Slow load times

Anyone else experiencing them the past few weeks?

Not sure if it is new graphics or ads but it is loading much slower.

Yes, I am experiencing the same thing for a while now.  I have assumed it is caused by the increase in the number of ads using revolving pictures.  But if that is what advertisers want Jason has to do it to pay for the site and make something for himself.

I might go ahead and make a change to how the ads are displayed.  It is not the # of ads or the file size.  I work hard to reduce everything down as small as possible.  The problem is the ads are served through google's ad management system and sometimes it is slow.  i  I catch my own browser at the bottom, reading "waiting for doubleclick".

I like to be able to provide accurate results to the advertisers, but I can't do it at the cost of slowing everyone down.

It is kinda of a catch 22, because google factors site speed in page ranking, but their ad management system is the one slowing it down.


I got a few ideas to fix this.  I will either go back to static ads, or see if I can have the ads load very last, so we go ahead and get our tables out of the way.  I will do some testing this weekend.

Average load time is 4.3 seconds, which is acceptable.

However, I think the problem lies is in the fact every once in a while a request to google doubleclick ad management system will get hung up.  All you need to do is to refresh the page and it will refresh the script and 99% the time it will load fast.

I will see about changing the load order and trying to get my tables to displayed before the ads.  So if it hangs up, you are still looking at the content you need.

Here is the report

http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/t1xld8lFJ/http://www.steerplanet.com/bb/the-big-show/

Still not noticing a speed-up.

Jive Turkey said:

Still not noticing a speed-up.

Click to expand...

Are you on broadband or dialup?

Jason said:

Jive Turkey said:

Still not noticing a speed-up.

Click to expand...

Are you on broadband or dialup?

Click to expand...

Broadband.

I notice when the pages are loading, at the bottom of the screen, it says "facebook.com plug-ins" loading quite a few times.

LOL, i thought you were talking about people who park their truck outside the barn entrance and take forever to load and unload.  (argue)

Aptly enough, google analytics added a site speed report.  Overall the site average out o 4.21 seconds, however this is very limited data.  I will be making some modifications this week to the way the ads are delivered to speed up the site.

I made some changes tonight that should greatly increase the load time.  The website is dependent on google double click for delivering the ads, many times it would hang up, which prevent the main table from displaying.  I change the request type, so the html will load independently.  No more hangups.

Jason said:

I made some changes tonight that should greatly increase the load time.  The website is dependent on google double click for delivering the ads, many times it would hang up, which prevent the main table from displaying.  I change the request type, so the html will load independently.  No more hangups.

Click to expand...

still slow, sometimes painfully slow on broad band - likely limits interest and participation FWIW

It has been loading much faster for me this morning.  Probably one-third the time it was taking.  Now taking 2-4 seconds versus 8-10 like it was before.

DL said:

Jason said:

I made some changes tonight that should greatly increase the load time.  The website is dependent on google double click for delivering the ads, many times it would hang up, which prevent the main table from displaying.  I change the request type, so the html will load independently.  No more hangups.

Click to expand...

still slow, sometimes painfully slow on broad band - likely limits interest and participation FWIW

Click to expand...

Hmmm, the speed has really picked up for me.  You can really see where the problem was when you the forum loads, but the ads are still loading on the side.  Yesterday, the forum would have been behind the ads waiting, now they load asynchronous.

There is a few more changes that I am working on.  The same pingdom test above is now showing 1.2 seconds consistently.

I will continue to work on it.

GoWyo said:

It has been loading much faster for me this morning.  Probably one-third the time it was taking.  Now taking 2-4 seconds versus 8-10 like it was before.

Click to expand...

Glad to hear, I still will work on tuning it up a bit more. 

seems better tonight - technology or the phase of the moon?

DL said:

seems better tonight - technology or the phase of the moon?

Click to expand...

Probably the moon.  (lol)

It has been smoking along tonight.  I have been working on a few things to speed up the database queries.

I generally use my iPhone looking at the website, I've noticed it has speed way up for me. It was loading all the ads and then forever later loading info, but it loading info faster.

According to the analytics, the main forum went down from 3.81 seconds to 1.9 seconds since I made the change.  That is based on thousands of page loads.

Average load time for the main forum is 2.26 seconds, which is definitely in a good range.  Will need to start tweaking the frontpage for better performance.