erratic response

[duncan drennan]

Is it just me or is anyone else also experiencing some erratic response from the Forum? I've been getting some erratic behaviour (mainly in terms of speed), and also having problems, particularly when I "Save" a quick edit of a post.

[I Robot]

I've just had a look at the server load times.

Server Load Averages 2.46 1.92 1.80 | 13 Users Online (3 members and 10 guests)

That is not good! Normally the slowest its been is 0.13
Only question now is why?

[duncan drennan]

New servers?

[Dave A]

Shouldn't be the issue. I benchmarked when we made the move and there wasn't a big change.

[bullfrog]

Hi guys,

Sorry about the slow server but there was some perl script running on one of the hosting accounts that was using a large amount of processing power. This caused all the other sites on the server to slow down dramatically. The process has been killed and the server should be back up to speed.

Again I'm very sorry for any inconvenience caused!

[Dave A]

Thanks for the update and dealing with the problem. And given that everything still seems to work here I trust it wasn't us

Sooo good to have a hosting provider that keeps an eye out for us and genuinely deals with issues.

[Dave A]

Amazon.co. slowing us down?

I've noticed since the Amazon.com "smart" advert box was added, there's a delay in page loading wherever the addy is. Pages without the addy seem to load faster. Anyone else noticed that?

As an aside, I've also noticed for a content related "smart" ad, it sure can get off-topic every now and then

[duncan drennan]

That might be what I'm seeing when I use IE7 instead of Firefox. I've actually been thinking the forum or my browser was broken in some way because it wasn't displaying (takes really long).

It is partially an IE thing in that it first downloads all the elements before displaying them, so nav bars at the top are there, but nothing appears below until everything (posts, pictures, ads, etc) are all fully downloaded.

I'm sure this can be set in IE, but haven't gone to look how yet.

[Dave A]

So Duncan, it behaves differently in Firefox?

Heck. I've got Firefox loaded 2. Might as well test it for myself.

The problem is there's a script that calls the addy. Google has the page contents cached (and probably a relaionship set between any given URL and what it might serve) so produces a really quick response.

I'm still trying to get a handle on how Amazon is researching the content (I'm not seeing a crawl), which could be a contributing factor. The other option is a slow turnaround on requests to their server.

An R&D project I might put on hold fairly soon if I can't figure out what the problem is exactly. I'm playing with the concept of intelligent content delivery. It is a new service, only just come out of beta, and maybe they haven't ironed out all the kinks.

[duncan drennan]

Heck. I've got Firefox loaded 2. Might as well test it for myself.

Let me know if you see a difference...

With me it is taking around about 1 minute to load this link totally in IE7. In Firefox it takes about 7s.

Problem with IE7 is that it is not giving me any visual feedback to show that it is actually doing something (the loading bar doesn't display weird). It loads the nav bars at the top, and then just sits waiting. After a long wait it displays the rest of the content.

[Dave A]

Really interesting. There is a significant difference on how they progressively handle the HTML.

First, clearly, there is a massive delay on the right hand column now that wasn't there before. Applies to both viewers. The content is arriving at the same speed so firefox isn't faster from that point of view. But it "feels" like Firefox is faster because of the way content is displayed on the fly.

Firefox displays the content for each table cell (think column for folks more familiar with spreadsheets than HTML page layout coding) as soon as its got it - therefor you've got something to read in the meantime and the lag is less irritating. When the right column content arrives, there's a shuffling of format to display it now that it's finally in. At first I thought the right hand column wasn't going to show!!

IE7 waits for the HTML contents of a complete row before it displays what it's got so far. In this case the entire thread, most of the stuff at the bottom of the page, and the right column. This makes for this long pause when nothing seems to happen.

Time to comment out bits of code and find the cause...

[I Robot]

Hmmm. And the server load times are cooking - from 0.04 to 0.11 which is quite acceptable. Looking closely the culprit is obvious - say bye bye to intelligent Amazon. And an impressive score for Firefox. With IE7 you can't tell what is causing the delay in this case.

[Dave A]

v3g load speeds all over the place isn't helping evaluating a difference with the substitute. I'll say this for Firefox - at least you've got something to get on with while the rest of the page is loading. This definitely makes for less stressful browsing when using slower connections.

[duncan drennan]

Just a note, I'm still seeing the problem in IE7. When I ran the test earlier (1min vs 7s) that was the approx time for the entire page to load everything - sidebars, text, etc.

[Dave A]

Post 11 explains the nature of the problem (probably badly but it's in there). There is a difference in behaviour between Firefox and IE that in this case is significant.

I'm going to test if moving the navigation to the left hand side helps. Otherwise we're going to have to drop the right hand column from the thread area.

BTW what speed connection have you got. 1 min 7 sec for a page load is slooowww.

We can also look at cleaning out some of the code - maybe the quick jump menu and the posting rules at the bottom, for example. I don't know how many people use them and the quickjump menu is a fair pile of code which is basically coming down with every page request.