Web Site speed improvmements

[neilschelly]

Rather than spend time on fixing some of the page layout issues, I decided to finally get around to some software upgrades, and also to attack some of the speed issues we've been having full force.  Hopefully, the results are noticeable.  There's more of that to come still too, but before I worry too much about the visuals (folks aren't reporting functional problems if there are any), then I'm focusing more on the general browseable-ness of the site for now.

Besides, I think the theme is going to need a clean redo to reimplement the whole new layout in a much more efficient manner, so troubleshooting that without first getting a page load time that doesn't suck isn't exactly something I'm looking forward to. ;-)
-N

[neilschelly]

Argh, some of the upgrades I did have negatively affected the calendars.  I'll be repairing these as soon as possible - tomorrow night I expect.
-N

[Mickle]

I know you are moving to speed issues but I have noticed recently that once I am viewing a thread I can no longer click "Show unread posts since last visit".  That button only works for me when I fist come onto the forum.  I am using Firefox 11.

[neilschelly]

I know you are moving to speed issues but I have noticed recently that once I am viewing a thread I can no longer click "Show unread posts since last visit".  That button only works for me when I fist come onto the forum.  I am using Firefox 11.

That's strange - it looks like that's a layout bug.  It works fine on the forum listing page, but not on message pages.  I'll try and look into that tonight too.
-N

[Gus Heck]

What software/OS/hardware/DB are we using? I know its all basically donated by you, but perhaps someone out there has a spare that can be donated to improve?

I see lots of wait time in FF/firbug or chrome/dev tools, and transfer time looks quite spiffy (88ms for the largest file which is 1/3 of a MB, and almost half the total bandwith) so I suspect you are either disk IO bound or processor bound or some of each... In this day and age, hardware is about a 10th of the cost of labor (except when the labor is free). I'd be terribly surprised if there was any significant gains in speed via upgrading, and in most cases new versions of software often do more stuff, but often this bloat actually makes them slower...

It is obviously a soak on your time... just wondering what it takes to save you some time

[neilschelly]

It's a VPS that's hosting it, and the software itself is essentially CPU-bound as best I can tell, but the VPS abstraction itself makes it hard to know what's really happening at the hardware level.  I have other sites running similar software stacks that perform fine, but something about the NER site, selection of modules/plugins/etc makes it much harder.  The theme itself has a lot of dependencies on extra images/JS/CSS/etc that makes it a bit tough to load/render for now, but that's the least of the performance issues.  Primarily, the site is running Drupal 6.23, SMForum 1.1.16, and Gallery 2.3.1 (I think those versions are all accurate, but off the top of my head).  I'm spending a few hours a week poking at the performance issues and making a bit of progress each time. There's a big boulder in the way somewhere, and I'll find it if I keep poking.
-N

[neilschelly]

For what it's worth, if you have an interest and the skills to do some system- and code-level troubleshooting, email me at webmaster@ner.org and I'd be happy to share some of that workload.
-N