Some users saying site slow

ibaker

Well-known member
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
 
I had a few such complaints - then took a poll, and it was only one or two users out of MANY.

Most such situations are at the client (users) end and there is nothing you can do about them. In my case, they eventually fixed themselves for those users.
 
Something important to note is, unfortunately, some older Firefox versions run incredibly poorly with XenForo.

The users need to appreciate, though, that using old browsers is a choice they make, and although we can do everything we can to ensure current browsers work ok, verifying and supporting old browsers is impossible.

One of our users was using Firefox 3.6. After upgrading, the site worked perfectly.

Always get the full browser version.
 
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
Yeah just to further ratify what I was saying, no mention of browser versions in that thread. They are essential for finding possible solutions to problems like this.
 
Sorry, I'm downloading here in the background and forgot about it. Most likely slowing things down and didn't take that into consideration before.
 
P4, doesn't an initial page load spend a lot of time loading js and all the other stuff that then may not need reloading on other pages? If so, it's hard to use the example of a first page load.
 
P4, doesn't an initial page load spend a lot of time loading js and all the other stuff that then may not need reloading on other pages? If so, it's hard to use the example of a first page load.
even 2nd page load has no browser caching/expiration for some images if you run through webpagetest.org test i.e

2nd page load http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120502_W8_9c35b014f7a3b139a0af708ba4ec8ea6/1/pagespeed/cached/

same when using gtmetrix.com test no browser level caching http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.aircraftpilots.com/56v3FajL

use pagespeed results to measure by (yahoo yslow has a different definition for browser level caching/expires tags it seems)

whole range of online tools and tests you can run are listed at http://vbtechsupport.com/388/
 
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)
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.


It doesn't appear that you're caching your static content. I'd suggest adding something like this to your root .htaccess file.

Code:
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|mp3|mp4|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>
 
I'm interested to know what I can do on shared hosting to speed things up. I've tried turning off the Facebook, Twitter and G+ bits (as suggested by Brogan in another thread) and he's right, it does speed the page load up by quite a bit.

I've read the XF docs about caching, but I assume these are for people with their own servers and won't be available to me on shared hosting?

It doesn't appear that you're caching your static content. I'd suggest adding something like this to your root .htaccess file.

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?).

In answer also to the OP, I had a couple of members reporting slow pages. It turned out I'd let images be uploaded at massive sizes, it only took a few of these in photo heavy threads to slow some browsers right down (even my Mac in some cases). So I put a max image dimension in at 1000px.

I should add I am really pleased with the speed now - just being greedy and want more, especially after seeing Brogan's site run like s**t off a shovel on his new server!
 
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.

Code:
$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_';
 
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