How is the speed of this site compared to others you visit? Options

[Dibrom]

I want to know what you think about the loading time of this site. Is it fast enough for you? Does it compare favorably with other sites you visit regularly? Is it speedy even on dialup?

[cbuchner1]

whoaah. One vote for "Speedy" resulting in 100%. I guess this is the first time I dominated a poll result like this ;-)

[Dibrom]

Hehe.. that was pretty fast, I believe the poll was only up for like a minute when you submitted your vote. It should be interesting to see how many votes I get on this...

[Jon Ingram]

The site seems very fast at the moment -- and progressively renders well (sections display as they are loading, and the ancient version of Netscape I have at work is very happy).

It'll be interesting to see how the speed scales as this board becomes more popular -- you have an awful lot of features, and I imagine some of them are quite processor intensive.

[Dibrom]

Originally posted by Jon Ingram
The site seems very fast at the moment -- and progressively renders well (sections display as they are loading, and the ancient version of Netscape I have at work is very happy).

It'll be interesting to see how the speed scales as this board becomes more popular -- you have an awful lot of features, and I imagine some of them are quite processor intensive.

Yeah. I think it will do well even under a pretty full load. I've taken steps to try and find a good, reliable, and fast host and cut down bandwidth usage as well as attempt to keep the code running pretty fast. I believe that trying to do this ahead of time will make quite a difference overall.

[JohnMK]

I honestly have never experienced a forum that's this fast. Care to let us in on your secrets?

John

[Dibrom]

Originally posted by Keynes
I honestly have never experienced a forum that's this fast. Care to let us in on your secrets?

Thanks. The forum software on its own seems to be pretty quick, but as far as loading time goes, mod_gzip for Apache helps with that quite a bit, especially on dialup. Then I'm also using Zend Optimizer which speeds up the php code a bit and lowers cpu usage.

[Baddezzed]

Actually it's pretty fast, but the "Thx, Your Vote has been added" stuff isn't necessary, I think. That's the only thing I don't like.

Hope I could help,

Baddezzed aka doofus2 (dialup user)

[Annuka]

Like most sites HA is sometimes fast and sometimes slow.

But I am getting tired of clicking the redundant links: Click here if you don't want to wait... why would I EVER want to wait?

[Volcano]

"Thanks for bumping this thread"

I hadn't voted on this yet, hehe. I don't really notice any difference after the server change, HA for me (56K dial-up) is still "quite speedy" most of the time.

[chicoselfs]

It's very speedy for me, it's good like that for me

[smok3]

very fast, faster than the old ha (tested on dialup and with fast connection), where is this new server located?

[Andavari]

It's pretty fast on my 56k dial-up even with images enabled in Opera.

[guruboolez]

Better than the previous HA board. Thank you Dibrom !

[Dibrom]

very fast, faster than the old ha (tested on dialup and with fast connection), where is this new server located?

Yeah... not only is the forum software substantially faster than vb (and it just got faster with the latest update! (w00t) ), but the server is way faster than the old one About the fastest transfer rates I've gotten out of it were 6.2MB/sec (yes, Megabytes) from apache.org when I was downloading an update

The server is located somewhere on the US west coast I believe, probably in or near the CA Bay Area or something.

[Infrared Archer]

This is the fastest board that I visit. Thanks for keeping the site fast and professional Also aren't these so called "redundant links" necessary to keep the forum in synch with the user's browser?

[fewtch]

This is the fastest board that I visit. Thanks for keeping the site fast and professional  Also aren't these so called "redundant links" necessary to keep the forum in synch with the user's browser?

I second that -- this is the fastest web-based board I'm currently using, especially in the time it takes between posting and the post actually appearing (nearly instantaneous).

[Dibrom]

This is the fastest board that I visit. Thanks for keeping the site fast and professional  :)

Thanks

Also aren't these so called "redundant links" necessary to keep the forum in synch with the user's browser?

Yes, pretty much. All web forums have this really. It might be possible to remove it, but I suspect that would cause problems with some browsers and/or other aspects of the forum software. In other words, that's just the way it goes

[layer3maniac]

Seems pretty fast to me!

[Sphinx no. 4]

Unfortunately I am not here as often as I would like, but I think the site runs pretty smooth.

[edekba]

Quite Fast ... even for my slow ass dialup when I am home for the holidays w/da Parents.

I guess It has to deal w/my other boards ppl have sigs that are jpeg & take up bw. O well.

Nice Work though

[Jens Rex]

No complaints here.

Of course, being the PNG zealot that I am, I'd love to see all the GIF graphics here converted into nice, tiny, cute (yes cute) PNG files, for even faster loading .

[LIF]

Portal, Foruns and Active Topics, all have good speed.
No complaints. Nice job guys.(Opera 6.05)

LIF

This post has been edited by LIF: Dec 31 2002, 00:30

[LordofStars]

Quite a fast board... Comparable to some of the boards I visit that use vbulletin. I use 56k and avoid many boards because of their speed.

[SometimesWarrior]

This site is responsive on my cable connection, but maybe this has something to do with the fast hosting service.

I have been optimizing a dynamic website for my company because modem users have been complaining about long load times. I altered the sourcecode and dropped the generated-HTML filesize (on the page that was the most troublesome) from 100k to 65k just by eliminating the extra whitespace.

I downloaded the sourcecode for this thread, and it was a 106k textfile. Simply stripping out excess tabs and spaces dropped that to 93k. My guess is that the server is told to output text to the browser exactly as it is typed into the sourcecode, whitespace formatting and all. So, for a 10% increase in speed, I recommend that an administrator go to the site's tag generating code and remove any whitespace characters where the code tells the forum software to directly output HTML tags.

Example (I don't know phpBB syntax):

CODE

<!-- print directly to browser -->
<table>
    <tr>
           <td>
           <td>
    </tr>
</table>
<!-- now go back to the script -->

Should be:

CODE

<table><tr><td><td></tr></table>

Another thing: what about putting all the stylesheets data into a separate .css file (the same goes for the javascript)? Then the browser can cache that data and not reload it with every page.

And finally, I'm not sure if this is my browser's (IE6) fault or what, but many of the links seem to have an "absolute" address, rather than a "relative" address. Example:

CODE

Flag: <img src='http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/html/flags/blank.gif' align='top' border='0'>

could be

CODE

Flag: <img src='/html/flags/blank.gif' align='top' border='0'>

All other optimizations would require a lot more work. For example, any properties that's applied to all <td>'s could just be applied once to a <tr>. And then there's the option of throwing out all the table tags and switching to pure CSS layout... (I've toyed with that on my site... waaaay too much work! Going from tables to CSS for layout is like learning how to walk again! )