Question for our MODERATORS

^+1 on slow website!

+2

Agreed, it took so long to load I just gave up and went to another website for awhile. BPL is very slow today.

+4^

I was JUST going to post this same thing.

Nice, Benjamin. Thought it was just my crappy router.

Scott, it IS your crappy router. :)

I kid, I kid.

I'm afraid I can't specifically comment on the speed of the site as of late but I'll ping our web host because I too have been experiencing it. It makes working a bit annoying given our back end infrastructure is on the same servers.

/beginrant/ However, I will take this opportunity to harass the OP about why this is posted in the "Gear" forum and not the "Forum Admin and Support" forum. Particularly because this was posted by none-other-than ben2world himself – a known reporter of out-of-place threads. /end rant/

This couldn't be caused from the incredible traffic load as of late over on Chaff now, could it? :D

Hi Sam:

I knew you would ask, so the very first thing I wrote in my post above was, "Not a gear question, but I assume this branch gets the quickest attention". T's the reason.

And guess what? You DID look here before the Forum Admin branch! :)

"Known reporter of out-of-place threads"? Moi? Umm, er….

Anyway, please let us know when you hear back from your web host. Thanks.

If I could pose a few suggestions:

Two different versions of jQuery are being loaded on each page, along with two different versions of a jQuery cookie script. My suggestion would be to settle on one version of jQuery and combine the files into a single download, creating one remote script download instead of 4.

It appears that https://dpcr19kltm61a.cloudfront.net/ is really unresponsive, taking up to a half second to respond to requests. This is the biggest issue with pageloads. If these are simply static thumbnails served from Apache (which appears to be the case), you may want to upgrade the hosting there or move your assets to Amazon S3 or another Content Delivery Network.

Edit: Another, perhaps more immediate fix would be to asynchronously load in avatars via javascript after page load. This would cut down on the number of calls to the cache and allow the full thread to appear much more quickly.

"/beginrant/ However, I will take this opportunity to harass the OP about why this is posted in the "Gear" forum and not the "Forum Admin and Support" forum. Particularly because this was posted by none-other-than ben2world himself – a known reporter of out-of-place threads. /end rant/"

This made me giggle in my chocolate milk

I've noticed this all week.

Me too. Granted, I have the slow speed DSL (even slower since Frontier took over from Verizon), but this site has been far slower than the others I visit. It seems OK today, though.

EDIT, later–getting really slow again when I try to bring up a thread.

Prolly just the FBI tapping into the site. Word's out, that a bunch of crazy folk are buying up all the sailboat sail material. Nothing to see here. Everything should be back to normal soon. Move along.

Quoth Ben:

> And guess what? You DID look here before the Forum Admin branch! :)

Yes, but that's because I was reading from the "recent threads" list and this appeared before the other. Haha!

@kylemeyer Thanks for the suggestions. I've been working on optimizations to load most of the JS asynchronously, and general optimizations: CSS, unused code, etc.

The cache.backpackinglight.com server is an Amazon S3 CDN, so perhaps there are some latency issues with it. I'll look into that also.

I just recently added the new cookie script, and wanted to make sure it's solid before removing the old one. It's using HTML caches, so hopefully we'll see some speed increase for those browsers.

Otherwise, I'll check with our host to see if they are seeing anything.

./ben

Thanks, Ben. Not sure what you did… but as a non-techie forum member, the pages are loading much quicker now.

Yes, the pages load much faster, thank you!

When I click on a thread, it almost immediately opens the page. But when I click the "back" button, things slow down again (but still better than before).

I'm not complaining, just offering more info that may or may not help.

+1 Kyle.

I have no idea what you are talking about, but it seems your suggests were the fix.

:)