Website Performance and Improvements

[RacingPete]

There has been many a thread started in website feedback recently that has mentioned the performance of the site, how it is run and so on, so I will try to address many of the questions here.

Contents

Why is the site running so slowly?

Why didn't you predict this?

What causes the slowness?

Why don't you speed up a specific area of the site?

What are you doing to speed things up?

Why have you changed the look of the site, when you could be speeding it up?

Why don't you just buy a gizzilion servers?

Why do the forums show different posts and have posts missing from time to time?

Anything else to add?

Why is the site running so slowly?

Currently we are experiencing a massive increase in volume of users, with a 20% increase in January this year alone. We hold our hands up and say we didn't expect that much of a jump, more than our optimistic predictions. This has had a knock on the speed the servers can serve pages and adverts.

Why didn't you predict this?

Contrary to popular belief, since Haymarket took over the running of the site we have done no marketing apart from to put on events for the members of the site (PH Meets, PH Show etc). The site this time last year was hitting around 35 million page impressions a month, last month we did 108 million pages, the increase has come from indirect marketing such as word of mouth and increased hits from search engines. The Sunday Service last weekend is proof of the increase in popularity of the site and how word of mouth snowballs the amount.

What causes the slowness?

There are a few areas where the site slows down:

• Adverts - These are served from a third party to the site and during busy periods they cause pauses in the forums and classifieds as the page tries to load them up before getting the rest of the page content.
• Server Load - Currently we hit peaks of users that affect the performance of each of the servers massively during certain periods of the day (1pm-2pm, 5pm-7pm, 8pm-11pm) This is caused by a mix of people surfing the pictures through the classifieds looking for their next car, and the increase in reads in the forums.

Why don't you speed up a specific area of the site?

The hardware is currently not set to differentiate between a request to view a classified ad, a news story, a general gassing forum post, or a ginetta forum post. If we wanted to implement a system to speed up a certain section it would take a lot of development time which could be spent speeding up the site as a whole and thus not a good use of resources.

What are you doing to speed things up?

We are constantly working on optimising the servers, code and infrastructure to improve things. These improvements take time to implement and test before we can put them live and be sure that they make a difference to the speed of the site.

The next major improvement we will make to the site is to implement two new image servers that will serve the classified pictures for the site. This will take a massive load off the webservers that serve the forums, thus speeding them up during the busy peak periods. We plan to have these new servers live and working by the end of next week.

Other improvements are to change the way the adverts are served throughout the site. We are currently testing this in the classifed picture pages and hope to be able to implement it across the site gradually over the next months. This will make the adverts load last after the page content and thus not affect a users experience to view the page.

Why have you changed the look of the site, when you could be speeding it up?

The subtle new look we have implemented across the site is something we have brought forward in our development plan to help speed up the site. This new look reduces the size of each page served across the site and thus will reduce the load of the servers and bandwidth as it needs to serve smaller pages. The new look reduces the size of each page across the site by 50KB, not much on its own, but when multiplied by 108 million pages it amounts to a lot less work for the servers.

Why don't you just buy a gizzilion servers?

We are looking into how we serve the website better into the future and this will mean more servers. We need to implement the above changes into the site and then see how the increase in traffic trends are going to be able to plan the next server build so that we are not caught out again and can plan for a year into the future.

Why do the forums show different posts and have posts missing from time to time?

The database system works by all the updates happening on one server and these updates being replicated to the servers that everyone reads, when the server is heavily loaded with users this causes a delay and posts get delayed from being updated. We are working on speeding up this connection by optimising the speed between the servers and the amount of load across them.

Anything else to add?

We do feel your anxiety at the speed of the site, and reassure you we are working very hard on solving this as hopefully above explains. We too like you are massive PH fans and want to make it work for all.

Hope that helps shed more light on things, and as always comment away

RP

[Vanya]

Thanks for that Pete.

I, for one, am more than willing to bear with PH while it catches up.

The fact we're 4 hrs ahead of GMT and I don't often view PH during it's peak usage periods doesn't influence me one way or the other!

[CommanderJameson]

Would it be a big job to change the page code so that the haynet adverts load last, so that we loyal readers can at least see the page while we're waiting?

The haynet servers are so piss-awful slow compared to the regular PH ones that haynet.adbureau.net now resolves to 127.0.0.1 on my home computer.

[Scraggles]

have to admit that have haymarket set to 127.0.0.1 as they take so long to load - almsot as if they are using dialup whilst everyone uses broadband

if they loaded last, then might even remove their 3 entries from the hosts file or a while

[TheGriffalo]

Thanks for the update... It's good to know you understand the reasons and have a plan in place to speed things up.

[GregE240]

Pete, thanks for the update, however, I think the phrase "The Sunday Service last weekend is proof of the increase in popularity of the site and how word of mouth snowballs the amount." is a bit lame, mate. VW meetings have always been several hundred cars, and only moved as the car park became a no-go area after a short while. All thats changed, in my opinion, is the venue.

Good news, all the same. An increase in quality of service is good to me, and all of us I'm sure.

[RacingPete]

GregE240 said:

Pete, thanks for the update, however, I think the phrase "The Sunday Service last weekend is proof of the increase in popularity of the site and how word of mouth snowballs the amount."

I was using this similarity into the difficulty to predict how much word of mouth advertising affects the site, thus we had around 110 signed up for the event on PH, but 500 turned up. This is the same as I can have servers coping well for 80 million page impressions with a predicted growth of 2-5 million more a month as the previous trends suggests and then suddenly it will jump 20 million.

[RacingPete]

CommanderJameson said:

Would it be a big job to change the page code so that the haynet adverts load last, so that we loyal readers can at least see the page while we're waiting?

The haynet servers are so piss-awful slow compared to the regular PH ones that haynet.adbureau.net now resolves to 127.0.0.1 on my home computer.

Apologies, I didnt make this clear above... I have now changed the line about the advert improvements we are doing to this...

Other improvements are to change the way the adverts are served throughout the site. We are currently testing this in the classifed picture pages and hope to be able to implement it across the site gradually over the next months. This will make the adverts load last after the page content and thus not affect a users experience to view the page.

Hope that clears it up

[jagdpanther]

Its still slow



I'll bare with it because I enjoy the site although do find it frustrating from time to time



What about the anomoly between posting and posts not showing up..whats that all about Pete?

Edited by jagdpanther on Tuesday 19th February 13:14

[RacingPete]

jagdpanther said:

What about the anomoly between posting and posts not showing up..whats that all about Pete?

I knew someone would ask that.. I will add that to the above post.

[jagdpanther]

RacingPete said:

jagdpanther said:

What about the anomoly between posting and posts not showing up..whats that all about Pete?

I knew someone would ask that.. I will add that to the above post.

Always count on me to do the most obvious thing eh

[HeavySoul]

Can you do anything to combat the rise of the idiots?

[Mannginger]

CommanderJameson said:

haynet.adbureau.net now resolves to 127.0.0.1 on my home computer.

For the PC dumb amongst us (me) can you tell me how I can do this and what, in fact, it does? I assume it tells it to bugger off and not try to load?

Edited to add - ok I've found ad-block plus extension for Firefox. Job done. (Until the site resolves these issues at least)

Thanks

Phil

Edited by Mannginger on Tuesday 19th February 19:36

[CommanderJameson]

Mannginger said:

CommanderJameson said:

haynet.adbureau.net now resolves to 127.0.0.1 on my home computer.

For the PC dumb amongst us (me) can you tell me how I can do this and what, in fact, it does? I assume it tells it to bugger off and not try to load?

Edited to add - ok I've found ad-block plus extension for Firefox. Job done. (Until the site resolves these issues at least)

Thanks

Phil

127.0.0.1 is a reserved IP address that is always the loopback interface. Therefore, if I add a line to /etc/hosts (I'm on a Mac) that says that the name "haynet.adbureau.net" is on IP address 127.0.0.1, then instead of going out to the internet to get stuff that's on "haynet.adbureau.net", it'll go looking for it on the local loopback.

Where, of course, it will find feck all. But the point is that it will find feck all very much more quickly than waiting for the haynet servers to maybe-or-not serve an advert.

EFI.

That's edited for informativeness, noobs

Edited by CommanderJameson on Tuesday 19th February 20:32

[Xenocide]

CommanderJameson said:

Mannginger said:

CommanderJameson said:

haynet.adbureau.net now resolves to 127.0.0.1 on my home computer.

For the PC dumb amongst us (me) can you tell me how I can do this and what, in fact, it does? I assume it tells it to bugger off and not try to load?

Edited to add - ok I've found ad-block plus extension for Firefox. Job done. (Until the site resolves these issues at least)

Thanks

Phil

127.0.0.1 is a reserved IP address that is always the loopback interface. Therefore, if I add a line to /etc/hosts (I'm on a Mac) that says that the name "haynet.adbureau.net" is on IP address 127.0.0.1, then instead of going out to the internet to get stuff that's on "haynet.adbureau.net", it'll go looking for it on the local loopback.

Where, of course, it will find feck all. But the point is that it will find feck all very much more quickly than waiting for the haynet servers to maybe-or-not serve an advert.

EFI.

That's edited for informativeness, noobs

Edited by CommanderJameson on Tuesday 19th February 20:32

Change it to 0.0.0.0 as that IP doesn't exist. It'll fail immediately rather than trying to access 127.0.0.1.

[cottonfoo]

I think you'll find 0.0.0.0 points to localhost anyway.

[CommanderJameson]

Xenocide said:

CommanderJameson said:

Mannginger said:

CommanderJameson said:

haynet.adbureau.net now resolves to 127.0.0.1 on my home computer.

For the PC dumb amongst us (me) can you tell me how I can do this and what, in fact, it does? I assume it tells it to bugger off and not try to load?

Edited to add - ok I've found ad-block plus extension for Firefox. Job done. (Until the site resolves these issues at least)

Thanks

Phil

127.0.0.1 is a reserved IP address that is always the loopback interface. Therefore, if I add a line to /etc/hosts (I'm on a Mac) that says that the name "haynet.adbureau.net" is on IP address 127.0.0.1, then instead of going out to the internet to get stuff that's on "haynet.adbureau.net", it'll go looking for it on the local loopback.

Where, of course, it will find feck all. But the point is that it will find feck all very much more quickly than waiting for the haynet servers to maybe-or-not serve an advert.

EFI.

That's edited for informativeness, noobs

Change it to 0.0.0.0 as that IP doesn't exist. It'll fail immediately rather than trying to access 127.0.0.1.

0.0.0.0 is the default route. 127.0.0.1 does exist, it's your loopback interface.

[Scraggles]

got my hosts file from a site found on google via

hosts +mvp

"Now includes most major parasites, hijackers and unwanted Adware/Spyware programs"

Which to me is the major benefit, I simply add on sites at the end that I not want to see, if u goto that site it comes up with nothing
When advert runners make it load quicker, then I might look at them

[JamieBeeston]

One thing to remember though guys.

If we all block the adverts, PH dies through lack of revenue to pay for the servers..

Adverts are a necessary evil.

J

[trackdemon]

But PH would still show the same amount of unique visitors, after all your not blocking PH....?