need help speeding up my forums

freeeeemind

hi Guys, i noticed my forums runs much slower than vanilla hosted sites. im running in a hostgator shared server, im not sure why it's acting slow but it's noticeably slow than any other forums . please help.. i dont know where to start. thanks

whu606

What is your Page Speed score for your home page, and does it change for other pages?

whu606

You could start with this:

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

which plugs into Firefox or Chrome.

It helped me to speed up my forum quite a lot, by following the suggestions.

If you can, check on your server log for slow SQL queries - this can help identify plugins or other elements which may be slowing the site down.

Use phpMyAdmin on your server to repair and optimize your Vanilla db.

freeeeemind

Use phpMyAdmin on your server to repair and optimize your Vanilla db.
all of them are:

note : The storage engine for the table doesn't support repair

any other suggestions ??

whu606

any other suggestions ??

Are you saying you've used PageSpeed, and followed the suggestions, and checked your slow SQL queries?

freeeeemind

yes, somehow it's still slow..... i've already cleared out all the error logs just to make sure. yet still it's slow.

whu606

What is your Page Speed score for your home page, and does it change for other pages?

Tim

How much traffic do you get?

Andy K

Hey whu606: Didn't want to completely derail the discussion, but I was looking for a single piece of advice. I tuned up the MySQL side, server resources seem okay, but always looking to get better perf out of my apps. I'm not as familiar with coding/frontend as I am with backend/hw/storage.

I went and set up Page Speed, pointed it at my Van1 instance ( http://www.story-games.com/forums ), and the main item it came up with was "You should enable compression":

Compressing the following resources with gzip could reduce their transfer size by 208.1KiB (87% reduction).
Compressing http://story-games.com/forums/ could save 159.6KiB (92% reduction).
Compressing http://story-games.com/forums/themes/NamedVanilla2/styles/jazzman/vanilla.css could save 21.2KiB (78% reduction).
(etc etc)

I followed the page where it explained the issue on Google, and in fact googled it further, but I don't quite understand what it's telling me to do. Does it want me to gzip the folder? the files? gzip the files but drop the extension so they are compressed but keep the same name (like "vanilla.css")?

Good advice was had on other elements, but not sure what the next steps are in regards to "compression". Have you done such compression on a Vanilla install? Does it break anything?

(if discussion takes more than one post or so I'll take it to a new thread)

Thanks!

-Andy

whu606

@AndyK

I've only really learned about this stuff from using Page Speed.

The gzip compression is done on the server before it delivers the page to the browser.

You can check with your hosts if they provide compression automatically, or if you have to take any action to enable it.

I'm on Bluehost, which automatically compress files (unless they are 'throttling' the site, in which case they don't...)

freeeeemind

Yep Gziping/compression of the pages is most helpful, i've ravaged through the system and noticed the files are not gzipped, and all of them are just minified provided by the base installation of vanilla.

i think a minify --> gzip feature would be very helpful for slow site like ours.

x00

compression is done on the fly. they are not stored that way, the browser need to support it.