Here’s my feedback to the Forum developers. Let’s see if we’ll get a response.
Site migration to faster server didn’t quite work. If you encountered site loading issues yesterday evening/ today morning, please comment on site discussions.
For me, the site loads faster after migration.
How much faster? Slightly? or much?
I wasn’t feeling the site was slow before, but now it’s snappy and peppy. ( I live in a major metro area with a ton of bandwidth and keep my computer well maintained. )
If I was blowharding, I’d say the site was cobbled together with open source and not well optimized for page load times, but OTOH doesn’t have ads, which more than balanced out the multiple libraries. I saw this on my phone, where the first page load would take a long time ( 10 seconds ? ) but subsequent loads were fast ( lots of pages & includes, but they get cached ).
I expect those with slower / older computers, or have network latency issues, will feel the site has gone from slow to normal / fast.
Nicely done ! Do you need money / contributions ?
The experimental features that I turned on to make the forum engine (javascript) load fast apparently didn’t work for everyone- for one user the site didn’t load at all. For another, Blackberry didn’t load the site. When I turned off those experimental features there wasn’t performance gain, so I just revert back to the old servers.
No money needed- I used the free CDN plan of a major company, so I didn’t spend a single dime. It did get me excited for a while until I found out there were problems.
I think it did work for most people, though breaking the site for some isn’t quite good enough. Theoretically the forum developers can do similar optimizations on their software, rather than relying on the CDN companies to optimize. Though the developers probably have other more important things on their plate. I was surprised, however, that serving those pictures/ forum engines from servers close to people, without turning on the experimental optimization feature, didn’t seem to speed things up for anyone. That kinda defied physics for me.
If it’s any consolation, I didn’t notice any difference, but it always loads pretty quickly for me using Safari . . .
It actually seemed a little slower to me (Safari/iPhone) right after 9PM last night. Could have been you fiddling around.
Site was slower today all day, taking 5-6 sec to load vs. about 4 previously, remained slow after you reverted to the old servers. However, when I came to the site at about 7 pm (CST) it was much faster, less than 2 sec. Has remained that way for a couple of hours. Never been this fast before.
Win 7, Firefox with NoScript, Dell desktop.
Tried it once during the day on IE, took more than 6 sec to load, but I have seldom accessed it on IE.
I reverted to the old server some time around noon MT time. After that I haven’t done anything since to the site. So the slowness and speediness you experienced was external to the site.
I happen to be on the east coast for a couple days and I find the site a little less snappy than on the west coast, but just fine, really. Pages take about a second.
HO
Have you been tweaking again today?
Access is positively speedy - 3 or 4 seconds to load the front page. Perfectly acceptable.
I wish I can take the credit but I have no idea what happened. I am glad its fast though- let’s hope it stays that way.
