For a New Zealand website Geekzone is rather slow...

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Randomahoa

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#22706 5-Jun-2008 23:03

I really enjoy the forums but it is frustrating waiting for the pages to load usually

'waiting for partner.googleadservices.com' Its not really easy to flick between post at any great speed. Where is the site actually hosted? I am on about 4mbit ADSL

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#135818 5-Jun-2008 23:04

They load real snappy on ADSL here for me . . .

It's hosted in Auckland

Randomahoa

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#135823 5-Jun-2008 23:11

I am on Vista Ultimate with Firefox, I just tried IE7 and it is much better...which is surprising

freitasm

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#135828 5-Jun-2008 23:44

Randomahoa: I really enjoy the forums but it is frustrating waiting for the pages to load usually

'waiting for partner.googleadservices.com' Its not really easy to flick between post at any great speed. Where is the site actually hosted? I am on about 4mbit ADSL

Geekzone is hosted in Auckland. Images are hosted in the U.S. Google is our ad serving platform - you probably have problems with access to international sites, hence the "waiting for" message.

chriswiggins

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#135844 6-Jun-2008 07:14

what would be cool is if google had ad server's in each different country to optimise speeds etc

gehenna

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#135850 6-Jun-2008 08:00

chrisjunkie: what would be cool is if google had ad server's in each different country to optimise speeds etc

would also mean that those of us with free national/local traffic would get the benefit of using geekzone and other nz sites as regularly as we do

jpollock

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#135853 6-Jun-2008 08:02

I've noticed that it gets really slow on longer threads. Since it seems to get signature updates immediately, I guess it's
re-generating/re-paginating the discussion each load?

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freitasm

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#135856 6-Jun-2008 08:08

It is all dynamic, you are correct, but it shouldn't be much different on longer threads since most of the database (if not all) is in memory and there's some heavy caching going on.

There are two main aspects: server times, download times and upload times.

Once your browser requests a page it is created on the server and sent down. It usually takes about one second for the front page, to under a second for forum pages. Depending on the server load it can take longer.

This html is sent to your browser. Now comes the fun part. The browser identifies the required "pieces" for the page and issues a request to our server. Note that here your upload speed is part of the equation. Also your browser can only request a certain number of elements from the server, so some will be in a "queue" on your browser. That's why we try to reduce the images to the max.

We host images in the U.S. because of bandwidth. The ads are served by Google now because this reduces the load on the server - lots!

So it's a very wide combination - our server, other companies' servers, your PC, your speeds up, your speeds down, your ISP proxying, etc.

Each user will have a different experience.

Quic Broadband

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE. Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

chriswiggins

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#135874 6-Jun-2008 09:10

is it not possible to host images in NZ too?

I know cost comes into it but surely there is a way to do it...

I would donate towards this but I am still a student

freitasm

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#135875 6-Jun-2008 09:11

You probably have no idea of how much it costs to run a site of the size of Geekzone...

RedJungle

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#135910 6-Jun-2008 10:25

chrisjunkie: is it not possible to host images in NZ too?

Possible != Economical

I understand completely why Mauricio has offloaded as much as possible overseas, the cost of bandwidth domestically is incredible compared to what you can buy it for offshore. It may introduce some additional latency, but assuming your ISP is providing a reasonable international service to you, it really shouldn't be that noticable.

And as already mentioned, if you're waiting on 'partner.googleadservices.com' then it's google that your finding slow, rather than geekzone itself.

jpollock

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#135915 6-Jun-2008 10:38

:) :) :) Static page renders would allow caching to work, saving you $$! :) :) :)

re: NZ Hosting, there is no reason to host in NZ, the prices are too cheap in the US.

It is insanely cheap to host in the US. I host data with Amazon S3, and it's US$0.17/GB of traffic out.

I paid US$0.80 last month for my iPhone repository. :)

That's for fully redundant, backed up and reliable static hosting, compared with NZ$7 for 2GB (NZ$10 for 4GB) of traffic from openhost.

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DS248

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#135918 6-Jun-2008 10:46

Have to say I have quite often found GZ pages frustratingly slow to load - that's on 10Mbs TC cable, Wellington. A few times when it seems to have been taking forever, I opened a couple of pages on gpforums to check whether our connection was playing up. But in every instance, the gpforums papges opened in a snap, while the GZ page is still loading.

freitasm

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#135919 6-Jun-2008 10:48

Seriously, 2 GB wouldn't even start our day...

Our current hosting withg ICONZ is good. It provides some good support and is reliable. There are two reasons why we host images overseas:

1. We wanted a second server to allow for faster downloads. Your browser will be able to download images from our server in the U.S. while downloading CSS and other files from our local server.

2. The cost of a second server in New Zealand would be too high

Back in 2006 we had a DDoS and that cost us about $10,000 in a single month. We since have moved to a more affordable unlimited plan - but you can imagine the monthyl costs for this.

Google is usually really fast - I have no problems loading this on my TelstraClear connection or over CDMA Mobile Broadband.

I am on Vista Ultimate with Firefox, I just tried IE7 and it is much better...which is surprising

No, it is not surprising. Do you have any Firefox ad blocker? Those ad blocker software cause more trouble than help, really. They slow things down - a lot.

freitasm

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#135920 6-Jun-2008 10:50

DS248: Have to say I have quite often found GZ pages frustratingly slow to load - that's on 10Mbs TC cable, Wellington. A few times when it seems to have been taking forever, I opened a couple of pages on gpforums to check whether our connection was playing up. But in every instance, the gpforums papges opened in a snap, while the GZ page is still loading.

During the last week we have been updating our database tables and scripts to maximise performance. This is an ongoing project.

Performance has been affected in the last few weeks due to increased traffic - by updating the scripts we have managed to get better CPU performance.

jpollock

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#135927 6-Jun-2008 11:00

freitasm:

During the last week we have been updating our database tables and scripts to maximise performance. This is an ongoing project.

Performance has been affected in the last few weeks due to increased traffic - by updating the scripts we have managed to get better CPU performance.

Congratulations! As the 37Signals guy said recently, performance problems are good things (and not really problems) when you're profitable.

On the flip side, if you're not profitable, you have my sympathy. :)

Jason

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