Occasional very slow GZ page loading

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timmmay

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#212777 12-Apr-2017 11:49

I clicked on an email link to view a thread a few minutes ago, the link should've taken me down the page to the newest post. The page loaded fine, but didn't take me down. The reason was the whole page content hadn't loaded - at the bottom of Chrome I could see "establishing secure connection". I assume that one of the resources the page uses was going slow.

I was curious so I ran a webpagetest.org test on the page.

Full page load time was 20.6 seconds, but it was visible from about 4 seconds.
The GZ resources loaded quickly, it's looks like ad networks and such slowing things down.
Request 57 had a 1500ms DNS lookup time
Request 165 (tribal fusion) took > 3 seconds. DNS was 1800ms, SSL 800ms
Request 151, some kind of 0 byte beacon, took 2 seconds to delivery that 0 byte file due to DNS and SSL
There are a couple of dozen 302 temporary redirects on resources loaded. That means there's a slow initial lookup, then another lookup because resources moved.

Anyway, not really a problem because it's occasional, I just thought it was interesting.

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#1762089 12-Apr-2017 11:50

Interestingly, it took around 21 seconds to fully load this page after I hit send. The page was visible, but it was still loading something in the background. I don't know what, nothing visual changed.

Edit - when I submitted this comment the same thing happened.

freitasm

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#1768811 22-Apr-2017 12:31

I have added preload tags to the most used resources now. This will reduce the page load a few hundred milliseconds for those using Chrome, Vivaldi and Opera. Those using Firefox will see this improvement soon after new releases come out.

I have moved a couple of resources to HTTPS, which speeds up loading pages since most come from Google and HTTP/2 is enabled, so there's savings in connection times.

I will look at Viglink (only used for non-logged in users) and change accordingly.

I have preloaded Disqus on the home page and news pages as well as TinyMCE where used in forum pages as well.

I will look into other changes later today.

timmmay

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#1768849 22-Apr-2017 13:14

Does that just do the DNS lookup, does it preload the resources, or does it establish an HTTPS session? Session resumption is faster than creation, so either of the second two should make a bit of a different.

Page load time is down from 20.6 to 17.6s (test result). The page is visible after around 4s, it's the plethora of other services loaded that make it slow.

freitasm

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#1768851 22-Apr-2017 13:16

It actually loads the resources into the cache while loading other stuff such as images and CSS.

hio77

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#1769052 22-Apr-2017 21:01

dns speed issues i would say you should be looking at your connection there..

loving the changed to more SPDY implementations though..

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timmmay

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#1769055 22-Apr-2017 21:05

hio77:

dns speed issues i would say you should be looking at your connection there..

The test was run from an AWS data center in Japan using webpagetest.org. See the link in my first post. AWS data center connectivity is probably pretty good.

freitasm

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#1771146 27-Apr-2017 11:05

I am running an experiment. I've replaced the top forum banner for a larger version, while removing the two tower ads and swapping the network on the large half page tower. This reduced the total requests on the same page you tested from 207 to 149.

Testing from the Australia DC (instead of Japan), those changes resulted in about 5 seconds savings. Will continue to run this test to find a good mix of revenue and number of ads on page.

Quic Broadband

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timmmay

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#1771147 27-Apr-2017 11:09

I'm not sure it's worth doing anything that reduces revenue much. Faster pages means better SEO, typically, but Geekzone ranks highly anyway. Since the important parts of the page loads quite quickly it's not a big problem. I think it's the advertising and such that loads a bit slowly.

freitasm

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#1771292 27-Apr-2017 14:37

That's exactly my point. I think I can reduce the number of adverts without affecting the revenue and that's what I am experimenting with.

sonyxperiageek

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#1771336 27-Apr-2017 15:25

Are the ads revenue based on CPC or CPM?

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freitasm

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#1771337 27-Apr-2017 15:28

It all depends on the advertiser. It could be one or another really.

freitasm

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#1774666 2-May-2017 22:01

Sorry, wrong URL for testing. Will post again soon.

freitasm

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#1774671 2-May-2017 22:20

Ok, test here now - almost half of the time from your test.

timmmay

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#1774725 3-May-2017 07:03

That's good progress :) With those ad servers and such being slow it would be very difficult to get to what I would consider a pretty good time of 4s, or the "quite good" time of 2s.

sonyxperiageek

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#1775027 3-May-2017 16:01

Did you remove the large ad taking up half the above-fold section? Or is it still automated? Because the smaller rectangle ad replacing it certainly makes the page look and feel better. :-)

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