# *very* slow site



## discosoc (Sep 26, 2015)

Why in the world is this site so slow?  Are there plans to move to a better host, or is the own just not really experienced or what?  This is easily the slowest forum experience I've had in a very long time.


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## Morrus (Sep 26, 2015)

It's fairly speedy for me.  How slow are you talking?  I wonder if there's some kind of routing issue between you and the server?


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## SkidAce (Sep 26, 2015)

Morrus said:


> It's fairly speedy for me.  How slow are you talking?  I wonder if there's some kind of routing issue between you and the server?



It was very slow last night with multiple 504 Gateway not found errors.  Seemed to clear up around 1am.


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## Morrus (Sep 26, 2015)

Some kind of glitch, perhaps.  Hopefully it's OK now.


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## discosoc (Sep 26, 2015)

Morrus said:


> It's fairly speedy for me.  How slow are you talking?  I wonder if there's some kind of routing issue between you and the server?




I'm talking 4 to 5 seconds for a page to load, which is really not good for a forum where you're switching pages sort of regularly.  It was worse without adblocking, and I guess the next step is to disable scripts to see if that makes a difference.  I can't shake the feeling that it's just bloated software or a poorly optimized/indexed database setup on the host.

It's definitely not a routing issue.  The site is fine when it's dead in the morning or something, but in the afternoons and evenings it bogs down horribly.  I'm almost certain it's just a resource issue related to the host, but regardless of the cause, it's been like this for years.  I'm also concerned that with all the potentially new arrivals from the WotC forum (myself included), it's going to make a bad situation worse.


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## Morrus (Sep 26, 2015)

That's certainly not what I'm experiencing - I'm getting under a second page loads.  You say you've experienced that for years?  I haven't, not in a number of years (isolated temporary incidents notwithstanding).  Analytics is reporting page loads of about a second for over 90% of users on average, which isn't super-fast, but isn't the 4-5 seconds you're getting. I'm not really sure how to go about diagnosing this without being able to replicate it.


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## discosoc (Sep 26, 2015)

Well, it's not so bad at the moment anyway, but blocking all ads and tracking scripts seems to make a fairly big difference even now.  The facebook plugin, particularly, from what I can see.  I'll test the site more tonight as traffic ramps up and update the thread for anyone interested.


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## discosoc (Sep 26, 2015)

Morrus said:


> You say you've experienced that for years?




Yes.  I've browsed the site frequently, but never bothered to actually register before because the page load performance of the forums was always noticeably poor compared to other sites.  Maybe I'm just sensitive to it as a result of managing sites and networks for a living.  Every millisecond counts in my world.


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## Scott DeWar (Sep 27, 2015)

Are you on a cable modem? If so, during 'normal people' hours, the node gets bogged down.


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## discosoc (Sep 27, 2015)

Scott DeWar said:


> Are you on a cable modem? If so, during 'normal people' hours, the node gets bogged down.




I'm aware of how things work, and it's not that.  Anyway, disabling ads and scripts on the site seems to have drastically fixed the issue for me.  It's still slower than pretty much every other site I visit, but better than before.


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## Darkness (Oct 2, 2015)

Site's been rather slow for me lately. Today, it's even worse, with database errors and 504 gateway time-outs being really, really common.


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## Scott DeWar (Oct 2, 2015)

Its a little slow, but no 504 timeouts.


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## StreamOfTheSky (Nov 4, 2015)

The past two days, the site's become incredibly slow for me.  It takes anywhere from 1 - 5 minutes to load a page, in some cases having to Reload the page one or several times after getting 504 Gateway Timeout errors.  Just getting to the 2nd page of this thread took over 10 minutes and 5 reloads.  What happened?  How do I disable these scripts and ads?


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