High Tide Aquatics

Site load times

tr1gger

tr1gger

Guest
BARcard
Why does this site and the forums take anywhere from 15-20 seconds to load? According to Pingdom, the site size when being loaded is around 451.3kB. This should load in a fraction of a second.

I am a website administrator and server administrator for all my websites and this one has me scratching my head. Where is this site hosted?
 
It's on a VPS on Wiredtree. We're currently working on getting the new site/forum up and running on a beefier VPS (if necessary).
 
If you guys need hosting space, let me know, I have a whole dedicated at a center in LA. I could host you guys no problem. My sites see around 4 million page loads a month so hosting this board and site wouldn't be an issue.
 
Thanks so much for the hosting offer - will definitely keep this in mind! The current load times are less than ideal, however the hosting service may not be the primary or only issue.
 
Drupal is something I know little to nothing about. My field is Wordpress and vbulletin. I wish I had some recommendations for you, but I do not :/ hope things perk up!
 
We'll be jumping to XenForo which is an up-and-coming platform that looks very promising. vBulletin, while well supported, hasn't seen very much innovation recently, IMO.

From the demos I've tested, it looks really solid and fast and the XF community is growing pretty fast.
 
Ah so once again BAR is moving to a platform only the webmaster knows.... I told you in person what became of the last few attempts like that. Once again if the webmaster leaves, we're up the creek with an all too familiar taste in our mouth :(
 
BAYMAC said:
Ah so once again BAR is moving to a platform only the webmaster knows.... I told you in person what became of the last few attempts like that. Once again if the webmaster leaves, we're up the creek with an all too familiar taste in our mouth :(
Click to expand...

It's always that way! I think we ever only have a handful of technical people to support the club. :p
 
BAYMAC said:
Ah so once again BAR is moving to a platform only the webmaster knows.... I told you in person what became of the last few attempts like that. Once again if the webmaster leaves, we're up the creek with an all too familiar taste in our mouth :(
Click to expand...

Well of all the CMS, Drupal has to be the worst. Best to make some kind of migration to Wordpress for front page and other items and vbulletin for the forums. They are probably the 2 most common solutions and would be easy on whoever has to run them. Only thing, I have never seen the DBTC section in vbulletin, but there may be something out there.
 
denzil said:
BAYMAC said:
Ah so once again BAR is moving to a platform only the webmaster knows.... I told you in person what became of the last few attempts like that. Once again if the webmaster leaves, we're up the creek with an all too familiar taste in our mouth :(
Click to expand...

It's always that way! I think we ever only have a handful of technical people to support the club. :p
Click to expand...

Gresham: Xenforo is developed by a team of disgruntled vBulletin employees, architecturally the two platforms are similar. Denzil made a good case for Xenforo over IPSP and vBulletin, and ultimately we need the webmaster to be comfortable with whichever platform is being implemented. We have a few contingency plans for platform migration and succession, and in both the short term and long run the site will be improved. :)


tr1gger said:
Only thing, I have never seen the DBTC section in vbulletin, but there may be something out there.
Click to expand...

That is a very astute observation - please let me know if you run across any applets that could be suitable for DBTC!
 
You know whats funny I used to get a 1-3 second delay in san jose, now that I live up in the foothills the site loads faster than any other ... Since I'm a MIS Major my opinion is that it is not a server issue, and more of a DNS / routing / Config issue ...

I wonder if people that have the site running slow used the direct ip if the issue is still there ...
 
That's pretty fascinating, bayview. I tried on a couple occasions to get to the bottom of our performance problems but ultimately I was unsuccessful. It doesn't appear to be related to the amount of computation (CPU utilization is quite low) or transfer speed. I ultimately figured it had to do with database performance or with the way that drupal accesses the database, but I could never quite pinpoint it or come up with a solution. A DNS or config related issue is an interesting theory.

Anyway, I didn't know much about drupal when I started either, Gresham, but it wasn't hard to learn. It's not without it's faults and I know the performance issues have been frustrating. At the time it seemed promising and lots of people were really interested in having an integrated DBTC tracking solution, which it seemed like I could provide with Drupal. I'm sorry you haven't liked it, but there were reasons for the decision and I'm sure there are reasons for the using the platform that Denzil is going with.
 
Pinging bareefers.org [96.30.11.64] with 32 bytes
Reply from 96.30.11.64: bytes=32 time=79ms TTL=48
Reply from 96.30.11.64: bytes=32 time=75ms TTL=48
Reply from 96.30.11.64: bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=48
Reply from 96.30.11.64: bytes=32 time=70ms TTL=48

Ping statistics for 96.30.11.64:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0%
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 70ms, Maximum = 86ms, Average = 77ms


Tracing route to bareefers.org [96.30.11.64]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 7 ms 1 ms 173.195.185.145
2 16 ms 20 ms 2 ms 173.195.188.33
3 14 ms 19 ms 6 ms 173.195.177.53
4 25 ms 9 ms 19 ms 173.195.177.9
5 17 ms 9 ms 30 ms 173.195.177.1
6 44 ms 55 ms 31 ms 76-14-140-193.rk.wavecable.com [76.
7 28 ms 31 ms 17 ms 172.16.17.5
8 52 ms 40 ms 24 ms 216.55.44.17
9 22 ms 33 ms 18 ms vb1510.rar3.sanjose-ca.us.xo.net [2

10 20 ms 28 ms 16 ms 207.88.14.226.ptr.us.xo.net [207.88
11 15 ms 18 ms 37 ms te-8-1.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.
12 89 ms 72 ms 90 ms vlan80.csw3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.
13 84 ms 87 ms 69 ms ae-82-82.ebr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [

14 99 ms 89 ms 77 ms ae-3-3.ebr1.Denver1.Level3.net [4.6
15 70 ms 77 ms 96 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.Denver1.Level3.net [4

16 103 ms 82 ms 65 ms ae-3-3.ebr1.Chicago2.Level3.net [4.
17 86 ms 69 ms 78 ms 4.69.158.137
18 78 ms 69 ms 86 ms WiredTree.edge4.Chicago2.Level3.net

19 71 ms 78 ms 78 ms vl11.dsw2.chi2.wiredtree.com [173.1
20 104 ms 104 ms 73 ms vz044e.wiredtree.com [209.188.90.50
21 94 ms 99 ms 91 ms host.bareefers.org [96.30.11.64]
 
Name Server:NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Name Server:NS52.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

nslookup bareefers.org
Server: router
Address: 192.168.2.1

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: bareefers.org
Address: 96.30.11.64


Location:
412 S Wells St, Ste 201, Chicago, US
Country:
United States
Web host:
Cogswell Enterprises Inc.
Server:
Apache/2.2.16 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.16 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwl


Tracing route to NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM [216.69.185.26]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms 173.195.185.145
2 6 ms 11 ms 2 ms 173.195.188.33
3 19 ms 7 ms 16 ms 173.195.177.53
4 23 ms 10 ms 19 ms 173.195.177.5
5 10 ms 10 ms 13 ms 173.195.177.1
6 43 ms 10 ms 14 ms 12.248.202.93
7 21 ms 24 ms 19 ms cr2.sc1ca.ip.att.net [12.123.155.30]
8 38 ms 28 ms 17 ms cr2.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.2.41]
9 31 ms 16 ms 17 ms 12.122.149.133
10 21 ms 18 ms 18 ms 192.205.32.210
11 86 ms 95 ms 85 ms vlan80.csw3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.69.152.190]
12 92 ms 94 ms 90 ms ae-81-81.ebr1.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.69.153.9]
13 112 ms 88 ms 103 ms ae-2-2.ebr2.NewYork1.Level3.net [4.69.135.186]
14 99 ms 89 ms 92 ms ae-45-45.ebr2.NewYork2.Level3.net [4.69.141.22]

15 104 ms 86 ms 92 ms ae-1-100.ebr1.NewYork2.Level3.net [4.69.135.253]

16 105 ms 85 ms 95 ms 4.69.132.89
17 124 ms 110 ms 100 ms ae-72-72.csw2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.1
50]
18 90 ms 90 ms 132 ms ae-23-70.car3.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.149.6
9]
19 118 ms 92 ms 96 ms THE-GO-DADD.car3.Washington1.Level3.net [4.79.16
8.54]
20 * * * Request timed out.
21 * * * Request timed out.
22 * * * Request timed out.
 
I looks like it's getting hosed up in the DC. Quite possibly a DNS issue but could very well be a DC issue too. If we're sharing a VPS it could be another VPS on the same box using all the resources but in my limited knowledge of VPS servers they should be limited to their allocations. If we've checked the load history and we're not seeing the VPS taxed I doubt it's a processing or DB issues. Has anyone checked references/reviews on the hosting provider and their DC?

All that said, the site has been fairly responsive over the last couple of days. If it slows down again while I'm catching up on posts I will try with the IP and see if that makes a difference.

pixelpixi - I truly appreciate everything you've done and continue to do. Thank you very much!

~Charlie
 
Yeah, I'm not too fond of VPS's from the limited experience I've had with our forum. You'd think that running a forum wouldn't experience performance issues.

In any case, if we have to go to dedicated hosting, we probably will. Of course, that's a worst case scenario if the other higher tiers of VPS's don't cut it. Or maybe, we should just hop onto AWS and we would never (hardly ever) have to worry about speed and performance. ;)
 
I really believe it is a combination of issues.
VPS + light load + location + wiredtree + level3.

The sever seems to be hosted in Chicago. A long ways away, lots of hops.

Wiredtree seems to partner specifically with level3.
So less backbone choice and yet more hops and indirection.
Level3 is not particularly well regarded as a backbone if reviews are to be believed.
And the traceroute seems to back that up.
So yet more latency and hops.

If the site is lightly used, a lot of the network + vps caching info gets timed out, and needs
to be rebuilt on the first access.

The host really needs to be located in San Jose!!!
I would suggest switching providers.
 
rygh said:
The host really needs to be located in San Jose!!!
I would suggest switching providers.
Click to expand...

I don't think location matters as much as quality. Our F/R circuit goes from here (Martinez) to Rochester, NY and we have no problems with speed.

For this site with it's limited traffic a shared host should be plenty. The only question would be DB size but I still don't think it'd be a deal breaker for a shared host. That would at least move the server administration off of the BOD's hands and over to the host. It's been a while since I've looked into hosting (I use part of a VPS for my sites :)) so I don't know who they feel about forum sites these days.

~Charlie
 
Apache/2.2.16 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.16 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.14
Click to expand...

I missed this earlier. Could be a throttle issue too. Is everything left up to the server admin (us) to config and manage?
 
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