Slow Load Times

[Andrea B.]

 

Global Pings

 

[Andrea B.]

Do you have Adblock running?

Has your Firewall changed?

Is your ISP having blockages somewhere?

Is your ISP blocking or throttling any websites?

Can you access the website on one device but not another?

Is Javascript turned off?

 

 

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Rebooting your router often speeds things up.

 

 

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Clear page caches & cookies.

 

Firefox: Firefox > Preferences > Privacy & Security (on left) > Cookies and Site Data > Clear Data

 

Safari: Develop > Empty Caches

 

Chrome: ? need to look this one up

 

Go here for a Cache Refresh Test:  https://www.refreshyourcache.com/en/cache-test/

 

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Going to go look at traffic now.

 

 

 

[Andrea B.]

I saw that a certain topic from 2020 was getting a lot of hits because it was thought to be some kind of porny thing due to its title. I retired the topic temporarily until I can reconstruct it under a different title.

Too funny!

 

Of course, I don't think that was the cause of any major problems.

[Andrea B.]

Top Hits

 

The 1st is Bahnhof Internet in Stockholm.

The 2nd is Amazon Technologies in Seattle. Like, what the heck? Why is Amazon hitting on us?

The 3rd is Wind Tre in Milan.

[Andrea B.]

Site5 HostBasic Plan

We are on a plan with Site5 which permits 10000 visits per hour.

Visit = one visitor who arrives at the website to browse at least one page.

 

I talked to Site5. They assured me that we do not need to move up to the next level of hosting.

 

Here are our most recent traffic statistics. Note that January is not yet complete.

The big surge during July 2023 was due to scraping by a bot. That was fixed.

Look at our Daily Average for Visits to see that it varies between about 1600 - 2500 visits per day with only occasional surges.

 

 

 

[Andrea B.]

Taking a break for dinner. Then I will go to the Invision Forum to determine whether anybody has had problems since the last maintenance upgrade.

[Andrea B.]

Nothing reported on Invision forum which would be relevant to slowness experienced by some members and not others.

 

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I've looked into everything I can think of to look at. And found nothing so far. I want to look at the database also, but that must wait until tomorrow as it is getting late here.

[Andrea B.]

I cannot find anything which would cause a loading slowdown to some members but not others.

 

[Andrea B.]

THIS is interesting. I'm in the US on my home PC in New Mexico. I pinged Google and also a few sites in Europe.

Recall that UVP has been slow to load for Birna/Norway, Stephan/Austria, and Ulf/Sweden.

 

Ping to google.com:  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 21.119/27.269/38.807/4.367 ms

Ping to France: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 21.036/28.123/45.550/5.144 ms

Ping to Italy:  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.439/26.974/31.731/2.408 ms

 

Ping to Norway: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 53.241/59.357/73.724/4.150 ms

Ping to Austria: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 70.057/85.123/141.592/19.888 ms

Ping to Sweden: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 97.792/106.510/122.891/7.143 ms

 

Of course, I am NOT saying that my example of 6 Pings is proof of anything at all. But still. 

Why would some countries be slower than others?

 

[Andrea B.]

10 more pings from Andrea, New Mexico, USA.

Again, 10 Pings do not a Proof Make, however.......

 

I think this indicates that commercial entities in some countries are getting the fast speeds

while the "ordinary" user is not being provided with fast speeds. Unless, I suppose, one pays for it.

 

The long average speeds shown here from US-to-Sweden, US-to-Austria, US-to-Norway match

the complaints about slow speeds in the reverse direction discussed above.

 

Sweden ping google.se:             round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.406/23.869/27.895/2.870 ms

Sweden ping www.savazzi.net:   round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 97.341/106.096/117.650/5.687 ms

 

Austria ping google.at:                         round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.355/26.718/45.882/4.774 ms

Austria ping photo-chameleon.com:  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 152.105/159.117/161.600/2.535 ms

 

Norway ping google.no:                        round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.820/28.063/37.626/4.053 ms

Norway ping www.naturfotograf.com:  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 51.081/56.517/59.806/2.872 ms

 

Italy ping google.it:                 round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 20.342/24.860/29.336/2.905 ms

Italy ping www.collodio.net: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 162.454/169.376/177.968/4.179 ms

 

US ping google.com:                            round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 22.923/28.617/40.172/5.269 ms

US ping ultravioletphotography.com:  round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 51.757/57.726/60.160/2.142 ms

 

((Aside:  And I would like to ask:  whatever happened to Net Neutrality in Europe?? Was it implemented? Just curious.))

[Andrea B.]

I'm going to enable Lazy Loading. This means that images are not loaded until the user scrolls far enough to see them. This might improve page loading time. (I think you should probably Clear Caches to see this improvement immediately.)

To enable Lazy Loading, the content on UVP will have to be rebuilt.

[otoien]

To me it looks like this is very intermittent and time variable. Even the main page was very slow for me to load right now (probably closer to 10 s opposed to other sites), at other times it comes right up, and other times again even much slower. I Just did a ping to UVP here from Alaska:

Minimum = 87ms, Maximum = 92ms, Average = 88ms

 

[ulf]

My gut feeling is that this problem is related to how images are processed behind the scene. 

When at the Activity page scrolled down to the link to Luckazs post

the activity page goes on several minutes when the images for the very small preview images are created from the rather big images inside the post. 

Just now it is still trying to load on a second tab in my browser. It took ca 10 minutes to load that page with 13 not that big pdf-images.

When ready loading the blue underlined link in this post this post switched to the more fancy thing above.

 

I have no knowledge about how site pages are handled, but to me it would be logical if some tings were cached and ready to send without any processing.

 

The ping response time is not proportionally longer compared to faster sites that load instantly.

 

Measured  ca 15 minutes ago:

--- ultravioletphotography.com ping statistics ---

30 packets transmitted, 30 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 165.113/185.461/373.466/42.203 ms

 

 

[StephanN]

3 hours ago, Andrea B. said:

 

 

 

((Aside:  And I would like to ask:  whatever happened to Net Neutrality in Europe?? Was it implemented? Just curious.))

 

Thanks for all the effort you're putting into this. At the moment speed is almost normal, but not sure if it's Lazy Loading or just that most Europeans are still asleep :-)

 

"Net Neutrality"??

[StephanN]

11 minutes ago, ulf said:

the activity page goes on several minutes when the images for the very small preview images are created from the rather big images inside the post. 

 

 

Agreed, this would explain a lot of the effects

[Andrea B.]

Here is what I do not understand-----

 

I clicked the Activity button on the menu. The page came up instantly and the little preview images popped up within ms after the click. Why would it take 10 minutes for Ulf to load the Activity page?

[ulf]

Just now it is faster for me, just half a minute or so.

It seams to be related to if there are any big images to create preview images from and how big they are.

That is only done the first time the page is opened.

The second time I open Activity those preview images are cached locally and I get a very fast response.

 

If I remember correctly, the other day there was several topics with many images to process and display previews from and the general response time was slower than usual.

 

The current speed is better, but not fantastic:

--- ultravioletphotography.com ping statistics ---

14 packets transmitted, 14 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 167.408/175.021/192.056/7.804 ms

 

I wonder if there are several occasions of handshake to show an image?

I still think the problem is from how the site is processing images to display.

It might be in combination with slow communication response, but I bet that the core problem has to do with images.

 

Is loading your "My Attachments" by your avatar at top right just as fast, Andrea?

Mine still takes minutes, except for the very latest that was cashed from Activity

[ulf]

When waiting for any page to slowly load the whole site is blocked from any communication up or down.

My last post was waiting a few minutes to upload, after I clicked Save, while My Attachments was processed.

 

It is not possible to close the page and start over again with Activity to look at another topic.

A picture rich topic insist of crawling until the end, or at least long enough for me to give up. 

I normally give up and com back later instead. 

 

[Andrea B.]

If you load the Condensed View of the Activity page, then the loading should speed up because Condensed View contains no preview images.

 

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It is difficult to diagnose a problem which I cannot reproduce. I'm trying!

 

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I have 260 pages under My Attachments, so I just don't click that. I usually use Search to find some image I've uploaded.

 

[ulf]

I really appreciate that you are trying and understand the difficulty.

Thank you very much for the effort!

 

I am not complaining, just trying to help with any input that might be of help.

As I am completely ignorant about the tech behind, I can only give hints of the appearance and details I can see.

[Andrea B.]

oh, yes, Ulf I know that you are not complaining! 

 

I'm just frustrated because I cannot figure out why only a few members are having this kind of problem. 

 

I have put a query on the Invision forum about a couple of things. Maybe I'll get some info which would help.

 

We might need to restrict image dimensions going forward. We could test that for a month or so to determine if it might improve some members' load times. If I do set such a restriction, it would only apply going forward. Previously uploaded images would not be affected.

[Andrea B.]

Let me please reiterate, just for the record, that when anyone encounters a slow website, switch (at least temporarily) to a faster browser, clear your browser caches & cookies frequently, and don't keep multiple tabs open. Also reboot your router. And perhaps check with your local ISP just to make sure there aren't any local slowdowns. Then notify me so that I can do the usual checks on our error logs, run some global pings, check our traffic stats, and do all the other items I reported on above. (I don't mind doing this at all.) As a last resort, perhaps try a faster ISP service for a couple of months just to see if that helps.

 

As mentioned, I've got a couple of questions out to the Invision forum. And I'm looking further into perhaps using a CDN service which might provide slightly better service to Europe. And I'm also considering whether limits on dimension size of images might help a little or help a lot or not help too much at all.

[otoien]

Considering that this slowness is intermittent and can quickly change, would a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the parent server show up in our web site's log?

[Andrea B.]

I'm not entirely knowledgeable about what to look for. Lots of failed logins could be a symptom. For the record I haven't seen that. Although we do get a certain amount of failed logins from bad bots looking to find a way into a website. (This happens to all websites.)

 

Denial of service is best detected at the server level. I have no access to that kind of traffic info because we are on a shared server. Typically DoS is detected by a deep analysis of traffic patterns and requires specialized software. 

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Just in case anyone thinks that I'm immune from what you all have experienced with the slow loads, I note that today I am seeing some slow loading times!!!!!

[Andrea B.]

I'm going to split off the discussion of slow loading times and give it a new title:  Slow Load Times.