Hi All,

I've been getting a number of comments from users that loading times for my sites are quite slow, and I have experienced this myself from my workplace where the Internet feed comes from the USA through a 2 megabit pipe and my sites loading times are up around the 30 second mark. I was wanting to get an idea of performance from a broader community, so if you could take a look at the following sites and let me know where you are in the world, and how loading times are for you I'd really appreciate it.

www.it-hq.org

www.brashquido.org

I serve both sites from my home over a 1500/256 kilobit ADSL link, and the server runs Windows 2003 Enterprise Server using IIS 6 for web serving on a 1.2Ghz Athlon based machine with 1GB of RAM and a couple of 10GB ATA-66 5400RPM hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration for system and data (on seperate partitions).

I have included a little bit of scripting in my footer.php and theme.html file that displays the time the server takes to process each request at the bottom of each page, and usually they are well under 1 second (0.5~0.8 seconds usually) so I don't feel these site loading delays are a server inflicted issue. However, according to MRTG, my ADSL link usage (apart from the odd large download on my behalf) is rarely stressed bandwidth wise. In particular the 256 kilobits uplink bandwidth rarely gets above 40 kilobits (16.66% usage) mark as can be seen on my MRTG SNMP stats page (http://stats.it-hq.org/ ).

These two results, plus the fact all the trace route and ping tests I've done have had decent results sort of contradict each other, so I'm fairly stumped as to what is coursing my sites to load so slow. My thoughts so far is to change to a 512/512 kilobit SDSL connection which will double my uplink bandwidth of my current 1500/256 kilobit connection, and is the fastest uplink I can economically get where I live. The other idea I had was to change to another ISP to one that has a larger pipe directly into the International backbone.

Testing from California USA on a cable modem.
it-hq
This page is loaded in 0.80710291862488 seconds.
However, it took between 8-11 seconds to render.

I wonder if the iframe is slowing things down? I don't know. I checked your code, and it appeared that you are setting your widths for images and columns, which is good. (Sometimes not setting these can cause a slight delay in render time.)

The first thing I would *try* is turning off any of the blocks that pull site or visitor stats... I've seen that slow down rendering on other sites. Just as a test. If that's the cause, at least then you would know. So Site Stats and Visitor Stats, disable temporarily. You can increase the cache or disable your Downloads and Web Links blocks. You can increase the cache time on any blocks that tend to change hourly or daily.

Here is a test idea... go to your page and view the source. Save the resulting file and upload it to your server. Then access this static test page you have created. This will allow you to test if the limit is hit in the content, versus the stat calculations.


brashquido
This loaded very fast with the exception of the visitor stats block, which I could actually watch as it placed each stat one line at a time. (This makes me think it is a good thing to look at for both sites).

I hope that helps.

Just took a quick look at your sites from Denmark and though I didn't time it I felt they were no slower than other sites.

The front of xoops.org states:

If you are using the cache feature, clear cached files periodically by updating the general preferences in "system admin" => "preferences" for better performance.

Could this be the culprit?

Have you tried analysing your site with this?

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Thanks all

I ahd a look at that optimization site Chainsaw, and for the most part it seems quite good. However, I don't know how they calculated their estimated download times, but I think they accounted way too much for netwwork latency. My entire site weighs in at about 138 kilobytes, and the analyser estimates my site would take 8.75 seconds to load on a T1. Overheads aside, a T1 (1.44Mbps) could download my site 10 times over in the space of 1 second, so I think addinf 8.5 seconds for network latency is a little over the top. A good tool none the less though.

I've ordered a line speed change from my current 1500/256 kilobit ADSL connection to a 512/512 kilobit SDSL connection which should speed things up a bit.

Hi All,

In the never ending quest of trying to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of my Internet connection and server for as little cost as possible, I have had my ISP change my xDSL connection from a 1500/256 kilobit ADSL configuration, to a 512/512 kilobit SDSL configuration, effectively doubling my outgoing bandwidth.

I have also discontinued the use of the Blockies module for displaying my pphlogger stats, and instead have made the shift to PHP-Stats and am displaying these stats via a module suggested by Olorin in this thread.

If you have a spare couple of minutes I'd really appreciate people going to my site and letting me know where they are in the world, and how long it took my site to totally load from the time you clicked on the link. There is also a script execution time at the bottom of each page which would be handy info too if you could include that. Thank you so much for helping .

www.it-hq.org

I've looked from Holland with an ADSL connection :
It took 6 seconds to display the page,
This page is loaded in 1.0169060230255 seconds

Aloha

From Georgia on UUNET T1 connection, IT-HQ took over 10 seconds on the first visit. Svaha's xoops.org page would have been mostly cached...

I'm sorry for my bad communication this :
Quote: have I copied from the bottom of the test site. So that is the actual loading time of the page and not the page here on xoops.org

Aloha

from sweden right now on a 2Mbit-line
load 16sec and
This page is loaded in 0.92709898948669 seconds.

1.https://xoops.org (IP address 68.90.69.23) :
Time until first byte sent: 1278 ms
Time lookup hostname: 226 ms
Download time (time from the first byte to the last byte sent): (Bytes: 90353) 290 ms
Bytes/sec: 311562

2.http://www.it-hq.org/modules/news/ (IP address null) :
Time until first byte sent: 1225 ms
Time lookup hostname: 0 ms
Download time (time from the first byte to the last byte sent): (Bytes: 98370) 2672 ms
Bytes/sec: 36815

? no dns-lookup:

Advanced Systems #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Advanced Systems #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
AT&T Worldnet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
AT&T Worldnet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
AT&T Worldnet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
AT&T Worldnet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Compuserve #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Compuserve #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Drizzle #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Drizzle #2 TIMEOUT
Earthlink #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Earthlink #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Earthlink NetAxs #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Earthlink NetAxs #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
GTE #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
GTE #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
IBMnet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
IBMnet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Internet America #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Internet America #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Internet MCI #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
MCI Internet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
MCI Internet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
MCI Worldcom #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
MCI Worldcom #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Mindspring #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Mindspring #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
OneWest Idaho #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
OneWest Idaho #2 TIMEOUT
OneWest Montana #1 TIMEOUT
OneWest Montana #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
OneWest Wyoming #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
OneWest Wyoming #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Prodigy Internet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Prodigy Internet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Qwest #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Qwest #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Roadrunner #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Roadrunner #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Southwestern Bell #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Southwestern Bell #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
SprintNet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Sprynet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Sprynet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of (root)]
Sprynet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Sprynet #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Sympatico #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Touch America #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
Touch America #2 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
UUNet #1 [No cached answer: Would go to NS of org.]
UUNet #2 TIMEOUT