Site Performace

daveo82

Member
I recently converted to Xenforo from VB3.8 (mid-may), a few people have mentioned the new forum is a tad slower although can't say I've noticed much difference myself. I checked Google's Webmaster Tools and page loading times have actually increased (see pic).

Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 4.0 seconds to load (updated on Jun 6, 2011). This is slower than 65% of sites. These estimates are of high accuracy (more than 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

The forum traffic has slowed down recently although this is common as it's a Football Club fans forum and the season is over. We are averaging at least 65-75 people online between 9am and 10pm and peak at around 150 when a new player is linked to the club. When the season kicks off again we will be back up to at least around 120 people online most times, peaking at 350-450 during the match.

Obviously my main concern is will more traffic slow the site down even further once the season kicks off again.

I'm on a reseller shared host with Heart Internet, as far as I know the servers are in Nottingham which is only 15 miles away from the hometown of the clubs forum I run. As you can see from the graph page loading times were half what they were on vb3.8.

I was wondering if there is anything I could do that would speed up the loading times again?
 

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There's plenty of things you can do. You could consider getting a new host (say, a dedicated server, or a solid VPS), using XF Optimise, or taking a look at Cloudflare. If you got an url, could take a look if there's anything specific that sticks out too.

With your level of traffic, I'd personally be more comfortable getting a VPS or dedi, but YMMV.

EDIT: Curse you, ninjas above me :p
 
There usually isn't much you can do on a shared server to affect performance.

APC caching can really help if your host supports it:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/tip-use-apc.6456/

And your server might not be tuned for innodb tables. vB uses myisam. XenForo uses innodb:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/changing-tables-from-myisam-to-innodb.14476/#post-189585

But again this has to do with the server config which you can't access on a shared server.

I'll contact Heart Internet and see if it's possible.


I did have a read of that, I tried XFOptimize but after installing it some people had problems posting, as soon as I disabled it the problem went away. I'm not that techincal minded, for me if turning it on or off doesn't work then it's broken and get rid.

I've removed the sidebar share block, I've even totally disabled Twitter and Facebook integration now to see if that helps.

or taking a look at Cloudflare. If you got an url, could take a look if there's anything specific that sticks out too.

With your level of traffic, I'd personally be more comfortable getting a VPS or dedi, but YMMV.

I'll take a look at Cloudflare now thanks. The URL is http://dcfcfans.co.uk

The adsense I make on the forum would cover the upgrade to dedicated, just wanted to hold off unless it was absolutely necessary as it's a nice chunk of free beer money at the moment :D
 
I'll take a look at Cloudflare now thanks. The URL is http://dcfcfans.co.uk

The adsense I make on the forum would cover the upgrade to dedicated, just wanted to hold off unless it was absolutely necessary as it's a nice chunk of free beer money at the moment :D
Fair enough :p

Nothing that really stands out, but since you can't get XFOptimize to work, I'd recommend using atleast a minified version of by far the largest JS file in Xenforo. Run it through http://www.refresh-sf.com/yui/ (don't touch any checkboxes) & replace the old one. You'll need to redo it every XF update.

Other than that, there's several other things that can be done, but XFOptimize (or atleast minifying that JS file) and Cloudflare should give you the most major gains if you wanna hold off on a dedi when it comes to things you actually have control over on shared hosting.
 
Fair enough :p

Nothing that really stands out, but since you can't get XFOptimize to work, I'd recommend using atleast a minified version of by far the largest JS file in Xenforo. Run it through http://www.refresh-sf.com/yui/ (don't touch any checkboxes) & replace the old one. You'll need to redo it every XF update.

Other than that, there's several other things that can be done, but XFOptimize (or atleast minifying that JS file) and Cloudflare should give you the most major gains if you wanna hold off on a dedi when it comes to things you actually have control over on shared hosting.

I've signed upto a VPS now, turned out cheaper than the shared reseller I was on before. (£3 extra into the beer fund), Will be moving the site across today, I'll give it a couple weeks and see what effect it has on the loading times.
 
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