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These forums are painfully slow

This forum has got so slow it's on the verge of becoming useless and is totally frustrating.

It's slow to present the contents of a thread 10-15 seconds, but far, far worse to return from that thread to the thread list 30-45 seconds - presumably rebuilding the whole thread list again? which seems somewhat superflous.

Is it not possible to put some effort into optimization of the code involved in these pages. having a high speed internet connection is pretty pointless if the web site you are accessing is using code that is so poorly written that it presents the results slower than a teletype machine would do in the past.

Comments

smith6612

Verizon uses Lithium for their Community Software, and as such, are at the mercy of what Lithium is running on their servers. So I believe the problem, if it doesn't come down to the JavaScript on this forum being clunky or an element on the page failing to load (if your browser is sensitive to that) would be what Lithium is doing to their servers. Here's some proof. My trace leaves the Verizon network.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\>tracert forums.verizon.com

Tracing route to vrzn.lithium.com [208.74.204.208]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms DD-WRT [192.168.3.1]
2 118 ms 114 ms 114 ms 10.15.3.1
3 98 ms 92 ms 103 ms so-1-1-0-0.BUFF-CORE-RTR2.verizon-gni.net [130.81.13.77]
4 134 ms 137 ms 137 ms as4-0.NY5030-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net [130.81.20.106]
5 123 ms 126 ms 139 ms 0.ae5.BR2.NYC4.ALTER.NET [152.63.18.29]
6 95 ms 116 ms 115 ms 204.255.168.110
7 67 ms 91 ms 92 ms te0-3-0-5.mpd21.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.26.61]
8 149 ms 160 ms 160 ms te0-2-0-2.mpd21.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.0.126]
9 205 ms 183 ms 195 ms te0-2-0-3.mpd21.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.30.105]
10 227 ms 240 ms 230 ms te0-1-0-3.mpd21.sfo01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.2.210]
11 208 ms 218 ms 240 ms te3-4.mpd01.sjc01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.1.26]
12 237 ms 229 ms 229 ms te4-4.mpd01.sjc06.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.146]
13 240 ms 228 ms 195 ms lithium-tech.demarc.cogentco.com [38.104.134.3]
14 * * * Request timed out.
15 ^C
C:\Users\>

I'm sure Verizon has their reasons for choosing to go with Lithium to run a forum, though what would be much faster in terms of speed would be to set up a Linux-based HTTP server running nginx, php-fpm compiled with MySQL running software such as SMF or vBulletin that offer a large amount of flexibility. My dedicated server, which is a dual Quad CPU box, even under the loads it gets under from the game servers I run on it has page generation times of 0.0082 seconds for cached forum pages. More lengthy pages can take a quarter of a second to gerate sometimes, but it's definitely very responsive; click and it's already loaded. Here's an example of how long it takes for the server to create a session for me (atter not returning to it for two days) and generate the page:

Page created in 0.07 seconds with 19 queries to the database.

I haven't benchmarked Wordpress on the same server, but it is very fast when you attempt to load it on a fast connection. Enter and it's already loaded up.

Merthiolate

Yea, in fact their whole web site is horrendously slow. And my browser is stuffed with javascript when I access the site. It's so poorly organized too. The best way I can find the things I am looking for is to 'google' for an answer. then follow the google link. I have yet go get a definitive answer on how they use the 'primary' and 'secondary' email addresses. I set them to see what would happen. Nothing I could determine.... I tried to clear them out (set them back to nothing) but the web site doesn't allow that: Something has to put put in the fields. For now, I just have them set to a totally bogus addresses until I get an answer. Believe me, I'm not holding my breath!

@viafax999 wrote:
This forum has got so slow it's on the verge of becoming useless and is totally frustrating.
It's slow to present the contents of a thread 10-15 seconds, but far, far worse to return from that thread to the thread list 30-45 seconds - presumably rebuilding the whole thread list again? which seems somewhat superflous.
Is it not possible to put some effort into optimization of the code involved in these pages. having a high speed internet connection is pretty pointless if the web site you are accessing is using code that is so poorly written that it presents the results slower than a teletype machine would do in the past.

smith6612

Here's two videos I just uploaded, one showing the Verizon Website while my connection is in use (it's always maxed out, so this is how it really feels for me), and the second one showing how things perform when the connection is completely idle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-M_tNb8IpM&hd=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sucdfI56awA&hd=1

The jumpy screen recording is due to how I have CamStudio configured. Not exactly optimized, but the computer is not choking what so ever. This is my gaming computer, so an Intel i7 running at 4.2Ghz and 3 GTX480s won't be choking over something like this. CPU load remained below 15% except for one portion while browsing the forums where the browser hung for a second, that spikes it up to 25%.

So really, the issue could be anything. Either slow response from the web servers, my DSL connection needing some love (if you want to put it that way), or poor optimization, maybe a combination of two or all three of these options. I suppose we just need some video recordings of how the site performs or some detailed analysis of what is running slow on it. It seems to be performing "OK" on my end, not as snappy as it could be.

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