# Temporary front page



## Morrus

Please let me know whether this affects your lag problems.  Trying to identify the bottleneck.


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## Charwoman Gene

Blows my lag bproblem out of the water!


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## Hrothgar Rannúlfr

Seems much better.

I was having trouble even reading through threads, before.  Way too slow.

I was beginning to question whether it was a problem with my computer, but it works fine on the other sites I visit.

Glad you're looking into it.


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## Mark

No lag or hang ups now.


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## mxyzplk

Totally faster.  Page loads in 62 ms off of 12s+ earlier.  Not to nag, but remember the post I made about front end performance issues and fixes with the new ENWorld?  They all still apply and it may be time to look at them.  

Most of the problem is the 28 separate JavaScript files, totalling more than 500k.  Browsers won't download other elements when a script is downloading.  If you:

1.  Eliminate unneeded JS
2.  Combine the remaining JS into one file and move it to the bottom of the HTML, not the top
3.  Minify the JS (google it)
4.  Turn on mod_deflate in your Apache 2.0
5.  Turn on expiration headers so that at the bare minimum browsers will cache that 500k of grunge

You'll probably improve your site performance by a huge percentage.


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## two

*Your front page is a freakin' hog*

This is infinitely faster.  Get rid of that old front page, like, NOW!


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## garyh

Much faster!


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## JoshR

Very fast!


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## Filcher

Much faster from front page to forum. Still getting dropped on posting replies though.

"Safari could not open the page “http://www.enworld.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=2” because the server is not responding."

Although in fairness, it used to be suicidal even to try to see ENworld in the evening. Early morning or not at all were the 2 options.


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## Mark

Did you just try something six minutes ago that might have lagged it down again?


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## Archmage

Noticeably faster now. Previously, switching pages would be 10-20 seconds, often timing out. Haven't seen any of that with the temporary front page.


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## rgard

Much faster.  We're cooking on gas now.


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## Knightfall

It does seem faster but it still freezes once in a while. I lost an entire post about half-an-hour ago.

I'm using IE7, BTW.


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## Elodan

Was much faster but I got a time out message for two or three minutes about five minutes ago.  I did get the timeout message much faster than previously.

Now it's speedy.


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## Mouseferatu

Eh. Still having a lot of problems. I'll get a few minutes of good speed, then a while of "it takes several minutes to load a page," then a while of good speed, and so on.

And I frequently lose posts. (This is not my first time trying to respond to this page, for instance.)

Running Firefox 2.something, for what it's worth.


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## DaveMage

Mouseferatu said:


> Eh. Still having a lot of problems. I'll get a few minutes of good speed, then a while of "it takes several minutes to load a page," then a while of good speed, and so on.




Same here.


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## weem

Been playing around for about 5 minutes to test (heading places I have not been, moving around a lot, etc) and it is much much faster (running at what should be normal speeds now).


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## Charwoman Gene

LAg spike at 11:00pm est


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## Intrope

I'm still seeing transient slowdowns--but they're better (it actually loaded the pages during the slowdown, just took ~60 seconds). In the fast bits it's doing fine. 

Also, with the full front page (before this test) I had noticed that the front page was always much slower than a forum to load (I open front page, general and rules in a tab set--the front page was always last to finish, often by a lot).

Edit: I saw the same lag spike as Charwoman Green, only it took me longer to write my reply.

More: Once the page had loaded after the lag spike, I've been able to post quick replies and do edits all but instantly.


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## Charwoman Gene

Intrope said:


> More: Once the page had loaded after the lag spike, I've been able to post quick replies and do edits all but instantly.




same for me


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## racoffin

A million percent better in speed and performance. Using Opera 9 and IE 7. Happy happy.


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## Michael Morris

Uhm, the server still has to process all the front page articles even if they aren't being displayed.


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## Orius

Yup, seems to be running fine, though there was a slight hiccup a few minutes ago.  Didn't last very long though.


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## Graf

I can confirm there are still hangs. Specifically around 13:30 Singapore time [fixed time] the system had "loading" for a few minutes. However all requests (3 or so) from me ultimately resolved within 2ish minutes.

I still find EnWorld usable btw.


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## Graf

It hung again starting around 13:52 Singapore time [fixed time].
Partial resolution of one request  (this thread) started at 13:55
Everything else came back around ~13:57

Not sure if this sort of info is helpful. But 5 minute hangs every ~20 minutes sounds about right to me.


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## Agamon

There's still a bit of hanging, I've seen, but for the most part, much quicker.


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## Khaalis

Same issues mentioned by Ari. While the temp front page loaded relatively quickly the first time, getting to this page, and getting a reply window took considerably longer.

If it matters, running Firefox 3.0.1.


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## vagabundo

Page was laggy for me and the forums slow, but I never lost a post.

[strikeout]Now everything seems superslick. But I have good connections. 10bps at home and very fast back bone here in work (college). I'm based in Dublin, not sure where these servers are hosted.[/strikeout]

EDIT: Okay looks like I've lots and lots of lag posting..


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## Bront

No difference on my end unfortunately.


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## Morrus

I'm gonna leve it up for a day at least, and look at the stats on Google Analytics.  If they jump up, we've found our answer.  If they don't, we haven't!



> Uhm, the server still has to process all the front page articles even if they aren't being displayed.




Oh?  Interesting.  How often does it do that, Mike?


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## Mark

Still super-fast except for that one glitch yesterday about 7pm central USA time.


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## gargoyle2k7

For once, EN World loaded fast.  That's the one problem I've always had with this site; it loads so damned slow.  Still, I'd rather see all the pretty lights than that temporary page.  I thought it was some kind of error page!


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## Schmoe

The site is much faster for me, and the front page loads nearly instantaneously.  The forums are still a little bit slow, but they are very much improved over the previous month or two.


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## ki11erDM

Front page loaded VERY fast.  Forums... slow slow slow.


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## Arnwyn

Front page loaded instantly.

Forums are still slow, though maybe a tiny bit better. Posting is still a bit of a pain, though it does seem to be a little bit better (haven't been timed out yet!).

Edit: Scratch that. Posting still hurts. Ow.


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## Troll Wizard

The temp FP is a bit faster.

The forums are as slow as ever, and I am accessing via T# at work and Verizon FIOS 5 MB at home


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## Merkuri

I still get very large periods of lag.  EN World usually chugs along fine for me, but it's at the point where I know once one page becomes slow to load that EN World will be pretty much unusable for 5-10 minutes, and at that point I usually move onto something else.

I don't think the front page has changed much for me, personally.


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## Michael Morris

I looked into what was actually done for the temp page and I was wrong - there is no database processing involved for that page since it is an html file as opposed to a phtml file. So it will naturally load faster.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go moderate some threads.


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## darjr

The home page just slowed down for me this last time i visited. Before the adds and were not there, now they are. Not saying that's what it is, just only saying that was the biggest difference I noticed.

Edit: submission still took too long... but was MUCH faster.


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## Lackhand

Still at "not dead" speeds, but we're back to a lot slower than we were earlier -- around 7 seconds (poor baby!) to load the forums from the front page. And actually, it took even longer for the thread status icons to load.


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## darjr

The home page is still loading slower than before.

It loads fast then pauses then the add shows then another section goes fast then pauses then the vertical add shows along with the rest of the page.


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## Mark

Mark said:


> Still super-fast except for that one glitch yesterday about 7pm central USA time.





This morning I have been seeing sporadic moments of glitchiness, again.  Mostly when posting but sometimes when just loading a page.  Not as bad as before, of course, but about once an hour or so.


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## Intrope

Mark said:


> This morning I have been seeing sporadic moments of glitchiness, again.  Mostly when posting but sometimes when just loading a page.  Not as bad as before, of course, but about once an hour or so.



Here, too. In particular, the boards recovered from a slowdown at 11:23 Central Time. 

It does seem to be helping, but it still seems to have something that's seizing up periodically.

Edit: and another seizure from 11:43 to 11:48--so 5 minutes down with 20 minutes in between, just about exactly. That sounds like something is on a schedule, and hoses the server every time it runs. A backup job running amok, or something? (Hopefully it isn't rooted...)


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## Montague68

Tried to load the page at 9:25 AM Pacific today, big lag spike, took around 2-3 minutes to load the front page in.

Last night around 10 PM Pacific time it was almost instant.


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## Morrus

Something clealry periodically "happens" on the server.  If I could pin it down to exactly how often it is, I might be able to identify it.


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## Intrope

Morrus said:


> Something clealry periodically "happens" on the server.  If I could pin it down to exactly how often it is, I might be able to identify it.



5 minutes of downtime, 20 minutes up time--see my edit above. This is consistent with a number of people's comments, too. Hope it's something easy to fix! (I know it's not easy to find...)


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## Morrus

So something that's happening every half hour for 5 mins or so?  or every quarter hour for 5 mins?

There are some scheduled tasks that are taking place in the background, but they're all at 15/30 or 60 minute repeated intervals.  Nothing at 20 minutes.


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## Mark

Something just now killed it for a few minutes.


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## darjr

Yea, just saw that. Not slow, but dead.

About 12:07 my time and now it's back. Was not able to keep trying the whole time so I'm not sure how long it was down.


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## Ashrum the Black

still a touch slow, and a bit of lag, but hey, at least the pages show up at 1:30 in the afternoon instead of just clocking away like crazy.

-Ashrum


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## Umbran

Morrus said:


> Something clealry periodically "happens" on the server.  If I could pin it down to exactly how often it is, I might be able to identify it.





Morrus, check your PMs, please.  I think I can help with this.


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## Michael Morris

Morrus said:


> So something that's happening every half hour for 5 mins or so?  or every quarter hour for 5 mins?
> 
> There are some scheduled tasks that are taking place in the background, but they're all at 15/30 or 60 minute repeated intervals.  Nothing at 20 minutes.



I've searched the machine top to bottom. I'm guessing it's a hacker's cron job but its damn well hidden whatever it is.


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## Eosin the Red

The site seemed normal last night but is dragging today.


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## Obryn

It hung a bit for me just now.

Overall, though, everything seems quite zippy, including the forums.

-O


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## Mark

Mark said:


> Something just now killed it for a few minutes.





Happened again at 12:33 pm central USA time, for several minutes.


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## Morrus

Michael Morris said:


> I've searched the machine top to bottom. I'm guessing it's a hacker's cron job but its damn well hidden whatever it is.




I just disabled five scheduled tasks which we weren't using, plus one related to PHPAds... we're not using that, are we?


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## Montague68

Just tried to log in again, at 12:14 PM Pacific time. The front page partially loaded after 3 minutes, then loaded completely after 6 minutes. Once loaded to get to the forums it was a 5 second load time or so.


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## Intrope

From 2:14 Central to 2:25, I couldn't reload this thread, although I never waited as long as Gearjammer.


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## Ghaerdon Fain

It's much faster. Thx. No headaches today


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## kreynolds

Front page loaded in less than a second. Page one of this thread loaded in just over a second. Page two of this thread failed to load after several minutes. Hit refresh a minute ago and page two of this thread loaded in about a second or two.


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## Charwoman Gene

I get lockups at X:00 and X:20 hourly.


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## weem

I just hit a major 4-5 minute snag - I'm posting this now having just come out of it


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## Merkuri

weem said:


> I just hit a major 4-5 minute snag - I'm posting this now having just come out of it




Ditto.  It seemed to last from around 8:12 to 8:18 EDT.


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## Graf

Dear Sir,

IN reference to your comment below 







Morrus said:


> Something clealry periodically "happens" on the server.  If I could pin it down to exactly how often it is, I might be able to identify it.



I refer you to my post on the first page of this thread


Graf said:


> It hung again starting around 13:52 Singapore time [fixed time].
> Partial resolution of one request  (this thread) started at 13:55
> Everything else came back around ~13:57



If you like I can try to provide more start and stop points. When it's up Enworld is lickitysplit fast so I don't think there is going to be too much lag.


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## Graf

Attempt to post an edit a wiki page hung at 8:39 Singapore time [fixed time]. The edit (and another request) "went through" at 8:43.

I am using firefox 3.0.1. The pages displayed "typical" behavior during this period. Showing a "loading" mark on the tab for the entire duration.


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## Graf

Persistent typical lag* noted around 9:04 [fixed time]; both wiki and forums affected. First request resolved 9:07. Additional requests began to resolve at 9:08.

*Multiple tabs with the "loading" mark persisting past the normal "timeout" time.


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## Steve Jung

ENworld just stopped working for me from 1:29AM to 1:36AM GMT.


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## Graf

PTL* noted at 9:54 [fixed time] when attempting to preview new thread.

Request resolved 9:57.


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## Graf

PTL* noted around 10:18 [http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclo...=8&day=8&year=2008&hour=9&min=54&sec=0&p1=236fixed time].

Request resolved 10:22.


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## xmanii

Couldnt load a page at 2034 to 2037 (PDT), and then it was slow loading  to get to this page


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## Chadarius

I absolutely love the temp page. Add your ENWorld logo and a bit larger set of news links and call it a day. Even if you think I'm insane (I seem to be agreeing with a whole lot of people though), if you just had this type of page as an option I would use it. Perhaps a handheld device friendly page? Simple and fast is good. I like Simple


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## xmanii

2123 I wasnt able to load ENWorld, and i finally loaded at 2127, then it wouldn't load 3 pages, for another 2 minutes (2129)


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## cougent

I have been here about 6 different times today and no lag even switching to forums on the first 5, did have some lag between posts in the forums but only about 10 seconds or so.

This time however following the link from the temp front page to this thread took about 45 seconds.  No idea why  11:30ish PM CDT if you want timestamps to check against logs.

EDIT: Posted first then went and read entire thread all 3 pages load within 2-3 seconds forwards, backwards, bouncing around... but it is now 11:42 PM seems definately to be hitting on the hours and half hours whatever it is.  Michael mentioned cron jobs, you might also want to check inside the cron jobs to see if any of them are launching child processes that don't list in the cron table, just some free advice (and worth every penny you paid for it!)

EDIT 2:  Left thread here and went to forums where it completely locked up from 11:47 untill 11:52 allowed 2.5 minutes before stopping and retrying.  3rd attempt got Network Timeout in about 10 seconds.  Reload from there got back in after about 15 seconds and then everything was fine again.


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## cotton

The front page definitely loaded much faster!


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## hewligan

Can we keep the new front page? I mean, you can tidy it up a bit, but it is easier to read, quicker to load, and contains more visible news within a single small page. Also, it isn't white text on black.

Gosh, I want to keep the new retro look.


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## Kralin Thornberry

No lag getting to the main page.  The forums...well....


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## Guillaume

No lag on my part for the past few days. I'm running on Firefox 3.0.


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## Mark

Still experiencing the periodic lags.  Going through one right now, it seems.


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## ki11erDM

9:56 everything rocked.  10:00 could not reload anything.  10:05 can reload and moving around fine.


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## Obryn

I have been having huge timeout problems all day.  Everything was unreachable from 12:15 pm or so CST until 12:25 or so, and again from about 12:35 to 12:45 or 12:50.  It greatly resembles how everything was last week.

-O


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## morbidgames

*The Slow Down*

The site is running significantly better right now, but it's still a bit slow compared to any of the other RPG related sites I visit. Before this new text only page that popped up I'd usually set enworld.org to load in it's own window while I continued to read other pages or do something else because of the long load time. It seemed to be the case regardless if I was at work or at home.

Work Specs: Windows box with Firefox 2
Home Specs: OS X 10.5 with Safari 3


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## Serendipity

Win!! Seems to have utterly resolved the issue.


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## cougent

Triskaidekafile said:


> Win!! Seems to have utterly resolved the issue.




And then again maybe not...

While in the forums I got a Network Tiemout screen twice while trying to move to another thread.  Closed browser completely and started over [Firefox 3 opens 4 tabs, 1 of which is ENW]  It took over 5 minutes just to load the temp text page. [2:05 pm CDT - 2:11 pm CDT]  This loaded fast and the New Reply loaded instantly, now we will see if it will submit...


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## gnfnrf

I have inconsistent results.  Sometimes, the main page loads faster, sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes, the forums move along at an OK clip, sometimes they don't.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but it really seems all over the place.

--
gnfnrf


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## Serendipity

cougent said:


> And then again maybe not...




Yeah, no sooner had I spoken...... :: wince ::
Load times have been extraordinary pretty much since I made this comment. About half the time a page will time out before it finishes loading.


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## Steve Jung

The problem is getting worse. Now the site seems to stick every 10-20 minutes or so.

Mac OSX 10.4.11
Safari 3.1.2


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## Serendipity

Agreed that performance seems to be deteriorating - it took twenty minutes for this page to load (There's some irony there I'm sure.)
For the record, running Firefox 2.0.0.16 on an XP machine with SP 3.  Hope that helps.


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## _sheepy_

Much faster.  Very much appreciated.


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## Cergorach

Sometimes the forum loads very quickly, other times it won't laod at all (times out after x amount of time).

Might I suggest that you look at the harddrive(s) of the server. I've had similar experiences with my fileserver, unexplained slow downs that where caused by a harddrive that wasn't wholy dead yet (but didn't show up on any standard tests, I heard the 'clicking sounds of death' by accident).


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## Bialaska

It seems just as laggy and slow-loading as always. And as always there are times where everything is super-fast, but it was that way before too, so that's nothing new. :/


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## DagazUlf

It was definitely quicker right after the temporary page went up, but the performance was horrible yesterday and today.  It took 4 refreshes to even get the front page, and getting to this thread was really slow.


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## Leontodon

When I viewed a thread and hit the firefox back-button it almost always hangs itself. That's new to me. Also If i viewed a thread and klick for example ENworlds General Discussion button or something like that the same problem occurs.


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## Michael Morris

After spending the last 4 days reading the Apache users manual I'm trying a new setting. Less is more.


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## Merkuri

Michael Morris said:


> After spending the last 4 days reading the Apache users manual I'm trying a new setting. Less is more.




I ran into another long period of lag this morning, so I don't think it helped.

From what I've seen, I don't think it's any MySQL or Apache settings that's causing this.  My guess is that you have _something_ on this machine that is running on a regular basis and taking up all of your memory/CPU/whatnot so that Apache and MySQL can't get their job done.

I know in Windows there's a tool called Performance Monitor that'll log a bunch of settings over time, like CPU and memory usage.  Is there something you could set up like that for Linux?  Take a look and see if there's something using up loads of CPU or RAM every 15 minutes or so.


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## Michael Morris

The linux equivalent is top.  I can run it, but it shows nothing. However, if the program has been tainted by a hacker there's no way it will show the culprit process.  I am not qualified to go making wholesale re-installs of the machine's software components.


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## Tharian

Whatever change you made let the front page load very quickly.  This is the fastest I've seen it load in a while.

Yesterday was decent, but today was noticeably faster, though.  Earlier this week had some very slow loads to the point where on Tuesday (I think?) timed out.


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## Merkuri

I don't know if this sheds any light on anything, but the last couple times I tried to come to EN World (which happened to be in the middle of lag spikes, apparently) the very top part of the front page loaded quickly, but the rest of it took a while to appear.  The part that showed up right away is the part that says:



> EN World
> This is a temporary page while we measure the change in server load.  Feedback here (speed related only, not content).




Then once the front page appeared it took a while to get into the actual boards.  Once the boards started loading it seemed to be back to normal speeds (I presume the lag spike ended).


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## uraniumdragon

*Don't go back!*

I'd have to say I like the current format over the "brand new" format. I can find stuff quicker now than could with the Block format. Of course, I liked last year's format also.


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