Loading Speed

[FlyFree]

Dunno if I'm the only one with this problem, I somehow doubt it.

Lately TD pages sometimes take ages to load, the severity of the problem obviously depends on the amount of media on the page. Pics, ads, vids.

I don't have this problem with any other site, so i assume there's been some coding going on. Had a peek at one of the pages' coding and seems, as suspected, a giant blob of code in sequential order.

Logical practice is to load all the formatting and text first, all media last, so that the user doesn't have to sit and grind his teeth waiting for the page to load. There are pages I simply give up on, those with youtube embeds.


Something smells.

[Necron99]

^ I think the recent addition of the auto resize code has had some impact.

[Thetyim]

My internet has been a bit tardy for a couple of weeks but it's with every site even the google landing page.
I had put it down to the school holidays

[FlyFree]

An added thought. You know that nifty pic resizer you've introduced? I notice it switches instantly between load size and larger size. That means it's both in my mem, been loaded at page load time. Not a very good idea for obvious reasons.

[FlyFree]

My internet has been a bit tardy for a couple of weeks but it's with every site even the google landing page.
I had put it down to the school holidays

No. It's not tardy. It's downright bad. Up to the point of feezing on some heavily embedded threads.

It's not the net. It's in your code.




Let me expand on that. It is sometimes necessary for me to kill the process in task manager.

[FlyFree]

There's no ordering for load speed in the code. TBH it's a mess.

Maybe someone can figure out why these have to be loaded 5/6 times....

</div> <div><span id="repdisplay_2409460_18568"><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /></span></div> <div> </div> </div> </td>

[FlyFree]

Average Load Time for Teakdoor.com
Very Slow (4.428 Seconds), 93% of sites are faster.

Teakdoor.com Site Info

[taxexile]

Yes, its slowed down considerably lately and im on a fast connection.

Either half the page loads, then it all goes black and starts again, or it freezes completely and I give up.

All other sites are ok.

I dont understand the technicalities flyfree refers to, but maybe somebody should have a look at them.

Its very frustrating.

[FlyFree]

^The site is very heavy. If your pc is not very resource-rich you'll have a problem. This happens when whoever looks after the site has the latest all-bells-and-whistles pc and never considers the fact that the majority don't.

The code looks like hell.

Since I lightened my load and blocked ads things have improved.

This does not mean the problem was me. ALL other sites were fine.

There seems to be a serious drop in traffic the last few months according to Alexa. If this is true the first place I'd look is loading speed.


Load speed has been, is and always will be the death knell for ANY site.


Ignore it at your peril. I was not simply whinging when I started this thread.

[Aberlour]

How do the drops in traffic flow look when taken over a 24 month period?

I have a quick connection but a laptop that's on it's last legs, almost no available memory, yet TD loads straight away every time, even on the pages with nothing but photos and videos.

Still having huge problems with it loading on my phone though.

[Troy]

^^ I have been experiencing the same problem for a couple of months as well. I am also on a good connection and have a high end laptop.

As suggested, number 1 thought is that an additional gizmo has been introduced. If it has anything to do with blocking the bots then fair enough but it may simply be use of a tool that is creating the pages inefficiently.

[Neo]

Interesting posts Fly Free, I'm not as technically savvy.
I've also noticed TD loading times slowing and more recently hanging.
When it hangs I check it against other sites and had no problem with them.
I'm in the UK so assumed it being choked somewhere along the line.

It's a perceptive point that you make regarding the decrease in traffic.
DD would surely groan at the ineptitude of the new administration.
A well deserved green sent.

[wasabi]

The loading for Teakdoor is very fast,I am impressed. The only time that it goes slower is around 7.30 pm and I just assume that the U.K members are loging on at the same time the Thai members have returned from a night out.Then after an hour it becomes speedy again when the Thai members pass out.
I have an old laptop,but an extra fast BT provider.
Hope this helps.
Now Thai visa is very slow,(do not log in,just want to read)so bad is the connection at times I get messages that the connection is lost,and do I want to reconnect,I get so pissed off with TV at times I just hit the red X box in the upper right corner knocking the link on the head.( It is so boreing it is not worth persuing)

[friscofrankie]

There's no ordering for load speed in the code. TBH it's a mess.

Maybe someone can figure out why these have to be loaded 5/6 times....

</div> <div><span id="repdisplay_2409460_18568"><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_pos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /><img class="inlineimg" src="https://teakdoor.com/images/reputation/reputation_highpos.gif" alt="FlyFree Thailand Expat" border="0" /></span></div> <div> </div> </div> </td>

The images; "reputation_highpos.gif" & "reputation_pos.gif" load once and are redisplayed each time. They are less than 300 bytes each, and, are surely cached as well. If you look you will find 6 or 7 calls to it for each post on a page (depending on the posters rep) but they are only "loaded" across the net once and then most likely cached If you post more than once in a "page" your avatar is only loaded once, and most likely can be found in your cache anyway. The rest of what you posted, coupled with css data, is only text that informs the browser how to handle display. if that's a mess to you perhaps you aren't as HTML savvy as you think. (actually eliminiating spaces & line feeds in a code with a large amount of table cells, divs, and data can significantly reduce the load times of a page, makes it tougher to read, but there's tools for that.

This thread loads 854.5 KB (689.5 KB from cache). At the bottom of the page I read; "Page generated in 0.10651 seconds with 45 queries" It takes over a tenth of a second for the server to even generate the page? A lot going on there, 45 database queries.

There's no ordering for load speed in the code. TBH it's a mess.

"Ordering for load speed?" explain that please? The code on this page is not a mess. For all the shit that's going on, in a one-size fits-all, kind of CMS/Forum like vBulletin I thihnk the code is pretty efficiently laid out. quite easy to read actually. The code you pasted is part of each posters profile and a very VERY small portion, quite efficient for what it is and does. it is repeated for each post (and then some).

There are pages I simply give up on, those with youtube embeds.

Hmm... youtube embeds come from youtube's server got nothing to do with TD's speed. Perhaps you've got other issues?

An added thought. You know that nifty pic resizer you've introduced? I notice it switches instantly between load size and larger size. That means it's both in my mem, been loaded at page load time. Not a very good idea for obvious reasons.

Not really, there is only one image per. Width and height have been reset in the image tag. if you look at the info on the resized images you can see that they are actually the larger image scaled to fit in the parameters set. I think if the size (width or height) is greater than 800 px the image is scaled. This is done on load by a javascript function. It is the same image just re-sized to fit. Personally, I dislike that feature. kind of necessary though, since you can load images from anywhere. it doesn't improve load speed, just helps with display (no more photos stretching beyond the screen). The resize occurs after the page has loaded; so, that's not the culprit.

If you go to look at the travel thread by TonyBKK (great thread, man) some of those pages take a long time to load, several posts with several large images per post slow things way down. Those images are being loaded from another server, not TD; but they are big - say about 150KB per. One of those pages end up being 37+MB !!! I say TD should limit the number of images or you tube embeds per post, now that would be a MAJOR improvement.

TD is not in Thailand. you've got some hoops to jump through just getting the data through Thailand's tight little proxies. TD make a lot of calls to remote functions. I particularly hate google analytics. It loads at the bottom of the page, a very good thing but it's a fucking resource hoggin' dog. When comparing to other VB sites TD is about the same. This is not a small informational site or even an e-commerce site. It's a forum. Forums take a huge amount of resources to run, particularly one with as much traffic as TD. This is a small thread, it takes forty five DB queries to provide the data that is then formatted as HTML via PHP and then presented to the browser. How many posts per page are you viewing? Try lowering that.

TD does get slow sometimes. But I find it usually loads pretty damned fast on my system. (I've got a 24+ Mb connection). There are forums ut there to compare to. Try Thai Visa, if you want a fucking dog slow load. Just the landing page takes 13 seconds.

The amount of remote data loaded, and where it is loaded from, can have an effect on load speeds. TD could remove some of the features that allow this, but that would make for a less interesting site.

Animated gifs can cause memory leaks in Chrome and Firefox (version dependent [maybe]). I usually have 10 - 12 tabs open in my browser and by using top (linux program) I always see firefox at the top of the resource utilization list. if I'm on TD or not.

Get used to it. The web development industry is forgoing tight code and lean pages for resorce hoggin' "rich content." I've looked at the back-end and front-end code of some major internet players and they just no longer care about bandwidth or memory use like they used to. "Bandwidth is cheap" "everyone has 8 GB Ram" is what I hear for lazy coders just slapping shit together to meet some marketing dimwit's release schedule. I'm not fond of it and have alienated more than a few interviewers when I tell them their code is shit. But it is. Compared with some of the other crap I've seen that is coming down the pike, TD is very cleanly coded.

[Aberlour]

Well I know who gets my "knows what he's talking about" badge, and it ain't FlyFree.

[Troy]

If you go to look at the travel thread by TonyBKK (great thread, man) some of those pages take a long time to load, several posts with several large images per post slow things way down. Those images are being loaded from another server, not TD; but they are big - say about 150KB per. One of those pages end up being 37+MB !!! I say TD should limit the number of images or you tube embeds per post, now that would be a MAJOR improvement.

Speed tests that I have done show some of the advertising gifs can slow the system down sometimes. Takes nearly 2 seconds to load on a good day and 4+ seconds on a bad session.





Appear to be the leading culprits...

[aging one]

Frankie amigo, you have a butt kisser following you. ^^ Loads slow for me as well but I am chalking it up to old ubuntu, my work windows loads much faster.

[FlyFree]

FF I really don't have the energy nor the time to cross swords with you at length. Neither did I at looking at the code. TD, on the technical side, has always been a steam-driven relic apparently rescued from a dumpster somewhere. The management is what saved it.

There's been all kinds of obvious signs lately that someone is scratching in the coding, not very well.

As you wish. I brought the subject up as a red flag only.

Ignore my ignorance. Ignore Alexa. Be happy.