suggestion A solution to the Neowin slow load problems

[ffMathy]

I have a solution to the Neowin speed problems that Neowin members are writing about here (http://www.neowin.ne...n-as-very-slow/). It's called Cloudflare (http://cloudflare.com) and is entirely free. I personally use it, and a lot of webhosting firms recently started using it globally for all of their customer's websites too.

It works by taking over your DNS (Domain Name System) servers, so that their servers handle the traffic instead. This is also called a CDN (Content Delivery Network), and it is what Google and Facebook are using too, in order to distribute network traffic over several servers. They have a server in almost every country, and by taking over your DNS, they automatically redirect the traffic to an appropriate server in the country that isn't overloaded too much. This would also make your website get less overload.

Furthermore, they compress your HTML. Right now, if you click "View source" on this page, the actual data is not compressed at all (sure, it might be GZip compressed without me knowing it due to under-the-hood browser features, but that doesn't give as much).

They also keep your site up. Let's say an error occurs on the website. They then just send the latest working version of Neowin to your users, while you fix the issue. Seen from a development perspective, changes added to the website are registered by Cloudflare in less than a few seconds. Furthermore, they keep your site protected to DDOSing, and other hacking attacks, as well as spammers. All of these functionalities can be toggled on or off if you don't trust them, too.

Now, with all the buzz going on lately about Google penalizing slow websites in the search results SEO (Search Engine Optimization) wise (http://googlewebmast...ch-ranking.html), I believe it would be a good idea to turn to this solution.

I'm not just an ordinary guy. I'm an experienced developer too, that recently ran a private hosting company through 3 years. If I didn't know much about Cloudflare, I wouldn't be recommending it.

[Japlabot]

It works for static files, most of Neowin's content is dynamic. It's not going to make much difference.

[Guth]

It works for static files, most of Neowin's content is dynamic. It's not going to make much difference.

This. with Neowin using AJAX and PHP pages I cant see it helping too much.

I've never used it though and I have heard good things about it.

I thought it wasn't free, especially for a website the size of neowin? I could be wrong though.

[LUTZIFER]

I still don't understand what is slow about Neowin. Seems to be quite a bit about that lately.

I'm on a fairly crappy internet service, and using wifi from a neibor somewhere nearby, and Neowin loads like in quarter of a second for me, on the main page and I don't find any post pages to load slow at all.

[cork1958]

It works for static files, most of Neowin's content is dynamic. It's not going to make much difference.

No difference what so ever!

I still don't understand what is slow about Neowin. Seems to be quite a bit about that lately.

I'm on a fairly crappy internet service, and using wifi from a neibor somewhere nearby, and Neowin loads like in quarter of a second for me, on the main page and I don't find any post pages to load slow at all.

It's not the speed of simply loading Neowin, but usually when replying it can take MINUTES for post to go through. Board at times is almost useless!

[n_K]

Slowdown is most probably caused by a load of database transactions that are waiting to take place, cloudflare may speed up static files being sent but it slows down dynamic files even more because you're going through another data centre.

Fix neowin speed issues = fix database queries.

[+Eternal Tempest MVC]

Didn't someone post recently about alexia and how slow the performance of neowin and the facebook stuff was the bottle neck.

[LUTZIFER]

Didn't someone post recently about alexia and how slow the performance of neowin and the facebook stuff was the bottle neck.

Yep, I read that. And I have noticed some changes on the main page with those Twitter and Facebook links near the top.

[Timan Veteran]

Didn't someone post recently about alexia and how slow the performance of neowin and the facebook stuff was the bottle neck.

Nah no one said that, theres two different issues. Site optimization which we did some of yesterday, then server optimization which is something that still needs to be addressed, but also IPB is gonna always run slower than the main page.

[HeyRatFans]

Not gonna tell you how to run your servers, but my suggestion would be to ditch Apache (presumably running PHP as a module?) and use nginx and PHP-FPM.

Both PHP 5.4.x and MySQL 5.5.x are substaintially better performance wise than their predecessors and Apache doesn't stand a chance against nginx.

Upgrading would also give you a chance to rid yourself of a LOT of software vulneravbilities that you might otherwise be at risk of by having not upgraded Apache and PHP.

[TSP]

Not gonna tell you how to run your servers, but my suggestion would be to ditch Apache (presumably running PHP as a module?) and use nginx and PHP-FPM.

We have a very good experience running nginx and PHP-FPM since we switched to it aswell, so I would recommend them considering it atleast.

[n_K]

Not gonna tell you how to run your servers, but my suggestion would be to ditch Apache (presumably running PHP as a module?) and use nginx and PHP-FPM.

Both PHP 5.4.x and MySQL 5.5.x are substaintially better performance wise than their predecessors and Apache doesn't stand a chance against nginx.

Upgrading would also give you a chance to rid yourself of a LOT of software vulneravbilities that you might otherwise be at risk of by having not upgraded Apache and PHP.

Agreed, but PHP is again rubbish, get HHVM and see performance run magically :)

[Redmak Administrators]

Not gonna tell you how to run your servers, but my suggestion would be to ditch Apache (presumably running PHP as a module?) and use nginx and PHP-FPM.

Both PHP 5.4.x and MySQL 5.5.x are substaintially better performance wise than their predecessors and Apache doesn't stand a chance against nginx.

Upgrading would also give you a chance to rid yourself of a LOT of software vulneravbilities that you might otherwise be at risk of by having not upgraded Apache and PHP.

Yeah, upgrading to PHP 5.4 is something we should do

[Guth]

I must say that neowin isnt all that slow for me on a 6mbit connection.

posting does take a little time (maybe 10s?)

but apart from that everything is no slower than any other forum i use. We must remember that IPB here is running aHUGE forum with a huge DB!

My suggestion would be vBulletin :laugh: always been a fan of it. (Im kidding ofcourse, I realise that is not an option)

[pes2013]

Not gonna tell you how to run your servers, but my suggestion would be to ditch Apache (presumably running PHP as a module?) and use nginx and PHP-FPM.

Both PHP 5.4.x and MySQL 5.5.x are substaintially better performance wise than their predecessors and Apache doesn't stand a chance against nginx.

Upgrading would also give you a chance to rid yourself of a LOT of software vulneravbilities that you might otherwise be at risk of by having not upgraded Apache and PHP.

Im not sure if a Apache to nginx translation can be done overnight.......It might take some work.

I do agree that the latest version of PHP (and MySQL) should be used. Better yet, maybe MariaDB....

[xendrome]

Nah no one said that, theres two different issues. Site optimization which we did some of yesterday, then server optimization which is something that still needs to be addressed, but also IPB is gonna always run slower than the main page.

Disable the Facebook/Twitter stuff for 24 hours and lets see what happens..

[LaP]

Neowin the website itself is not slow at all. It's not fast but not slow.

What is slow is the forum.

[DaveLegg Developer]

Cloudflare wouldn't help us with speed. We've tried them before, and they only caused headaches. Every ime we made a change to a css file for example, cloudflare would show the 'site offline' page for a good 5-10 minutes, amongst other issues. From what I can tell, the issue isn't slow database queries either. If you hit post and then half a second later, open the thread again in another tab, you'll see your post there, whilst the initial tab is still loading. Obviously IPB does a lot of additional processing after the post is submitted, and I have no idea what this processing entails, but it's clearly that which is causing the slow processing problem, and when we get time, we will look into that thoroughly.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

^ Well the DB may not be the main problem, but you have to admit that the DB has been somewhat of a problem lately with it taking a crap on itself every couple months causing abysmal slowdowns for a few days until it's either rebooted or manually cleaned

[remixedcat]

Facebook is what slows it down....

[SuperKid]

Im not sure if a Apache to nginx translation can be done overnight.......It might take some work.

I do agree that the latest version of PHP (and MySQL) should be used. Better yet, maybe MariaDB....

I have used MariaDB and yes It is faster, but it would take a lot of downtime for Neowin to convert to that. and nginx and php fpm makes a massive difference

[remixedcat]

I would suggest litespeed, however there is a little problem and to resolve it would not be pretty and a certain memberbase would be ****ed. so nope to that. PM me to find out why (subs only)

[Jub]

Nginx isn't faster at serving php content actually. FPM however would indeed be advisable, and of course, the lighter server load and static file serving of Nginx.

Also, apart from pricing, why would litespeed cause people problems?

Ultimately I don't think the entire issue can be solved by simply changing the environment. There's a lot to do with the IPB application itself no doubt.

[SharpGreen]

I would suggest litespeed, however there is a little problem and to resolve it would not be pretty and a certain memberbase would be ****ed. so nope to that. PM me to find out why (subs only)

Litespeed is not free, or rather the free version has too many limitations.

[remixedcat]

that as well as something else....