Slow board

[Rex Fisher]

Why is the board so slow l8tly? some daysi think my old 128k Mac was faster.

[Webmonkey]

Every time I've tried to load it today all page elements loaded in under 2 seconds. I'll try it again from home where I can load Firebug and look at it element by element.

Is it loading a little faster for you this afternoon as compared to this morning when you posted the complaint, are there certain times you're seeing slowness?

Let me know a few more details and I might be able to nail it down.

[Decimus]

I've noticed the boards regularly being slower than previous to the time that Werewolf added the multitude of boards that they use. To that point, I also see the additional forums, subforms, etc that were added loading before the rest of the boards, then having it reformat and be in the correct listing.

This has been checked & verified on the following (Both reloads, fresh restarts and revisits):

(Work PC) Windows XP - IE8
(Home Laptop) Windows XP - IE8 & Chrome
(Home PC) Windows Vista - IE8 & Chrome

I do notice it takes another couple of seconds when the website has to load the banner advertisements at the top of the page, but that much I can live with pretty easily. The 5-10 seconds it takes to load and reformat the front page of forum listings, though, is a little silly to me.

[Webmonkey]

That makes sense B-rad. Since the cript use to reformat for sub-sub boards is hoseted elsewhere, the process is:

1. Browser loads boards as-is.
2. Script tells browser to look on the other site where script is hosted to find out how to 'hide' the werewolf boards as sub-sub boards.
3. Browser goes to other site.
4. Browser collects additional instructions.
5. Browser applies additional instructions.

There are more 'tubes' in the series than before. The script is hosted elsewhere, so if the hosting site is slow, or the internets between us and them are on the east coast, or the browser security settings won't cache off-site scripts so they have to be grabbed every time you load the page, or any number of other things, I can see where this might slow things down.

Options are to host the script locally which could speed things up, but I don't know if I have permission to do that, but I could look into it. Also the WW HST mentioned that they didn't want sub-sub boards for the IC section after all, just a variety of split sub boards, but we never discussed if sub-sub boards for the OOC section were useful or not, but judging by their limited use at the moment, maybe not. I'll talk with them, because there's a possibility that we might not need the feature after all, in which case, problem solved.

Thanks all for the heads-up and useful diagnostic info. Your webmonkey appreciates it.

[Decimus]

No problem, the slowdown made sense to me after watching how it loaded through the different versions I listed. And I know one thing that might work for them, if the actual sub-sub boards aren't getting used much is just a stickied link to different important threads, like we've got on the Vampire OOC boards. And, if that's the case, problem solved as you said.

[Amber]

Jan 4, 2010 12:36:56 GMT -8 Webmonkey said:

Every time I've tried to load it today all page elements loaded in under 2 seconds. I'll try it again from home where I can load Firebug and look at it element by element.

I would look at it with YSlow in Firefox, which will grade the site from an end-user performance stand point and work as a good starting point for improving the performance of the site. Doing this is was one of my projects at my last job, finding areas where the UI choked at the browser, making recommendations, and then implementing. I had a very long list of things to work on.

For example, one of the categories is "Make Fewer HTTP Requests". The front page received a "D" over all.

Grade F on Make fewer HTTP requests

This page has 19 external Javascript scripts. Try combining them into one.
This page has 7 external background images. Try combining them with CSS sprites.

Decreasing the number of components on a page reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page, resulting in faster page loads. Some ways to reduce the number of components include: combine files, combine multiple scripts into one script, combine multiple CSS files into one style sheet, and use CSS Sprites and image maps.

[Amber]

And looking at the site in both YSlow and Fiddler, one the big contributing factors are the ads. Lots of downloads and lots of JavaScript. Javascript takes time to parse and execute, granted, but while that is happening nothing else is downloaded. Browsers will typically download external resources in parallel to improve performance.

[Ross]

YSlow, serious?

. . .

*hides*

-Ross

[Webmonkey]

Jan 4, 2010 15:29:27 GMT -8 Amber said:

And looking at the site in both YSlow and Fiddler, one the big contributing factors are the ads. Lots of downloads and lots of JavaScript. Javascript takes time to parse and execute, granted, but while that is happening nothing else is downloaded. Browsers will typically download external resources in parallel to improve performance.

Hey there's a reason for folks to donate to the Ad-Free (since we're out of credits)

[Amber]

Jan 4, 2010 15:54:25 GMT -8 Ross said:

YSlow, serious?

. . .

*hides*

-Ross

Serious. In fact, it's based on a white paper by a guy at...wait for it...Yahoo!

Seriously.

[Rex Fisher]

i think it is worse in the mornigs....some times 20 to 30 seconds...but then i will got to NWCN or Google, or Facebook to see if its me and they load lickity split...
Hope that helps

[Rex Fisher]

i hate to ask this again, where do we click to by credits for the board?
The other thread said at the bottem of the page but poor old blind jeffrey couldnt find it...

[Amber]

Jan 5, 2010 8:27:29 GMT -8 Rex Fisher said:

i hate to ask this again, where do we click to by credits for the board?
The other thread said at the bottem of the page but poor old blind jeffrey couldnt find it...

It is vampst.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=purchasecredits

[Cookie]

Just as a small note....I have no issues loading this site. I am just saying.

[Rex Fisher]

There you go Chris, you can get the adds out!

[Webmonkey]

Jan 5, 2010 15:18:18 GMT -8 Rex Fisher said:

There you go Chris, you can get the adds out!

Ads destroyed! (for probably the better part of three months actually) Thanks!

I'm betting you'll see an improvement in load speed there too.

[Maeve]

Much Better! Thank you Jeffery!

[Ross]

Yay Jeffery!! ;D

-Ross

[Webmonkey]

There are now no sub-sub boards on the site. So that's one less cross site script to slow things down.