How fast / lean can xenForo be?

[island]

What's the fastest page load you get with xenForo setting everything to "fastest/leanest"?

E.g. are the round corners slowing down firefox a bit? With the extended statusbar in firefox 3.6.10 I'm seeing forum home and forum display page load times of around 1 to 1.2 seconds here. Are there things we can do to approach 0.5 seconds page load time?

In comparison I'm seeing 1.4 to 2.5 from vB4 which is way slower still for me than vB3 which clocks at 0.7 to 1.0 in firefox 3.6.10. chrome seems noticably faster than firefox 3.x on the css layouts, but I don't have a way to clock chrome pageload time. Maybe I should wait for ff4 to become mainstream before asking, but speed is one of my real interests with xenForo.

 

[HannahP]

E.g. are the round corners slowing down firefox a bit?

Why would they? It's CSS.

I'm seeing forum home and forum display page load times of around 1 to 1.2 seconds here. Are there things we can do to approach 0.5 seconds page load time?

Do you really think a half second is going to drive people away?

Besides, load time is going to be different for everyone, depending on the path the connection takes to/from the server, connection speed, latency, road work in Boston...

Your expectations are unrealistic.

 

[Blandt]

apples and oranges.

too many variables can't compare like that

 

[D.O.A.]

I'm perfectly happy to wait 2 seconds for a website to finish loading.

 

[island]

Why would they? It's CSS.

I'm not sure why, but firefox seems a tad slower on the css layouts than the oldschool tables forums like vB3. I'm not sure why this is. Chrome seems a tad faster.

Do you really think a half second is going to drive people away?

Besides, load time is going to be different for everyone, depending on the path the connection takes to/from the server, connection speed, latency, road work in Boston...

Your expectations are unrealistic.

Agreed there, My numbers above are only my own totally non-scientific observations tonight. Can't compare apples to apples yet obviously, and as you say it's not a make or break as everything is a balance between features and speed (and I want the features too.)

On forum display for example all the avatars must take a fraction of a second longer to load than the old-school few post status icons.

But I am curious how lean / how fast xenForo could be in "racing mode" compared to vB3 for example.

 

[Blandt]

Do you have any extensions on firefox? some extensions do slow the browser rendering.

Chrome gives the impression of faster loads because of its clean cut-the-pork layout and design. I switched to chrome for my goof browsing.
I still need firefox for few extensions that aren't available on chrome yet

 

[island]

I'm perfectly happy to wait 2 seconds for a website to finish loading.

Yea, I suppose I'm obsessing over speed now, and partially I'm just curious how fast xenForo can be if fast is the goal. For bragging rights I'd like to see page load times faster than vB3. I know it's a bit like asking what the top speed of a car is even though in the real world it will be packed with the family and 65-70 mph is perfectly fine But would love to see if some lean/fast page load times could come in at under 1 second or even approaching a half second or say in google's top 5% or top 10% of fast sites by means of a minimalist template set and/or feature set.

 

[island]

Do you have any extensions on firefox? some extensions do slow the browser rendering.

Chrome gives the impression of faster loads because of its clean cut-the-pork layout and design. I switched to chrome for my goof browsing.
I still need firefox for few extensions that aren't available on chrome yet

Good point too. I should install firefox on a separate box or VM without any extensions. I do currently have extensions such as the page load timer itself, web developer, proxy switch, showip, google toolbar. I don't think any of them would be specifically slowing down css rendering and I'm comparing vb3 to xenForo with these same plugins, but there's a chance the plugins could be skewing things too since we're talking sub-second differences. I tried uninstalling firebug since that's the only one dealing with css specifically (even though I had previously tried with it disabled.)

 

[Trevor]

The sky's the limit on this one.

 

[island]

Maybe once the beta comes out we'll get a "race" going to see who has the fastest running xenForo

 

[island]

(granted features and such might be more fun too , so maybe a week after we get to play with all the new toys!)

It would be nice to hit 0.5 as a mark, though sub 1.0 page loads would be plenty fast.

Edit: According to http://xenforo.com/community/threads/real-world-page-loading-speed.1215/ the default is already in the fast zone which is great -- 1.4 on forum home, 1.2 to 1.9 on the forum display pages with 1.5 being the "fast" line. As the others have observed there's the "race" and then the "real-world" - one considering the "fastest/leanest" and the other which will have to do with how it handles peak loads. With my vB3 forum on my current hardware even though I can see faster page loads in firefox, I'm actually hovering above the "fast" line on the google graph.

 

[Caelum]

apples and oranges.

too many variables can't compare like that

What he said. XF can't do anything about slow browsers being slower; try loading any site with IE & then loading it with Chrome.

I don't see why you'd want to hit 0.5, rather than just optimize it to whatever is realistic without losing 90% of the style.
Basically, if you'd want to optimize it on your own install, what you'd to is...
-Spread all static content over several subdomains that don't set cookies
-Make sure gzip is enabled server-side
-Do a couple of (largely redundant anyway) code edits

That's the basics, there's more that can be done, but these are the ones that are going to yield the most results. Other than that, honestly, you can't do very much as XF is already really fast.
I don't see the problem with waiting 2 seconds for a page to render though.

 

[hescominsoon]

What's the fastest page load you get with xenForo setting everything to "fastest/leanest"?

E.g. are the round corners slowing down firefox a bit? With the extended statusbar in firefox 3.6.10 I'm seeing forum home and forum display page load times of around 1 to 1.2 seconds here. Are there things we can do to approach 0.5 seconds page load time?

In comparison I'm seeing 1.4 to 2.5 from vB4 which is way slower still for me than vB3 which clocks at 0.7 to 1.0 in firefox 3.6.10. chrome seems noticably faster than firefox 3.x on the css layouts, but I don't have a way to clock chrome pageload time. Maybe I should wait for ff4 to become mainstream before asking, but speed is one of my real interests with xenForo.

part of any speed issue is the browser itself. FF is very dated..even FF4 isn't going to be multi-threaded so good luck there. Use either IE or chrome for as well..they are inherently faster than FF these days.

 

[Luke F]

Firefox has always struggled with CSS3, especially shadows. They make scrolling laggy if you use smooth scrolling, and everything is just slightly less responsive.

XenForo doesn't get it very bad though, barely noticeable.