[dmbrubac]

I've run lots of forums in my day and one of the big issues is the number of bits you have to push down the pipe.

Right now, you are sending nearly 300k of images because of the Christmas skin. That's about 10x more than ideal and 3x more than what I've found to be barely acceptable.

Your total page size is about 441K. That is really big. Anyone not on broadband will find the site too slow to use.

Also, you don't appear to be employing client side caching of the images once you do send them down the pipe.

Here is some info that may surprise you...

Global Statistics

Total HTTP Requests: 76
Total Size: 440798 bytes

Object type Size (bytes) Download @ 56K (seconds) Download @ T1 (seconds)HTML: 17692 3.73 0.29HTML Images: 274057 67.02 13.85CSS Images: 22673 5.72 1.32Total Images: 296730 72.74 15.17javascript: 117252 24.57 1.82CSS: 9124 2.02 0.25Multimedia: 0 0.00 0.00Other: 0 0.00 0.00

External Objects

External ObjectQTYTotal HTML:1Total HTML Images:62Total CSS Images:6Total Images:68Total Scripts:6Total CSS imports:1Total Frames:0Total Iframes:0
Download Times*

Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 356.84 seconds
28.8K 186.02 seconds
33.6K 161.62 seconds
56K 103.05 seconds
ISDN 128K 42.10 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 17.54 seconds
*Note that these download times are based on the full connection rate for ISDN and T1 connections. Modem connections (56Kbps or less) are corrected by a packet loss factor of 0.7. All download times include delays due to round-trip latency with an average of 0.2 seconds per object. With 76 total objects for this page, that computes to a total lag time due to latency of 15.2 seconds. Note also that this download time calculation does not take into account delays due to XHTML parsing and rendering.

Look at Web Page Speed Report - WebSiteOptimization.com for details.

68 images on the forum page - wow!

Hope this helps with your bandwidth and cpu issues.

[woodcreeker]

Good information. Thanks for analyzing and sharing. We have other issues at hand, though.

Read This: AAAFTA Site 503 Errors

[dmbrubac]

Exactly the reason I posted. The less you serve with each request, the more you can serve before you hit the limit.

[woodcreeker]

We also have the Default Style, lower right for users with slow connections. We will attend to all these details after we move and get setup and running again. Because we are on a shared solution, we will get everything running with 10 times the CPU usage this week. Should be good enough for 1500 to 2000 members online simultaneously before we cut back on our page usages. We also have a permanent skin ready which will not be so server intensive as the Christmas Themed one.

I would hate to deal with the fact we should adjust everything for the benefit of a 24k modem user. I do know what you are saying above, those are just numbers. Also, your browser doesn't have to download images everytime you view a page, they are already cached by the browser.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestions again!!

[aladin 13]

wood is there something you can do about this when new bins came out i cant log in to post them..maybe mods,site helpers and vip members should have preferense to the site ...
just a sugestion. thanks

[woodcreeker]

Yes, we will start limiting access to certain groups during peak usage times.

This will include Moderators, Site Helpers and Contributors for now once we get the permissions setup. We will expand on this when we setup other user groups as well. We are also going to upgrade our servers next month so we can handle much more of a load, and that will further stop some of these limitations. We are trying very hard to keep this a free site. This site is growing very, very rapidly, and our money only goes so far to handle the traffic. We may have to institute Paid Memberships if we cannot continue to keep up with the demand.

Thanks for your concern, aladin 13, I couldn't get on the site, tonight myself during the premium hours.

As far as the initial post in this thread goes, the site the guy used to analyse this site was using quite an antiquated method, as you can tell his numbers are way off. A 14K modem? C'mon. Page loads via T1 lines 17.54 seconds? Nah, any DSL can load a page from here in under a second. A T1 line is 100 times faster than that, too. He must have been using his Windows 3.11 386 machine for the above analysis.

[hazwis]

if your running apache and mysql ill be happy to help you fine tune it.

[woodcreeker]

The trouble isn't the Apache or MySQL, it's the raw traffic we are generating. We didn't think we were going to grow into one of the best FTA sites in just a few months, but it seems like we are headed that way. Upgrades are a priority, and we will be doing some upgrading pretty soon.

We will discuss this and more in a Site Helper forum when we create one, hazwis.

[hazwis]

im glad we are growing, i think its a tribute to what a great job your guys are doing.

anyways, happy to help where i can. i work on linux servers all day so pretty familiar with the ins and outs.

[tb1971]

Thats good to know, thanks for that info, might need ya sometime!