# Main > Technical Support and Notices >  Slow loading

## bartmoss

Hi Guys,

Site seems incredibly slow lately. The forum itself is okayish - not great - but the frontpage takes FOREVER to open for me.

I am behind VERY fat connections (the bottleneck is my PC's 1gbit ethernet) here, but I haven't done any analysis.

Known issue? Anybody else have it?

- Nils

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## RobA

> Hi Guys,
> 
> Site seems incredibly slow lately. The forum itself is okayish - not great - but the frontpage takes FOREVER to open for me.
> 
> I am behind VERY fat connections (the bottleneck is my PC's 1gbit ethernet) here, but I haven't done any analysis.
> 
> Known issue? Anybody else have it?
> 
> - Nils



Grumble vbulletin Grumble

I have a bout an 8 second pause, then the whole page loads up.

Searching around it seems the slowdown is the recent forum thread widget.  I'm turning it off to see how that improves things... EDIT seems to be twice as fast without the recent threads display...


-Rob A>

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## RobA

OK - I've but the recent threads query back in, but narrowed down the forums searched, and upped the cache time so the query is only executed once an hour.  Ditto for the recent gallery images widget.

I also implemented some .htaccess cache rules that should help for repeat visits.

-Rob A>

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## Ascension

It's been taking me about 2 minutes to load the front page and about 10 seconds for the forums.  Now the front page takes like 20 seconds and the forums 5...so, much better YodA.   :Smile:   Thank ya.

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## Diamond

Yeah, it was really slow for me too, but seems fine now.  Thanx, dude!

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## waldronate

I was having real problems getting the site to load in IE9 before the change. It seems to load well now.

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## Ramah

I'm about same as big A now. It still takes about 10 seconds or so to load the front page but before the change it was a lot higher than that. My PC is getting pretty fubar though and I had put it down to how slow things are running in general... soon be time for a fresh install for me.

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## bartmoss

Seems better, but I haven't visited much from my home pc lately, and am off work now for a week so can't verify with my work pc.

Thanks for the changes though, it's not perfect yet, but at least here at home I don't have time for coffee breaks while browsing ccg .  :Wink:

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## bartmoss

PS: If you use MySQL: Enable slow log, see what happens, then optimize it. If ever the DB is a bottleneck, then you are almost certainly missing indices or doing something else in a very roundabout manner that can be optimized. That, or have a severe RAM shortage.  :Wink:  -- other DB packages probably have similar logs.

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## Ascension

It seems like it's back to super slo-mo again for me.  The main page is the worst by far but the forums are getting slower n slower.  Maybe it's the weather lagging my connection, shrug, but it's been like this pretty much since the end of September.

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## Ramah

Timed out quite a few times for me tonight.

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## Ghostman

I don't remember the site ever having been so slow as nowadays  :Frown:

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## RobA

> I don't remember the site ever having been so slow as nowadays


The whole site or just the front page?

-Rob A>

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## Djekspek

Hi RobA, 

For me it was mostly the frontpage, yesterday I timed 27 seconds before it had loaded. The other pages were much faster at that moment, although lagging up to 10 seconds. 

Current response for the frontpage (un-cached) for me is about 8 seconds. Pages below the frontpage are about 3 seconds so that's pretty ok.

hope this helps, cheers, DJ

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## Steel General

I've been experiencing slowdowns periodically for the last few weeks. Initially I wrote it off as being a product of our corporate firewall. Now that I see others having the same/similar problem(s). 

For me its usually the forums that are slow. Occasionally the login fails, and sometimes it hangs after I hit the "post quick reply" button.

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## bartmoss

Slowness issue definitely not fixed. frontpage continues to be really really slow - I haven't timed it but I've seen ~30s too. Forum in general is slow, but at least it's responsive, and I do not get timeouts.

I still think it's a db config issue, but that's just me guessing without any actual hard info.  :Wink:

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## RobA

> Slowness issue definitely not fixed. frontpage continues to be really really slow - I haven't timed it but I've seen ~30s too. Forum in general is slow, but at least it's responsive, and I do not get timeouts.
> 
> I still think it's a db config issue, but that's just me guessing without any actual hard info.


The host is a VPS, and the database is shared... and we can't do much diagnostics.  The price of a dedicated sql is quite high for the size we have  :Frown: 

I've been adding some of the obvious indices to try and speed up the sql server...

EDIT - though I came in today the first time in a few days and was loading the front page in under 3 seconds....

-Rob A>

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## sigurdbjohansson

Hi,
Just wondering if everybody else still has issues with site slowness?


And where did the "New Threads" box go?

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## sigurdbjohansson

Hi,
Just wondering if everybody else still has issues with site slowness?


And where did the "New Threads" box go?

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## jfrazierjr

Ditto slow loading... been that way for days, with a few 500 errors occasionally.

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## sigurdbjohansson

Yeah, I'm up to nearly a minute on the main page, and around twenty seconds for forum pages. Gets annoying after a while :Smile:

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## Redrobes

Look at whos online. 10 members 100+ guests. Look at the list and the Baidu spider dominates. Can we limit the number of Baidu connections. Its not like we have a plethora of Chinese members. Probably less than 1% of members are Chinese and its taking probably half the bandwidth.

If it were me, id just dump the Baidu spider altogether. In fact, if I could, I would limit it to 10 spiders of any type on a first come first serve basis and 403 the rest.

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## bartmoss

> The host is a VPS, and the database is shared... and we can't do much diagnostics.  The price of a dedicated sql is quite high for the size we have 
> 
> I've been adding some of the obvious indices to try and speed up the sql server...
> 
> EDIT - though I came in today the first time in a few days and was loading the front page in under 3 seconds....
> 
> -Rob A>


How big is the SQL database?

MySQL and Postgres are free and scale quite well.

It's really bad again today... :-(

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## Jaxilon

Last night/early this morning around 1am or so Arizona time I couldn't get on at all. I guess either we were down for maintenance or something between me and the site was completely out?

I was so relieved when I was able to get in just now. For a moment there I thought, "OH NOOOOOO!"

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## torstan

Yesterday Arcana altered some of the cache settings which caused a large portion of the site cache to be rebuilt. That probably explains yesterday's problems, but it should be much better today. How's it looking to everyone? I know my load times seem quicker today.

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## RobA

We are also on a trial on a dedicated mysql server, so some of yesterday's performance issues were related to transferring the database.... all 1.6GB of it...while leaving the site up.

-RobA>

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## bartmoss

Today seems MUCH better than usual.

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## bartmoss

PS: if it's mysql, what table types are you using? This may be too obvious, so my apologies in advance, but if you have MyISAM check carefully what they are used for, because MyISAM only does table locking. I have seen this myself in one situation, if you have say a session table that constantly gets updated, and it's myisam, you'll kill your site with that.

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## RobA

> PS: if it's mysql, what table types are you using? This may be too obvious, so my apologies in advance, but if you have MyISAM check carefully what they are used for, because MyISAM only does table locking. I have seen this myself in one situation, if you have say a session table that constantly gets updated, and it's myisam, you'll kill your site with that.


We are using InnoDB tables where possible to deal with this, though it is an overhead trade-off.

-Rob A>

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## Robbie

I just found something weird...the vb_cache table was 1.2 Gigabytes in size...just for the table...

So I cleared the cache and it dropped down to 300K...Home page load times should be significantly faster now, because there was a cache query that took 3 minutes to load.

Also, I think we're goign to look into keeping it MyIsam and going with a Sphinx solution...I've read good reviews...more info to come.

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## bartmoss

MyISAM is fine - unless you write to a busy table. If that happens, table locking will definitely kill you. In my experience, the InnoDB performance overhead is not an issue, but of course this will vary according to your specific situation. And also of course, InnoDB has other things to consider (need to be smart about the tablespaces, since they won't shrink automatically.)

Don't know Sphinx or what you'll use it for (sounds to me that it's useful for the site's search engine.)

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## Robbie

> We are also on a trial on a dedicated mysql server, so some of yesterday's performance issues were related to transferring the database.... all 1.6GB of it...while leaving the site up.
> 
> -RobA>


Total DB size is now 433 megabytes....lol...much more manageable  :Wink:

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## bartmoss

> Total DB size is now 433 megabytes....lol...much more manageable


One word: CUTE.

That's nothing. :-)

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## Robbie

> MyISAM is fine - unless you write to a busy table. If that happens, table locking will definitely kill you. In my experience, the InnoDB performance overhead is not an issue, but of course this will vary according to your specific situation. And also of course, InnoDB has other things to consider (need to be smart about the tablespaces, since they won't shrink automatically.)
> 
> Don't know Sphinx or what you'll use it for (sounds to me that it's useful for the site's search engine.)


From what I'm reading, yes it is...I need to make sure I can install it on our server.  I think we can install whatever we want.  How are the load times for you right now?

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## ravells

I don't know about anyone else but since Robbie posted about redoing the table the loading speed has really improved for me. Not sure if it's a coincidence and might slow down again, but I hope not!

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## Thesslian

Well, today the forum seems to be flying.  Only takes three or  four seconds for a page to load, as opposed to a minute or two that it was a few days ago.  Being so new here I thought it was always slow.

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## Robbie

> I don't know about anyone else but since Robbie posted about redoing the table the loading speed has really improved for me. Not sure if it's a coincidence and might slow down again, but I hope not!


There's no coincidence, only carefully calculated results from carefully executed procedures...lol.

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## ravells

lol, I think you've cracked it!!!!

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## maxsdaddy

"only carefully calculated results from carefully executed procedures" Great work from the SA's. Home page loaded in about three seconds, forums even less. Kudo's and thanks.

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## Robbie

Still working on further improvements...thanks for the feedback

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## Robbie

Just upgraded the site...let me know if there's any problems....create a new thread for them...and use that thread for all upgrade problems.  Thanks!

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## Coyotemax

things have been moving nicely for me over the last day or so.  Nice.

and for the win:
_The threads below have not been updated since your last visit but still contain unread posts._

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## RobA

> things have been moving nicely for me over the last day or so.  Nice.
> 
> and for the win:
> _The threads below have not been updated since your last visit but still contain unread posts._


Just noticed that... seemed to come with the forum upgrade.

Also just noticed the reply font is now times or something....

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## RobA

We've also just implemented a new server memory cache, so please comment if 1) you notice performance is better or 2) things are weird anywhere...

-Rob A>

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## ravells

I've noticed that loading is just flying now. Hooray!

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