Comparative speed of my forum

Ingenious

Well-known member
I'd like to ask you all whether my forum is considered fast or slow in the great scheme of things (from the page load times below).

I have just over 200,000 posts and host on shared hosting still (but it's a cloud/cluster type service). I don't use any caching and can't do any server tweaks because it's shared.

In particular I'd like to know what kind of speed increase, if any, hosting on VPS or dedicated might bring (from your real life results looking at page generation times).

Pages on my forum typically take 0.2s to 0.3s to generate.

The fastest page is the What's New with no new posts - 0.14s
Forum home page - usually 0.2s to 0.3s
Entering the forum thread view for the biggest forum (500+ pages) - 0.3s to 0.5s
 
Sorry, I should have worded my post better. I am not looking for people to check my site and report on its speed - I already know how fast it is as per the post above. I'm asking people to share their own speeds especially VPS and dedicated forums so I can assess whether there are any major gains to be had from upgrading from shared :) I've edited the OP a bit to make this clearer.
 
That's interesting - not just the speed difference (about 2 or 3 times faster) but also your host. I moved away from 1&1 (in the UK, though at the time based in Germany) because of continual issues with their service and support. But I notice they bill by the hour for that cloud package and you can change it to suit. The reason this is interesting is because my site is very seasonal, and traffic multiplies by 10 in one specific month only. Being able to change spec just for that month and only be billed extra for the time being used could be handy!
 
That's interesting - not just the speed difference (about 2 or 3 times faster) but also your host. I moved away from 1&1 (in the UK, though at the time based in Germany) because of continual issues with their service and support.
Dedicated/Cloud servers have their own 24/7 support team, which as far as I know is US based.

One thing you have to remember though is that the 1&1 Cloud servers aren't managed, so you'll have to take care of everything yourself.

But I notice they bill by the hour for that cloud package and you can change it to suit. The reason this is interesting is because my site is very seasonal, and traffic multiplies by 10 in one specific month only. Being able to change spec just for that month and only be billed extra for the time being used could be handy!
That's why I went with them. It's also great for a new (growing) site as you can just increase the resources as needed.
 
Thanks DBA. I am beginning to think that going unmanaged and learning it yourself is the way to go, as this substantially decreases costs. I've done a bit of searching here and at a few users' recommendations checked out Linode. I'm reading through their guides now, but setting up a server doesn't seem overly difficult. What I mean is I probably don't understand 100% of what's going on but am not afraid to read guides and tutorials and try it out. The only concern being what to do when things go wrong (as in, where to start!).
 
The 1&1 system worked out of the box, however it's a lot more efficient after some tweaks and installing a caching system (xcache).

Uptime has been excellent, if I remember right we had a 100% up rate the first year.

BTW you'll also want to take some steps to secure it.
 
My site (link in sig) has similar post numbers to yours.

I'm on un-managed 3GB VPS (xtrahost.co.uk), running FCGI, Percona 5.5 with Xcache

Things which slow the speed of page generation down are the social plugins and google adsense java. I've just turned those off, as in 3 months, they have hardly been used.
 
Likewise I turned off the social media bits (which sped things up no end). I am also lucky enough to have direct adverts rather than use a third party, so my banners are generated in the Xenforo page itself and not a third party script. Other than use some sort of caching and/or change host I think it's as fast as I'll get.

But other problems with shared hosting are I can never use the better search option (my users frequently want to search for three letter terms or less) and quite honestly although it is a cloud/cluster type shared hosting it still runs slow from time to time.

In terms of speed I guess the best way to do this is install a clone of my forum on a VPS which has no long contractual obligations and then compare speeds.

Probably an impossible question to answer (horses for courses and all that) but if I had the choice of any OS on my own VPS is there a preferred one for Xenforo? I read in another post here that Debian is quicker than the others. And I understand then once I have installed everything there are further enhancements (at cost) to speed it up more, such as litespeed.
 
Things which slow the speed of page generation down are the social plugins and google adsense java. I've just turned those off, as in 3 months, they have hardly been used.
Social plugins won't really have an effect on page generation times, however it can drastically increase your page load times. (y)
Probably an impossible question to answer (horses for courses and all that) but if I had the choice of any OS on my own VPS is there a preferred one for Xenforo? I read in another post here that Debian is quicker than the others. And I understand then once I have installed everything there are further enhancements (at cost) to speed it up more, such as litespeed.
Don't really know anything about the different OS's, just know that we're using 64bit CentOS 6.
 
Thanks a TON again, I don't know how many times would I be thanking you :D but now I got another question..
I don't want normal users to see the debug file and the results of all the details of the xen functioning..
My I ask you to check my file coz the load times on some pages are like 2 seconds !!!
Enable debug mode by adding this to your library/config.php file:

Code:
$config['debug'] = 1;

That will add load stats at the bottom of each page.
 
Thanks a TON again, I don't know how many times would I be thanking you :D but now I got another question..
I don't want normal users to see the debug file and the results of all the details of the xen functioning..
My I ask you to check my file coz the load times on some pages are like 2 seconds !!!
Use this (edit the IP address to your own)

Code:
if($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '192.168.1.1')
{
    $config['debug'] = true;
}
 
Thanks to you, but I am also in a fix, I think the server I hosted on is overloaded, it is a shared hosting so sometimes the load times are .01 seconds and sometimes they are 11 to 12 seconds :( that too with no more than 4 or five users online :(
I dunno what to do??
Use this (edit the IP address to your own)

Code:
if($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '192.168.1.1')
{
    $config['debug'] = true;
}
 
Thanks to you, but I am also in a fix, I think the server I hosted on is overloaded, it is a shared hosting so sometimes the load times are .01 seconds and sometimes they are 11 to 12 seconds :( that too with no more than 4 or five users online :(
I dunno what to do??
Switch to a different hosting company.

:eek: 11-12 seconds is insane, I'd go nuts if my total load time was over 2 seconds (on a 5mb connection).
 
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