line or something...you never know.) But anyway, just thought I'd let you know that yes, something does seem to be awry.

Strangely enough, I had a day of slow loading your site, but then it seems to have cured itself. Just that one day, and now everything is back to normal.

One thing is for sure, DG is a very CPU and memory intensive application. The database gets hit extremely hard during all times, but especially during peaks (10am and 9pm EST).

Eventually I'll need to go to a 2 server setup, with one server handling the web requests, and the other server handling the database. They'll both need to be more powerful machines, too.

I think the slowdown we're seeing is probably CPU related. I will do some work on optimizing some code and reducing database queries, but this is only a crutch. In the long-run I'll have to upgrade our hardware.

Dave

You can help me by letting me know which pages seem to be the slowest for you. Are you finding that some areas of the site are nice and snappy while other areas are slow?

Which areas? Which pages in specific (if there are any).

Thanks,
Dave

Dave - going into the different forums is very slow - it takes a long time for them to load. But once I'm in a forum I can go from thread to thread pretty quickly. In fact it seems quite a bit better than last night did.

poppysue - I've done a little optimization this morning. You'll start seeing messages on problematic pages that tell you how long it took that page to generate itself.

Would you believe the homepage is taking 14 seconds to generate?

The forums is taking around 8 seconds (last I checked) and the threads are under a second.

The journals are nice and snappy (I've rewritten them and they are as optimized as they can be), but when lots of people are hitting the forums, it slows the entire system down.

This is the reason for the overall slowdown at DG - it's starting to get a little overwhelmed with all the work I put it through on the forums.

If I can further optimize the forums and homepage, it will significantly improve performance through the entire site.

One thing is certain, though. At this rate of growth, we're going to need new hardware within a month.

Dave

Poppysue, thanks for making me aware of this.Dave- I thought it was just my 'puter. Slow over here too, lately. I'll have to pay more attention. Lisa

One thing is for sure, we need better hardware sooner rather than later. If anybody knows a business who would like to win my eternal gratitude (and perhaps a nice little ad on the bottom of each page) in exchange for hardware, please send them my way.

Dave

Well, I did a lot of optimization this morning. I got the homepage down to 3 seconds (you can see the timer below the forums list).

The forums are down to 7-8 seconds (it was 14 seconds - I had the two reversed in the previous post about this).

This is the best I can do without removing the feature that checks for new posts on your behalf. I'm not willing to get rid of that feature, though, because it's one of my favorites.

This is about the best optimization I can do for now - the only way to improve it any better than this is to completely overhaul it and I'm not even sure how much performance gain I would find. :(

Dave

Hi Dave, I cannot believe the work you put into your lovely site. Just love the new heading "Dave's Garden" and the morning glories. Nice homey touch.

I too thought it was slow a couple of days ago. But better now.

Still having trouble with my Journal. Maybe my problem is 'you cannot teach an old dog new tricks' I liked the old format. Oh well will get used to it eventually.

I just did some work on my journal & it seemed to be running fine. No troubles there

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karma - not minutes, seconds. :) Seconds are extremely important during webserving. 1 second times 60 visitors = 60 seconds = 1 minute.

this is very very bad when you have lots of poeple hitting the site all at the same time. Every single millisecond counts for a lot.

Dave