GPWA Site Improvements

[chalkoutline]

Originally Posted by MichaelCorfman

I'll have our operations group take a look and see if they can find anything than might explain any response time delays.

Michael

Thanks Michael.

I would say that it is really page rendering/load times that feel slow, I don't think it is down to the timing in the day (although I do read the forums at this sort of time most of the time) I would say that it is probably more down to a slow script or something in the page.

There are a whole bunch of external JavaScripts being called and the inline CSS styles probably aren't helping things much.

Thanks for investigating, I hate slow loading pages!

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I have done a little poking around with Firebug and the main GPWA forums homepage takes nearly 9 seconds to load all content on my 400kbps connection. The page is 274k when all files have been downloaded. It takes 2.5 seconds for the external javascripts to be downloaded. Getting the ad banner at the top takes 1.2 seconds.

[aksana]

Micahael, I have some problems with the GPWA performance especially in Forefox. In other words, it's impossible to read the GPWA forum in Forefox, all threads load very slowly, and usually I stopped them and open them in IExplorer, which I don't like.

[chalkoutline]

Did the tech guys find anything that could be imprved here? I still find the forums very slow to browse through. I seem to remember that the individual forum thread list pages responded more quickly in the past when the summary info about each thread wasn't be shown by default. Could we try swtiching that off to see how load times change? Just a thought...

[MichaelCorfman]

Earlier today we determined that the www.gpwa.org website was configured to not allow any content to be cached. Evidently this change was made during the feature deployment to resolve problems we were having at the time. The change in settings was subseqeuntly forgotten about. We've now configured the web site to allow content to be cached once again. Our tech staff says based on tests on a random selection of pages approximately 80% of the content is now being cached. They believe this will result in a noticable improvement.

Please let us know if performance is reasonable now, or if there are still issues.

Thanks,

Michael

[bradz21]

Hi Michael,

I can tell that the threads load faster then before and I only use FireFox. Thank you sir!

Cheers,
Brad

[Chips]

Still a bit slow in places and the thing that is getting my goat is even though i tick "remember me" it forgets and I lose my sign in session. If I am looking at new posts, and get logged off I lose all those posts I did not see.

[MichaelCorfman]

Originally Posted by Chips

Still a bit slow in places and the thing that is getting my goat is even though i tick "remember me" it forgets and I lose my sign in session. If I am looking at new posts, and get logged off I lose all those posts I did not see.

In terms of "remember me" this instances I know about a problem here affect being logged in outside of the forums, but not inside them. Do you see instances where you are shown as being logged-out when inside the forums when you should not be? In terms of the problems I do know about here, I have a promise from the responsible developer that it will be fixed in the next week.

Michael

[Chips]

Sure make me think after 12 hours of work... lol. Actually I have been dropped both when logging in from say an email notification and when I just come here using the url and logging in. In any case, I notice that remember me forgets me more times than I would like to remember.

[chalkoutline]

Thanks Michael, that does seem to be noticably better where I am. The delays waiting for thepage to render are lower now and things move speedily. Great job guys!