Hi All,

I've been running my site for a few weeks now, and I have been having some significant issues with site loading times, particulary International users as I host my site here in Australia on my 512k/512k SDSL connection.

I've just made some pretty major changes to my server configuration which I'm hoping will make for some more respectable loading times. These changes Include;

- Port80 Software HTTPZip. I've installed this software in the hope that it'll enable much more efficient use of my available bandwidth, and quite frankly I've been very impressed with the stats so far. It is only a hour or so since I set it going, but already it's reporting a bandwidth percentage saving of nearly 65%.

- Moving images to ISP server. According to Google the main page of my site contains about 60k worth of content, not counting about 39k of images as well. I have moved all images I can without major recoding work to the free webspace provided by my ISP. This will work not only at decreasing load times as my ISP's servers will be much quicker than mine, but also drastically reduces the amount of image content transfered from my site upon each visit from around 39k to under 2k.

I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to load my site, and report back with aproximately how many seconds it took to load. I'd also appreciate info on your location and Internet connection type too. Thanks .

IT Headquarters

It is a very slow connection from Australia to North America - over 300 ms.

You can do a traceroute
http://www.nedcomp.nl/visualroute/

Your ISP web pages load pretty fast.

You did not mention your server specs. You may consider upgrade to increase MySQL database query speed. You could do a query speed test by turning MySQL/Blocks debug on under admin-preferences. Check the query time of your frontpage. This will give you a general idea about your query speed.

tl

Hi TL,

Thanks for the feedback. My Server spec basics are;

PIII550
1GB SDRAM
2 x 10GB ATA-66 HDD's in software RAID 1


From this you can see the only real lacking component is the CPU. I have a 1.2Ghz AMD Athlon and motherboard ready to upgrade my server with which will bring significant performance gains. However, as this upgrade will mean an OS reinstall, I'll need to do a bit of planning to ensure I don't screw things up, plus it'll also minimise downtime.

I have created a hack which is in the footer of my webpage which says "page loaded in X seconds" which displays the MySQL query time. This is ususally between 1.2 and 1.5 seconds which I think idealy is about a second too long.

Your site takes about 11-12 seconds to load here. I'm near Los Angeles on a T1 connection at my university. I do have a very slow computer though which slows down (a lot) pages with scripts and graphics etc... For comparison xoops.org takes 3-4 seconds to load here.

You might consider upgrading xoops, the latest version stores the javascript in a separate file so it does not have to be loaded with *every* page that is visited.

Thanks mvandam. I'm definately considering upgrading XOOPS to 2.0.5 at the same time as I upgrade my server. Thing that makes me a little nervous with that is that I've made a few changes here and there along the way which I don't want to loose. I'll just have to take care with my planning phase.

From some comments made by other people that I've read I'm starting to wonder if a 1.2GHz Athlon is going to be sufficient for maximizing my sites speed. I might just have to do a bit of server task redelegation so that once I do the upgrade it only servers purely Internet related tasks.

Hi,
The site took me (or actually my computer) about 12 seconds to load. I'm from Holland, so that's down under for you.
I have a T1/ADSL lite connection at 384/96 Kbits/sec
Aloha

-----------
Beam me up Scotty,
there is no intelligent life down here
http://www.rainbowshaman.com

Well, it seems I found a way of significantly lowering the MySQL query time, and it's so simple I could slap myself. I had set all the modules to use the XOOPS caching system, but in a glaring oversight I neglected to do the same for the side blocks .

I've enabled caching on most of the side blocks which has knocked about 0.5 of a second of my MySQL query time, and has reduced the total number of MySQL queries from 91 to 32. Perfromance may still not be top of the line, but definately a huge improvement on before. I'm getting about 5 second loading times from across my LAN whereas before I was getting in excess of 10 seconds.

Thanks so much to all that replied, and if I could ask one last time for you to load up my site and let me know how much time it took, where you are in the world, and what type of Internet connection you have I'd really appreciate it. Thanks again.