podcastalley loading super slow

[allthewhile]

I've tried it from home, from work, and from school all on three different "types" of connections. It seems that over the past week or so things have started to load, REEEEALLLY slow around here. Is this just me or what?

[spaz]

I hate to agree with allthewhile, but yeah, I've noticed podcast alley is loading really slow too...maybe it's an indication of the site's popularity

[edgeoffaith]

yeah, it's really slow for me too. feels like i'm back on dial-up :?

[theFerf]

it has been slow for me as well...but i do think that it is in part to the popularity. im checking around to see what the problem is and will try to have it up to full speed as soon as possible.

[slodaddy]

Just a couple of suggestions that might help a little. Limit the size of avatars to 48 x 48 and bytesize of avatars to below 10k. Also, external linking to images slows things down significantly. While nice images are part of the charm of a forum, I'd much rather have quick loading pages as opposed to liberal image posting policy. I really dig this forum, but what a drag to wait and wait for each page transition imho.

[Cookiepuss]

I'd add to slodaddy's suggestions to not allow images in signatures. Some of those are huge and the animated ones are flat out annoying. Especially if the same person posts 3 or more times to the same thread.

Text links in sigs should suffice for people after all. Another thing is do you dynamically generate the pages or are you caching them? Caching would slow down on any mySQL and PHP requests. Since part sof this site have a lot of javascript etc seem you could use all the optimization of Apache as well. That is if you have access to httpd.conf

There are a lot of good papers on Apache optimization, just Google for them.


:D And my 100th post. . ."I love the Alley" ;)

[RevTim]

it has been slow for me as well...but i do think that it is in part to the popularity. im checking around to see what the problem is and will try to have it up to full speed as soon as possible.

I want to thank "theFerf" for all the difficult work that goes into this site, it is constantly improving and your dedication to the Podcaster community is obvious. Thanks!!

RevTim

[Ian]

I thought it was just me. The avatar limitations are a good idea, but I find it hard to believe that those are major contributor to the perfomance hit.

[Cookiepuss]

Seems to have come about after the forum was upgraded to Current now that I think of it. . .

[Ian]

It's working fine now..

[slodaddy]

Whatever you did this afternoon has the forum running like a race car. Thanks for the speedy fix. Cool.

[ksanders]

Yes... much better than 3:00 pm this afternoon!

[theFerf]

I have been working on a lot of new features for the podcast alley site, but nothing really that should cause it to slow down. the forum updates were VERY minor. All there were was: 1. security updates 2. updated template to make forum wider 3. updated template (extremely minor cosemtic) 4. converted email addresses from name@domain.com to name AT domain DOT com in profiles.

Another thing that come to mind that may cause slow downs is the release of the new iPodder. Podcast Alley is built into the directory browser of the new iPodder, and with 70k to 100k iPodder users out there, that could be a lot of new folks checking out the site and feeds (so be nice to them).

The other thing to take note of is that podcasting (and this site) are gaining popularity. In the last month we have extremely expanded the number of users, posts, podcasts and visitors.

The server should be able to handle the load you guys are putting on it, but I am on the hunt to figure out why it is so slow. I do not believe the avatars and sigs are the issue, but maybe we will test to find out.

Suggestions are always welcome.

[allthewhile]

slowed way down again today. is it possible that it's simply your host?

[theFerf]

i wish it were just my host, but dont think it is. i have other sites i run on this server that all seem to be running just as smooth as usual.

im probably going to end up moving to a beefier dedicated server for the podcast alley site by its self soon anyway, for many reason. maybe that will solve all the problems.

[theFerf]

we had some errors with the hard drive with our current provider. hopefully if you are seeing this, i got all the data recovered.

[bob]

Glad to see you back!

[Big Mike]

I'm not seeing it!!!! I'm not seeing it!!!!

[theFerf]

there will be more details soon, but there has been some crazy stuff happening in the alley. :)

[pzarquon]

Indeed! My reply to this thread was sucked into the Twilight Zone.

My money was on phpBB hackers. But overwhelming popularity is much better!

[Cookiepuss]

Well phpBB does have a bad track record (http://secunia.com/phpbb) of vulnerabilities. :(

So with the popularity of the Alley it also has a way of bringing some attention you might not want as well. . .

[el]

No more than phpNuke or other such CMS and forum type things. As long as you keep yourselves updated and abreast of all of the security updates as they're released.

Good to see the Alley is back though :D

[Cat]

Me too I am glad to have you back!!

I really started missing my daily fix.

[cc_chapman]

**** servers. We may not need any transmitters, but we certainly need the servers!

Good to have you back.

[owyn]

Glad to see you back. Was starting to wonder when dns to podcastalley would not resolve.

And response time seems much better.

Maybe time to look at Raid for the server.

[owyn]

PS: Switched to Firefox over the weekend. Much better than IE6 and the scrolling problems I was getting on the forum are gone.

[aaronsnet]

yea.. definetly glad to see that the alley is back...i hope that any issues u may be having can be resolved soon...