Slow Slow Portal

[#1]

Kelly,
Access to the portal has been dire for a long time - a year or more - and has been discussed a number of times in these forums.  I agree with oldjim, it is consistently one of the slowest web sites I access. 
Maurice
Edit 18:24:  Just needed to visit the Member Centre to check a few things.  Portal home page came up in about 4 seconds, Getting to Member Centre took 12 Seconds, but clicking on the link to review my current referall info took 15 seconds.  Accessing the Ticket pages took a similar time.  Whilst waiting for those pages to load, I was concurrently browsing other sites with no performance problems?
M

[#2]

I agree too - and over the last few days I've noticed it especially -
some of the portal pages can take about 2 or 3 seconds to load - when at about the same time I am accessing an website on the other side of the world and it loads in less than a second.

[#3]

Fasterfox reports

http://www.plus.net	6.449s	k4wY98cb7DKEtGAY37lNUQ%3D%3D
http://portal.plus.net	3.886s	HmteacsWKdLks7kB%2Fwb%2Bsw%3D%3D
logging in to https://index_portal.html	7.321s	HmteacsWKdLks7kB%2Fwb%2Bsw%3D%3D
http://www.plus.net/support/?helpheader=support	1.196s	k4wY98cb7DKEtGAY37lNUQ%3D%3D

Anything specific you want testing page-wise?

[#4]

Well I have a speed and connection problem, now about a hundred,and have problems replying to the "raise a fault " help desk though as I said this works

[#5]

Well folks, it's now so slow that my browsers are all timing out or failing with a "Page contains no data" error when attempting to access either the PN main page or the portal.  Admittedly it's a peak time but I can access every other site I need (including this forum) without any significant delay.
Oh dear...

[#6]

Loombucket:  That sounds like a problem.  Did you get a speedtest at the time?

[#7]

Quote from: James_G

Fasterfox reports http://www.plus.net 6.449s k4wY98cb7DKEtGAY37lNUQ%3D%3D http://portal.plus.net  3.886s HmteacsWKdLks7kB%2Fwb%2Bsw%3D%3D logging in to https://index_portal.html 7.321s HmteacsWKdLks7kB%2Fwb%2Bsw%3D%3D http://www.plus.net/support/?helpheader=support 1.196s k4wY98cb7DKEtGAY37lNUQ%3D%3D Anything specific you want testing page-wise?

Those speeds, although aren't great, don't sound like the same thing Loombucket is reporting?
Also, does fasterfox rely on all the page elements completing before stopping the timer?  I.e. The page could be up in 2 secs, but a single image stalls and doesn't stop the timer.   I'll have a play with it this afternoon.
> Anything specific you want testing page-wise?
The break down of where the slow downs are would be useful.  I.e. is it connecting to the site, waiting for the page to start, the length of time to download the page, length of tie to download the images?  I'm sure fasterfox supplies these?  (although I might be mixing it up with webdeveloper tool bar...?)

[#8]

I'm doing a load of project work away from my desk ATM, but I'll try to take another look next week for you.
Anecdotally I'd be tempted to say that a lot of the time it seems to be image downloads slowing the page (perhaps number allowed to be downloaded simultaneaously from your webserver per client session might be slowing the load time?)
This might tie with some people not noticing an issue on faster lines, or with some aspects cached?
Anyhow, anecdotes are not so much use, so I will try to give you some firmer times of what I'm seeing.

[#9]

Fasterfox reports with no acceleration or pre-fetch and cache cleared
Note these are noticeably faster than usual - will check again at peak periods
http://www.plus.net 5.29 secs
http://portal.plus.net ; 13.628 secs
http://www.plus.net/support/?helpheader=support 3.782 secs
https://portal.plus.net/my.html?action=myconnection 9.204 secs

[#10]

@Oldjim - might be worth noting the server string on the pages too - there was an issue some time ago where a single server was perfrming slower than the others for some reason, which of course made it hard to diagnose.
If you view the page source, and scroll right to the bottom, you will see a string a couple of lines up, similar to those I included with my earlier post.
Submitting these (at least initially) might help Kelly rule in/out a hardware or routing issue versus a problem with the code.

[#11]

Quote from: Kelly

Quote from: James_G Fasterfox reports http://www.plus.net 6.449s k4wY98cb7DKEtGAY37lNUQ%3D%3D http://portal.plus.net  3.886s HmteacsWKdLks7kB%2Fwb%2Bsw%3D%3D logging in to https://index_portal.html 7.321s HmteacsWKdLks7kB%2Fwb%2Bsw%3D%3D http://www.plus.net/support/?helpheader=support 1.196s k4wY98cb7DKEtGAY37lNUQ%3D%3D Those speeds, although aren't great, don't sound like the same thing Loombucket is reporting? Also, does fasterfox rely on all the page elements completing before stopping the timer?  I.e. The page could be up in 2 secs, but a single image stalls and doesn't stop the timer.   I'll have a play with it this afternoon. The break down of where the slow downs are would be useful.  I.e. is it connecting to the site, waiting for the page to start, the length of time to download the page, length of tie to download the images?  I'm sure fasterfox supplies these?  (although I might be mixing it up with webdeveloper tool bar...?)

Note that Fasterfox says:-

Quote

Performance and network tweaks for Firefox. Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with the unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing.

See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9037

[#12]

I've had a sniff around using Firebox (Fasterfox hasn't been updated for this version of Firefox) and I've not seen any obvious issues (well, apart from a couple of invisible 404's in there!)
Have a look at the attached image.  This is the netpanel from Firebug, showing you how long it takes the page to load.  I think the blue line to the right is the point that the page has started rendering (so that you can see it!)
This had the front page visible within around 2-3 seconds.   The page does continue to load after this (up to about 6-7sec) but a lot of the is smaller images lower in the page and external resources like some double click/google analytics stuff, and the page is functional well before this point.
Loombucket:  I would like to see similar info from your connection when you are on a slow run! 

[#13]

That screenshot of yours Kelly - just to clarify, is that all from loading the one page? If so I'm rather astonished to find that from just the amount of the report that's visible, the front page is nearly half a megabyte in size - which probably isn't helping the issue for people who're on slow connections.

[#14]

I am using Fasterfox Lite which works on v 3 onwards (I am on 3.5). This one doesn't have the prefetch capability

[#15]

Quote from: Be3G

That screenshot of yours Kelly - just to clarify, is that all from loading the one page? If so I'm rather astonished to find that from just the amount of the report that's visible, the front page is nearly half a megabyte in size - which probably isn't helping the issue for people who're on slow connections.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/
Large webpage sizes aren't that unusual nowadays.  Also, you've got to remember that once loaded, the css, js and images will be cached and reused.  512KB on a half meg line should take about 7 seconds to download.