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First time byte performance

R

Richieboy67

Member
Hey all, I hope everyone is good here!

I have been working on optimizing my site and dedicated server. I have gotten decent grades on most but first time byte performance is still an f.

WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : musclemecca.com - 01/26/15 11:54:07

Forum url is most important:
WebPagetest Content Breakdown - Dulles : musclemecca.com/forum.php - 01/26/15 14:34:03

All A but first time page load.

I have been going through images and optimizing them but now the images at least that impact the entire site are the style related images, gifs, pngs. Most are very tiny already but should I mass optimize these?

I also turned on Keep Alive in apache, Right now it is set to 150, with a 25 second time out. Does anyone have any recommendations as to this setting? PS - I do have the htcaccess tweaks. Also, very strange because now I get an a grade under keep alive but my load time has actually increased by nearly 2 seconds.

When visiting the page it loads quickly but apparently the test is still showing the load time of the background images, etc still loading.

What do you guys think? What can I do to get the load times down? Keep Alive or No?

I would gladly donate a few bucks to whom ever can knock some real time off the page load.

Thanks
 
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It is 156 requests and 1.5 MB. Images are 68 percent of the pageload.

I always recommend a baseline test, vBulletin default style forced, all adverts and 3rd party calls off, and all hooks off. See what that does to TTFB.

If under the above conditions you still have poor TTFB, you need to talk with your host about it.

You're doing everything right, straight A grades across the board except for TTFB.
 
Thanks my friend!

I think part of it also is the server. I have raised the MaxKeepAliveRequests to 600 and have lowered the time out to 5.

I am my own host bro. Dedicated box so it is all up to me.

I am restarting Apache right now and will run another test. I think most of the issues now are server dependent.

Thanks for the advice. I will try another test on the standard theme. i know my current theme is heavy.

Is there anything you can suggest to optimize mass png and gif files?

Thanks again bro!
 
Richieboy67 said:
Thanks my friend!

I think part of it also is the server. I have raised the MaxKeepAliveRequests to 600 and have lowered the time out to 5.

I am my own host bro. Dedicated box so it is all up to me.

I am restarting Apache right now and will run another test. I think most of the issues now are server dependent.

Thanks for the advice. I will try another test on the standard theme. i know my current theme is heavy.

Is there anything you can suggest to optimize mass png and gif files?

Thanks again bro!
Click to expand...
We had this conversation before.... My answer was, try to hide alot of these images from the unregistered/not logged in usergroup. Lots of them don't really do you any favors as far as, getting people to register. Especially with a slow page - people just leave if the page doesn't load or loads slow.
 
Blocking images is not really a suitable solution for this site. At any rate I got load times down to under 5 now with server tweaks and optimizing more images.

Now if I can shave a bit more off the images I think we should be good. Maybe a little more tweaking on the server as well.

This is what I have for keep alive now:

MaxKeepAliveRequests 250

#
# KeepAliveTimeout: Number of seconds to wait for the next request from the
# same client on the same connection.
#
KeepAliveTimeout 15
 
I found a free program called PNGGauntlet. I was hoping to do this on the server using ssh commands with an extencion of some sort but this program works well. You just download the images and drag them into the program and then upload the images,overwriting the old ones.

I am planning on going through much of the images at least on the threads that get traffic but there is literally tens of thousands of images on the site so optimizing all of them is near impossible at least this way.

What I do need help with now though from you guru's is some of the other issues slowing down the site.

For example this one here

clientscript/vbulletin_css/style00039l/forumbits.css,forumhome.css,widgets.css,sidebar.css,options.css,tagcloud.css


Also, is there any way to speed up the Twitter box? Once cached it is good but it slows down the first hit. I really hate to pull it but I just may. That and the dam google translater. That is used though by many people too. Any ideas on these things?

Thanks again for the help!
 
i removed the twitter block and the Google translate block and I reduced the gallery images at the bottom of the page from 4 to 3. I also optimized literally thousands of images, theme images, etc..\

I got the page load down to almost 4 seconds now but I still get the F rank for first page load! I am sure I can get the page load down more by changing the forum blocks a bit. i think it is ok for now though. What do you think max?
 
Richieboy67 said:
i removed the twitter block and the Google translate block and I reduced the gallery images at the bottom of the page from 4 to 3. I also optimized literally thousands of images, theme images, etc..\

I got the page load down to almost 4 seconds now but I still get the F rank for first page load! I am sure I can get the page load down more by changing the forum blocks a bit. i think it is ok for now though. What do you think max?
Click to expand...
I have no clue wtf is going on with that FBT. There's really no causal element I see. Did the grade improve at all, on your baseline test with vB standard style, all hooks off?
 
When I had a issue with my FBT, my host adjusted the outbound path from the server to the most optimal one.

That was done via the network.
 
I haven't done the baseline yet but it looks like the theme to me causing most of the issues though the server still may need some tweaking. I will try the other themes now but will wait to try disabli98ng the plugs.

To run a theme I just have to add ?styleid=## to the url? Right? I do not want to switch the themes if I can help it.

In terms of internet connection I am not sure what you mean. I will try some other locations though besides Dallas as it is pretty far from here.

Thanks for the help Max!
 
Wow, Unexpected that those themes are much slower because I did not optimize the images yet in those.

I am sure there are a number of things still contributing to the first time issue like the sidebar mainly but I am happy we have some great improvements so far.
 
Richieboy67 said:
Wow, Unexpected that those themes are much slower because I did not optimize the images yet in those.

I am sure there are a number of things still contributing to the first time issue like the sidebar mainly but I am happy we have some great improvements so far.
Click to expand...
Sidebar along shouldn't bother you at all.

And I meant, the internet service provider your box uses? It's only gonna be as good as the pipeline it's hooked up to.
 
Ozzy47 said:
When I had a issue with my FBT, my host adjusted the outbound path from the server to the most optimal one.

That was done via the network.
Click to expand...
I will have to do that. I am sure there are some things I could do with the dns and the network cards but I just do not believe that is the issue here.
 
Max Taxable said:
Just create new style with no parent and that should be the v4 default style that results.
Click to expand...
yeah but I already have a "default" style which I have names "Standard". The only thing different is the header.
I also have a low res theme and both are over 6 seconds.

I will have to check the network out but I lease my servers from 1and1 and I am sure they have a very large data center where these are running.
 
e1LVRUV.png


Is this probably a hosting problem? I can't get my first byte time below .67s. The VPS isn't a bad one though, as far as I can tell. I have this same problem on my main website that isn't a vbulletin. It's on it's own dedicated server with a different host as my VPS and the TTFB is horrible.

What factors can I look for that might be causing this?

In the case of my forum, there are no ads on the page that the test result above was generated from. But there is the dbtech shoutbox...
 
It is a host issue, have them look at the routing to the server. You may need to provide them with a tracert, so they can see where the issue is.
 
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