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Site Performance - optimization workshop thread

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CharlieDelta said:
Here is an interesting article about it. Stop worrying about Time To First Byte (TTFB) | CloudFlare Blog
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Yeah... That article is a bunch of spin and hooey, covering up for the fact that the handshake is always going to be slow using the CF proxy. I proved this with my vB3 which always had good first byte time without CF, and always a F grade with it. It's just the nature of the beast. Just like it is always the nature of the beast with vB4 anyway regardless of mods, hosting, whatever. It just has a bloated DB.
 
Max Taxable said:
That's pretty darned good though for a vB4 loading 2MB on people's browsers. Two..... Megabytes.
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That is because I have a few pics loading on the forum home from the gallery and a few advertisements. In my test results I did it with them eliminated, yours is with them added.
It is a performance hit I am willing to live with as my users love the gallery and the advertisements are paid for by my vendors.
 
CharlieDelta said:
That is because I have a few pics loading on the forum home from the gallery and a few advertisements. In my test results I did it with them eliminated, yours is with them added.
It is a performance hit I am willing to live with as my users love the gallery and the advertisements are paid for by my vendors.
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Nothing is added. Nothing is subtracted.

And yeah, 3rd party stuff ya can't control. It just is what it is and part of monetizing sites.
 
yeah that's nice. 200kb page size would be impossible to achieve without stripping everything off for me. I have banner ads bigger than that.
 
I used cloudflare for awhile but seemed to keep having problems. I thought about trying them again. i think they were newish when I tried before.

I've been reading articles about doing both cloudflare and maxcdn.

I think if I could serve my banner ads from a cdn and a lot of those vbulletin scripts, I would prolly see some difference.

[MENTION=17]CharlieDelta[/MENTION]... Nice looking site! One thing I don't like is the disappearing threads when I hover over the last thread on forum home....where it shows the thread count and replies on hover.

EDIT--- And I think your registration script may be a little too aggressive. :)
 
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I shaved a little more off. I think it the site feels faster than before. I ditched the "Add This" script at the bottom of the footer and hard coded the five follow us links and used a sprite to display the images. Overall it shaved 4-5 requests from the page...plus now the follow us buttons display even if someone is using ghostery because there isn't any tracking (I wasn't using the tracking and would prefer not to send it to someone anyways).


The first test you ran for me had 129 requests and a page size of 2,317KB. Now I'm down to 79 requests and 1,125 KB page size without losing too much in terms of content. Basically optimizing file types, using sprites now for a lot of images (using vb addon + some I added), I did lose one slideshow, but the images weren't very great anyways.

WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : captivereefs.com - 02/08/14 03:58:28

I ran this test here and was at 945KB page size, but I think the banner ads have more to do with that than anything. I have been optimizing the offenders that I see as I run the webpage tests as it is pretty easy to grab the optimized image and overwrite the bloated files.

WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : captivereefs.com - 02/08/14 03:53:51

I can gain more by reducing the forum icons and avatars as well and will work on that more this weekend.
 
Nice work! All it takes is a little effort, and refusing to just accept poor performance things you can change.

One thing it does do for you, and this is only too typical - when you have problems with your host the first thing they are going to want to do is blame you. "You have too many images," or, "You have so much data in your page it's bound to run slow" are common ones in their little trick bag of blame shifting. Cutting almost 1.5MB off your pageload nullifies any blaming of you they might try, nicely.

Plus it is gratifying knowing that you have made all reasonable effort to minimize your footprint on your users browsers - folks on slower connections like DSL and dialup will definitely notice it and appreciate it.

Here's your board as loaded by one of the test computers on a slower DSL connection:

DSL WebPageTest <-- Almost 12 seconds. Imagine what it must have been before.
 
I did some more work today. and got the page size down to 830kb.

WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : captivereefs.com - 02/09/14 00:07:24

I asked URLjet if they had any ideas for improving time to first byte... first thing they did was mention my background image. It was dialed down to about 120KB at that time. I crunched it some more and have it down to 90KB now...its starting to look pretty blurry though.

They sent me a link with more suggestions. I think I have most of these already. But I'm going to go through them to verify.
 
jimsflies said:
I did some more work today. and got the page size down to 830kb.

WebPagetest Test Result - Dulles : captivereefs.com - 02/09/14 00:07:24

I asked URLjet if they had any ideas for improving time to first byte... first thing they did was mention my background image. It was dialed down to about 120KB at that time. I crunched it some more and have it down to 90KB now...its starting to look pretty blurry though.

They sent me a link with more suggestions. I think I have most of these already. But I'm going to go through them to verify.
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Yeah what did I say? They always gonna blame you, first. It's what they're trained to do and it is the teleprompter script they follow. Most of what you get calling these hosts are people qualified for flipping burgers at McDonald's and that's about all. Because anyone even slightly knowledgeable about the web knows a BG image isn't going to slow down a ENTIRE server. Even if that image by itself is 1MB.

v4's bloated DB does slow servers down however. It's documented.

Congrats on your optimization accomplishments! You've come a LONG way.
 
When these sons of bitches say stuff like blaming your 120kb BG image, point out that removing it doesn't help, using stripped down default style doesn't help, hell even using a custom HTML page that merely says "Hello" doesn't help. They will mutter some stupid crap for awhile, then they will escalate your call up the ladder a little to someone who knows something.
 
I've been pretty happy with their support since I have been with them (3 years). They pointed out a couple things that weren't quite right that I was able to fix...my additional.css file was taking forever when testing this url: captivreefs.com/forum. Which is sort of strange since its the same page as captivereefs.com. But I realized I was linking to a couple background images on my test site and I also shortened the url to a relative path so it was inside of the forum directory rather than the full url (http://....). That seemed to get it loading faster.

But I don't seem to be making a dent in that time to first byte with all the changes.

I think I can score a few less requests if I work on adding a few of my custom images to the sprite. I may check into implementing that sphinx search mod by digital point...if anyone is searching, that will lessen their impact.
 
jimsflies said:
I've been pretty happy with their support since I have been with them (3 years). They pointed out a couple things that weren't quite right that I was able to fix...my additional.css file was taking forever when testing this url: captivreefs.com/forum. Which is sort of strange since its the same page as captivereefs.com. But I realized I was linking to a couple background images on my test site and I also shortened the url to a relative path so it was inside of the forum directory rather than the full url (http://....). That seemed to get it loading faster.

But I don't seem to be making a dent in that time to first byte with all the changes.

I think I can score a few less requests if I work on adding a few of my custom images to the sprite. I may check into implementing that sphinx search mod by digital point...if anyone is searching, that will lessen their impact.
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Create a simple HTML page with only something like, "Hello, this is a test page" and test that, see what first byte time is.

If it is still bad, it is a oversold machine, it's the host. If it is stellar which it should be, it's you.



By the way it's the call center's job to make you feel happy with them and they have alot of preset tools at their disposal to accomplish it. Some of them even look legit and sound convincing!
 
Here's another educational thing you can do, since you are a v4 license holder. Download v3.8.7 from the member's area and install it on the same machine, as a test forum. Then run some WebPageTests on that.

Then ask the host why we still have bad first byte time, if we do.

But the real education is, seeing first hand how much more svelte and efficient v3 is over 4, from the jump.
 
Repeated tests reveal a big improvement in first byte time, the other grades aren't relevant for this.

A grade here

B grade here

Results can fluctuate depending on the connection the test computer has at the time, etc. just like it can on our own.
 
jimsflies said:
So what's the conclusion... server is fine and its on me?
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I'd keep testing and bookmarking, try to establish a pattern over several days, different times and alot of tests.

I am pretty sure they have oversold the machine, because that is a typical thing for a host to do. It might or might not be apparent, at different times. The 1000 or so other sites loading the machine have alot to do with apparent performance on your end. It's the nature of the shared hosting beast.

Setting up the vB3.8.7 test site and running a battery of tests on it too could be quite educational.
 
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