Over the past few months, the time it takes for any given page on chatbots.org has been steadily increasing. This post shows that the problem has been pretty wide-spread, geographically, with complaints coming from both Europe and the USA. For myself, I’m seeing “page load times” that vary from 5 seconds to well over a minute, depending on the time of day. That amount of time to load a page is slower than a dialup connection, when I have a 25Mb/second connection, so there’s definitely something going on that’s creating these delays. Additionally, I’ve recently been getting a lot of alerts from pingdom, letting me know that chatbots.org is down. These “down times” are relatively short, lasting no more than a few seconds in most cases, but they’re also indicative of a problem, and the two could very well be related. I think that this is a critical issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. If there’s anything I can do to assist, I’m more than happy to jump in and help.

Thanks for reporting this issue Dave! We’ve restarted servers and cleaned our cache, which seems to have helped. However, that is not a structural solution.

We’ll start to find a structural solution for this asap.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Keep you posted

Thanks, Erwin. I’ll inform the others that this is being addressed.

Since being “promoted” to the role of Super Admin, I’ve done some checking, and noticed a lot of overhead in some of the DB tables, so I’ve run repair operations on those tables, and it seems to have helped some. I’m continuing to investigate, and will report back any findings that I’ve made that could potentially impact site performance.

nice Dave, keep us posted!

I’m afraid the real difficulties will be in caching, highly efficient php and super fast sql queries

you can also register on the expression engine forums http://www.expressionengine.com. The guys over there are always pretty helpful

Thanks, Erwin. I’ll be sure to do that.

I’ve created a test account, so that I can see what the average user sees. This way, I can see how the page loads, not only for “Me”, but for regular users, too (there’s a HUGE difference now, since I’ve turned debugging options on for Super Admins).

The site seems to be faster, but what could be the reason? Turning debugging options on? I would guess that that would make the site even slower ....

For right now, it’s faster because I went into phpMyAdmin and repaired/optimized some of the tables that showed a lot of overhead, and that helped a great deal, but there’s still an issue with the avatar images each not only loading individually for each and every image, but they also take anywhere from a half second to up to 4 seconds each. Oddly, the worst offenders are your avatar, and mine. Go figure.

I’ve checked the performance, both as a Super Admin (with debugging visible) and as a regular user (with no debugging shown), and the load times aren’t off by more than a tenth of a second. I already had an account at the Expression Engine forums, but that account doesn’t have permission to post there. I’ve sent the EE team an email yesterday, asking what I need to do to obtain posting permissions, and I’m waiting for their reply because I wanted to ask about the avatar image issue, along with a couple of other questions that I have. While I agree that the site is definitely loading faster, I’m still not happy with the result. I’m sure that something else can be done to improve things.

[edit]
I noticed that the last 2 posts that each of us made prior to my “promotion” were made on the day of my accident. How strange!
[/edit]

That’s an interesting thought. Yours, mine and Steves are shown on all forum pages. Do you think the caching doesn’t work properly for forum templates? Did you already find the forum templates? These are pretty hidden.

You can find them through AddOns-<Modules->Discussion Forum. Then right hand corner button ‘Templates’. Default->Page Subheader. Or simply click here:

http://admin.chatbots.org/index.php?S=0&D=cp&C=addons_modules&M=show_module_cp&module=forum&method=edit_template&folder=default/forum_global/page_subheader.html

Interestingly enough, I find this:

{moderators}
{!--{embed="expert/.contacts" member_ids="{moderators}”}—}

but I can’t explain why this shows name & image in the left hand side bar??

I’ll look into that, but that’s not what I was actually referring to. Those images are different in size, and where/when they load, than the ones I’m seeing. For example, your image on the left sidebar is found at /images/member_photos/50/photo_1.jpg, whereas your avatar image is found at /images/member_photos/75/photo_1.jpg - The sidebar image loads a little slowly (around 250ms), but it only has to load once. On this page, your avatar image appears 5 times (as of this post) and took 1.61 seconds, 1.45 seconds, 1.18 seconds, 1.40 seconds and 1.58 seconds to load, respectively. That’s far faster than they usually load (2.3 to 4.6 seconds, on average), but having the same image load separately five different times, and each one taking ~1.5 seconds each is unacceptable. I would suspect there being a cache problem on my end, but I get similar performance on several browsers, and they can’t ALL have the cache turned off.

Hi Dave,

You might want to create test page in the Sandbox template group. Our convention is to name test pages like dm_ (your initials followed by _ ) and then the name of your template.

A test page could hold the HTML of this forum page, but than rendered. I would be curious whether it still would take 5 x retrieve the images.

Is there a server setting somewhere not to cache or reload images?

Erwin

I’m not sure, Erwin. I’m still learning the software, but I’ll try to find out. I got a response from EllisLabs about my inability to post in the EE support forums, and that should be resolved shortly, so I can ask about it there. We’ll just have to see what’s going on.

For those of us who are following this discussion, Erwin, myself, and other members of the admin staff sat down “together” on the 3rd of January and delved deeply into the forum’s software, trying to figure out why the site has been so very slow. We found several problem areas that were addressed, and so far, the site seems to be much improved. That’s not to say that we’re done yet, but we think we got the worst of the bottlenecks fixed. I’ll continue to search out other performance problems, and correct them as I go. This will be a relatively long-term project, since I’m still learning the software, but rest assured that I’m “on the case”, and will keep working on improving load times and site performance.

For those following this thread: the site is now significantly faster, and we’ve identified even more areas to improve the website.

Now, this area is almost done, we can now focus on upgrading our CMS to the latest version, and introduce new functionality.