Speed of this site

[genes]

Hi

Is it me or is this site getting slow?



I have a broadband 1 mb connection and I find that most sites load in an instant but this one can take 15 - 20 seconds to load



Terry

[Dave]

It depends where you're seeing the slow down. We do get a slow down in the forums when you have more than 15 active users on at anyone time. This is the norm for the size of the database. 15 Active users, are just the amount of users, most users will have an average of 10 forum links open at anyone time, which means 150 database connections open, this might not sound a lot but it does tax the server.



The forums are loading for me around 5-7 seconds at the time of this post, which is around the norm. This is on a 512mb connection.



We do notice a general slow down by around of the site as a whole after 1-2pm which is when the states generally comes on line and we have lots of visitors from the states. I'm not going to give any of our stats away here, but we get 10 times more visitors compared to the closest GPS website, which is a lot of users per day.



Most of our reviews are large, it's not necessarily the website slowing down, but the time it takes you to download the pictures. We make our reviews large because we try to bring you as many images as possible including raw photos, and this depending on reviews being read (eg the CoPilot review that we've just released is massive-800k in size!), can have an adverse effect when we release a new review. We will be optimising code over the next few months to reduce the overall loading of pages on-site, but this will mean reviews will get smaller and so will images.



Other latency can come across internet links from different ISP's.

[genes]

Hi Dave

My problem is mostly when logging into the site initialy, after that moving from forum to forum seems fairly fast but thanks for the explanation anyway

Regards

Terry

[MikeB]

Terry,



When you log on do you go to the home page or directly to the forum index page?



This can help us determine where the issues are.
_________________
Mike Barrett

[genes]

Hi Mike

Directly to the forum index page - This is where it takes a long time - Then I log in and that is also slowish but after that things seem normal

Terry

We see you’re using an ad-blocker. We’re fine with that and won’t stop you visiting the site.
Have you considered making a donation towards website running costs?.
Or you could disable your ad-blocker for this site. We think you’ll find our adverts are not overbearing!