Some users saying site slow

[ibaker]

I have some users saying that my site http://www.aircraftpilots.com is running slow and not sure what I can do to assist them. My audience is predominately in Australia, the server (dedicated) is located on the US West Coast and the server has a lot of resources still available:
Server load 0.11 (8 CPUs)
Memory Used 12.16% (1,982,892 of 16,311,948)
Swap Used 0% (0 of 2,097,144)

It is only a few users and this is what they are saying:
http://www.aircraftpilots.com/threads/slow-site-response.38322/

Can anyone give me ideas on what I can look into to help these users...thanks

 

[ibaker]

I hope that it isn't always that low usage, otherwise you're blowing a lot of money that you don't need to be. For you a server load of 8.0 would be 100% capacity.

The usage is about as high as it gets. The server (dedicated):
Intel e3 1230 (8 cores)
16gb ram
4x73gb 15k rpm sas hdd
raid 10
320gb sata II hdd
5TB data
100mbps port
is only costing me $179 a month + $30 for WHM/cPanel and I pay $25 per month to Platinum Server Management to manage and monitor it for me as I am not a server person

Hosting here in Australia is so expensive and for that money I would be lucky to get a VPS with a quarter of the resources. So the thought was to pay that for a high spec'd server which would offset the latency a little whilst giving me ample room for expansion and greater protection with any unforeseen loadings...if you could get a server spec'd like this for only $179 a month, wouldn't you say yes given I was paying up to $400 in Australia for a quarter of it as a VPS

 

[zappaDPJ]

For what it's worth all the pages in your forum section resolve almost instantly for me, consistently in well under a second. The latest news section is very slow but I guess that's a delay pulling content from elsewhere. I'm on a fast, fibre connection but I'm also based in the UK so I'd expect there to be a degree of lag but in all honesty there's none whatsoever except where mentioned.

 

[Ingenious]

and I pay $25 per month to Platinum Server Management to manage and monitor it for me as I am not a server person

I didn't know such a service existed. That might help me then because I'd love to go dedicated etc. but wouldn't know how to switch a server on, let alone manage it - and as soon as you move up to managed servers the price rockets.

 

[DBA]

That sounds like a good idea, but would it have any other implications, say if I made changes to the forum (would people have to hard refresh pages to see the changes, for example, to graphics or the CSS?).

Not if you remember to always change the image/graphic file name. For example my node image sprite is currently called nodes-10.png (started at nodes.png)

 

[mrGTB]

You can use simple file caching on shared hosting.

Create a directory named cache in internal_data and add this to your library/config.php file.

$config['cache']['enabled'] = true;
$config['cache']['cacheSessions'] = true;
$config['cache']['backend'] = 'File';
$config['cache']['backendOptions'] ['cache_dir'] = '/path/to/internal_data/cache';
$config['cache']['frontend'] = 'Core';
$config['cache']['frontendOptions'] ['cache_id_prefix'] = 'xf_';

What's the difference between using that what you listed above and this below found on the forum listed?

$config['cache']['enabled'] = true;
$config['cache']['backend'] = 'File';
$config['cache']['backendOptions'] = array('cache_dir'  => '/path/to/internal_data/cache');
$config['cache']['frontend'] = 'Core';
$config['cache']['frontendOptions'] = array('caching'  =>  true,
                                            'automatic_serialization' => true,
                                            'lifetime'    => 1800
);

Because the code I posted doesn't include this line "$config['cache']['cacheSessions'] = true;"

And, this whole section is different also.

$config['cache']['frontendOptions'] = array('caching' => true,
'automatic_serialization' => true,
'lifetime' => 1800
);