Painful browsing the forum, like wading through treacle

[#1]

We raised it again with Lithium and they're viewing this thread and running some tests their end, they've already restarted the forum but it appears not to help.

Thanks for the feedback.

[#2]

@JonoH Thanks for the update. As reported, most of the site is horribly slow, although the very odd time, it behaves as it should.

[#3]

Can I echo the other reports? The site feels extremely slow most of the time (typically 6 seconds or longer to load a page) and occasionally has a burst in speed which lasts for a couple of minutes, It's pretty tedious browsing.

Most of the time

Firefox 64.0.2 / Windows 10

All boards

General browsing

Slow loading of pages

[#4]

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@JonoH wrote:

We raised it again with Lithium and they're viewing this thread and running some tests their end, they've already restarted the forum but it appears not to help.

Thanks for the feedback.

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Any response from Lithium, @JonoH? The site was a little quicker about eight hours or so after you posted the above, but it has got considerably worse over the past 36 hours or so - up to 40 second to load a page after you hit enter!

[#5]

What are Lithium doing when they “look at it”?

A need to restart the service clearly points to bugs - what is being done to fix them?

What is being done to address the reports of poor cache management? The static payload of this site is sizeable. Not everything which ought to be cached is being cached leading to content (for example graphics) being reloaded on every page refresh.

Also where such content is being correctly cached, users who expressly clear their cache (for no particularly good reason) will see a degraded experience.

[#6]

@Townman Good questions, but my specific problem is not the speed at which a page loads, but the length of time 'waiting for community. plus.net' is visible on my browser, which makes me wonder if the fault is at a lower level - once that notification disappears, pages load instantly. Also interesting to note that refreshing the forum home page after I have been away is almost instant, but loading individual boards or threads after that results in a wait of anything from 5-20 seconds.

[#7]

I clear my cache whenever I close my browser and I've just logged in to the forum again but for me I don't see the delays experienced by others all that often, but when I do I have time to write a book (OK I exaggerate but a pamphlet all the same) in the time it takes to load.

We know about the bad cache setup but might it also be a routing issue, i.e. the path being used for some isn't as good as it is for others. @Townman do you have any thoughts on this?

[#8]

@jab1

I see much the same pattern, but when one of the multiple page 'refresh' realignments takes place I have seen instances of 'waiting for community. plus.net' to reappear.

@Anonymous

I'm seeing fewer instances than a few months ago, but when they do occur - boy do they cause delay, usually for a few hours!  It can be very erratic even during a session with really bad response times interspersed with periods of rapid response?  At one point yesterday mid afternoon I gave up reading / replying to the forum because of the delays.

Following @Anonymous routing query AND the erratic performance within a session might be an indication of a 'load sharing' problem across the server farm?

Does the Lithium server farm host multiple Corporate forums across different time zones giving different load at odd times?

[#9]

The forum isn’t full of complaints regarding its loading time / performance so from that I assume that whatever the issue is it doesn’t affect everyone all of the time, hence my suggestion that it may be related to the route the user has.

Your reply @MauriceC, gives to me at least, credibility to this thought. If as you say the delay was at such a point that you gave up but no one else commented / complained then does that not imply that the issue you experienced yesterday was specific to yourself.

If this is related to load balancing then surely it would manifest itself more often and as a consequence generate some user response on the subject. But equally if it is related to load balancing then the route from one device will be different from any other.

I may be barking up the wrong tree here but all the same it does sound plausible to me.

[#10]

@Anonymous True, the forum isn't full of complaints regarding slow performance, but I for one experience it over multiple connections and multiple browsers.

Over the past couple of months I have tried my normal Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled/disabled, Safari on a iPad, a vanilla Pale Moon browser and a vanilla Firefox on my connection, two different Virgin connections and a BT connection. Page loading has been from just about acceptable to dire on all setups, so I am reasonably satisfied the bottleneck exists. Maybe others have time to waste waiting for the site to load?

As a further test, I have tried the TalkTalk and Virgin forums (both also Lithium hosted) under the same conditions, and they DO NOT exhibit this slow behaviour.

[#11]

I find these forums a bit slow but adequately usable. But then I'd class 100% of my time spent on these forums as wasted time anyway. Wasting time waiting a couple of seconds for a page to load or wasting time reading stuff on the forums makes little difference.

[#12]

@ejs Useful information - not!

[#13]

The page loading delays can be frustrating during moderator actions

I get delays quite often.

[#14]

Based on what you say @jab1 then this would appear to point the finger more in the direction of Plusnet and not Lithium with their other similar hostings showing no lag. So, if we rule out the routing theory then, as I see it, the only remaining candidates are Plusnet propriety tweaks.

[#15]

My thoughts too, @Anonymous - but which ones?

And why so random?