# [merged] Site speed threads x3



## renau1g

Is it just me or has the site been slow since later last week? Seems like it hangs and stuck at Loading a long time, like 20+ seconds in some cases


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## weem

It's been really bad for me today - yesterday was fine though.

With that said, there was some new functionality to go in today at some point - there could be some things happening in the background. Or it could be something else entirely


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## Morrus

The new functionality is going to be delayed a few days.


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## IronWolf

renau1g said:


> Is it just me or has the site been slow since later last week? Seems like it hangs and stuck at Loading a long time, like 20+ seconds in some cases




It has definitely had its slow periods for me from different network locations.  It seems to zip along in the early morning hours but then can crawl during the mid-day hours.  It's been like that since mid-last week or so for me.


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## Odhanan

Morrus said:


> The new functionality is going to be delayed a few days.



Hey, Morrus. Could you shrink your sig a bit or something? All your posts are deformed, and I have a resolution of 1280x800 on my laptop. That's driving me nuts. Thanks.


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## Nagol

*Board Responsiveness*

I notice a dramatic slowdown yesterday and today in the forums -- multi second delay between clciking a link and the new page appearing.

Anyone else notice?


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## Morrus

Yup, it's been pretty slow today.  We haven't figured out why yet.  Traffic's been a bit above average.


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## Nagol

Thanks for the reply.

When in doubt, blame the recent changes.  _Dice rolls are choking the board!_  (almost certainly not the case, but...)


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## Morrus

A much more likely candidate is us fixing email notifications on thread subscriptions - that's a heavy process.  But, like I said, we don't know for sure yet.


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## surfarcher

Responsiveness does seem to be up and down. I always just assume our trusty e/w staff are working to improve what they can and I just bear with it


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## Camelot

I've been noticing the load times get slower and slower the past few weeks.  It now usually takes a good 15-20 seconds (oh, noes!) for a page to load, which isn't terrible, but sometimes it just doesn't load at all, and I have to give EN World a rest before coming back.


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## Morrus

Yes, we know.


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## renau1g

Anyone still noticing the site moving at a snail's pace? It takes forever to load up a page, sometimes timing out...


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## surfarcher

Yes it's still slow   They are doing their best.


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## Morrus

Incidentally, we also have some new hardware options lined up.  However, much as I'd love to explain them, I don't understand them - but darjr is currently liasing with Cyberstreet on technical configuration stuff (it's either a new server, or a second sevrer to augment the current one, or something else...)

I'll let you know when I know more; it's a case of getting various people on the same page at the same time, as I understand it.


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## mach1.9pants

I really hope it helps. I have pretty much stopped coming to ENW more than once per week because of the speed during the last 2 and a half months or so. It has been anywhere from 10 to more than 60 seconds for each click for me during that period. As in 10 - 60+ to get to the forum, another to get to the thread I click on, more for each page I go to, then another to get to a reply page then another for the reply to post...

As you can imagine doing 3 pages of unread posts on a thread then replying can take about 10 minutes instead of 1 or 2.

I'll keep checking back every week or so for better results. Well at least until my subscription expires! 

EDIT: and my email notification hasn't worked for literally years, can you just turn it off if it is causing the slow down? Does it actually work for anyone?

Just FYI to get to the point of typing this from the main forum page took me 9 minutes


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## drothgery

mach1.9pants said:


> EDIT: and my email notification hasn't worked for literally years, can you just turn it off if it is causing the slow down?




Please. Email notifications are very handy for PBP, but I've pretty much gotten used to them not working. Insanely slow message boards, though, can't be worked around.


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## Seonaid

CM and ENW are painfully slow recently. It's getting to the point where I don't want to come to either site. I definitely haven't been spending as much time as I normally do. I would say it's my connection, but all other sites are fine. I'm generally pretty easy going when it comes to this kind of thing, but the problems the past few days have made me think I want to cancel my subscriptions.


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## freyar

Wow, I've noticed a little slowness, but nothing like what people have said in this thread!


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## Morrus

Could we avoid "me too" posts, please, folks.  As noted, we're aware of the problem, we're going with the assumption that nobody is magically an exception to it (so just assume all 90,000 members have posted "me too"), and we are working on it.

Thanks!  We'll let you know when the new hardware is ready to go.


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## SolitonMan

Morrus, I don't know how tech savvy you are, but if you want to get a "behind the scenes" look at areas to improve performance, you might want to check out the site using Firefox with Firebug enabled and open.  I've been doing so today because the site did seem to be taking quite a while, and what I saw showed that every page seems to be loading more than 500 kB of data, and in the case of a lot of the files, this is a repetitive download based on the building blocks used in the page (e.g. - topper.gif, topper2.gif, utilities.js, etc.).  Since these features are used in each page, it might be useful to consider redoing the site in an AJAX format that then only retrieves the data necessary for the click, instead of retrieving every file every click.  

FireBug also shows the download times for each resource, and today it's been taking no less than 30 seconds per page.  I know that you're always striving to improve the site, so some fundamental changes might be useful.  

Sorry if all of this is well known and simple to you, just thought I'd try to add in something helpful.  Good luck!


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## surfarcher

Shouldn't most of the content be marked with a cache expiry of a day or a week or more?


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## thalmin

I don't know if this is related to the thread, but I can't get to ENWorld from IE8. I get a message " Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage." I am running Windows 7. Same computer, I can get on with Safari.


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## darjr

working here. What are you using now?


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## Merkuri

thalmin said:


> I don't know if this is related to the thread, but I can't get to ENWorld from IE8. I get a message " Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage." I am running Windows 7. Same computer, I can get on with Safari.




Try clearing the cache in IE.


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## IronWolf

I just checked IE8 (not my usual browser) and the site works for me.  The clearing cache suggestion sounds good.  I did notice the newsflash thing at the top didn't appear to want to display the images.  It says 'Progressive JPEG - unable to render'.  



darjr said:


> working here. What are you using now?




He noted he was using Safari to access the site now.


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## darjr

I did see the issue with the jpgs in IE before. 'Progressive jpeg - unable to render'.  [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION]

Don't know how I missed the safari bit.


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## IronWolf

The site speed has seemed much better for me over the past several days.


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## Piratecat

We've been flying. Eyebeams caught the remnants of an old deactivated hacking attempt that darjr has now completely removed. Even inactive, the malicious code was acting as an anchor. With it gone, everything is much, much snappier.


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## Seonaid

Awesome! Thanks eyebeams and darjr!


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## Cergorach

Earlier today it was working fine (not fast, but decent), now it's taking minutes for a page to load. If it loads at all, black pages, a few posts. Some pages won't completely at all (I assume a timeout). I noticed the trouble about 90 minutes ago.


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## Cergorach

It's going a little faster now, but certainly not fast.

The meta forum or the forum index page takes ~10 seconds to load, the 4E forum takes ~30 seconds to load and a full page thread ~10-15 seconds.

I am located in Europe, but have a very fast internet connection 100Mbit (up and down).
Response time to enworld.org is 127-129ms (US?), to a website in my own country it's 2-4ms, to a site in germany it's 22-24ms and to the UK it's 15-23ms. To wizards.com (US) as well it's 191-193ms and that is loading way faster then enworld.org.


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## Morrus

As I mentioned before, folks, we know about the speed issues. If they happen to you, they happen to us, too.  Posting "me too" doesn't help us.  

We have hardware lined up; we're just getting our ducks in a row so that we can get it all in place.


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## renau1g

Will there be a site disruption if you are installing some new hardware? Just curious. Also, would there be an ETA on that disruption.

Thanks!


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## Morrus

We'll let you know in advance; right now I don't actually know.  This high-level tech stuff is beyond me, but we have good people working on it.


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## renau1g

Cool. Thanks. Tech stuff is above me too. Now, financial stuff ...that's my wheelhouse baby!


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## Cergorach

Morrus said:


> As I mentioned before, folks, we know about the speed issues. If they happen to you, they happen to us, too.  Posting "me too" doesn't help us.
> 
> We have hardware lined up; we're just getting our ducks in a row so that we can get it all in place.




1.) The issue was first mentioned almost two months ago.
2.) Piratcat made the following comment:


> We've been flying. Eyebeams caught the remnants of an old deactivated hacking attempt that darjr has now completely removed. Even inactive, the malicious code was acting as an anchor. With it gone, everything is much, much snappier.




It wasn't all that much snappier at certain times, so I posted as such of a bug report as I was able to. Maybe someone 'upstairs assumed that with Eyebeams 'fix' the issue was resolved (it wasn't).


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## Merkuri

Morrus said:


> If they happen to you, they happen to us, too.




That's not always the case, you know.  It is now, but sometimes problems on one user's computer or network can make the site slow for them and no one else.  So if the site is slow for you it's normal to drop by the Meta forum and say, "Hey, is the site slow for anyone else?" or look for other users who have said the same.

We're not trying to annoy you or rush you, we're just confirming to each other that no, it's not us, it's the site.  And especially when the site sped up briefly, one of the mods mentioned that something got fixed, and then the site slowed down again, we need to reaffirm with each other that it's still the site.


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