Slow page loads

[Wayne Luke]

To start you would have to open a sales ticket to [email protected].

[josh-v]

Our forum was completely down this morning and when it finally came back it took 2:27 to load 5 tabs. Leadership has made the decision that too much time/money is being lost and we need to move to self-hosting. So my questions:
1. Is there anything we need to keep in mind in migrating that is not covered in link below?
2. What process do I need to go through / who do I need to talk to about getting the amount we have paid for our Bronze plan to be applied to needed license?

[josh-v]

Thank you, I appreciate your responsiveness as this functionality is core to what we do. Please keep me posted on progress and estimated timeline for next steps.

[Wayne Luke]

Right now, we think it is an issue with caching video thumbnails. The issue has been escalated from the Cloud team to the vBulletin Core development team.

[josh-v]

Did as you suggested with threads below and both loaded quickly this time.

I've noticed that if I have the forum open in two different browsers (Chrome & Safari) and in one browser click "Go to last post" on a topic (with videos embedded), it is currently taking 20-25 seconds. If I then switch over to the other browser, and click on "Go to last post" on the same topic, it loads quickly.

If I reverse the order, opening another topic first in the other browser, the same is true.

1. "Go to last" topic A in Chrome: 20-25 seconds
2. "Go to last" topic A in Safari: 1-3 seconds

1. "Go to last" topic B in Safari: 20-25 seconds
2. "Go to last" topic B in Chrome: 1-3 seconds

https://forum.reynoldsstrong.com/forum/business-consulting/one-on-one-consultation/720-mike-tinder-mentor-consulting-log

https://forum.reynoldsstrong.com/forum/business-consulting/one-on-one-consultation/8697-testing

[Trevor Hannant]

Can you try this:

- Copy (not move!) a thread you're having issues with to a "testing" area on your forum
- Delete the videos from the copied thread
- Clear your browser caches and close all browser windows

Now open the original thread and the copied thread in different windows and time the time it takes to load each. Does the copied thread (minus videos) load in a "normal" time while the original continues to take the longer time to load?

[josh-v]

That's a difficult question to answer... Threads with fewer posts seem to load faster. Threads with many posts load slower. All threads with many posts also have video embedded as each topic a training log for a client where coaches can review and give input on their lifts.

[Wayne Luke]

Do you have the loading time issues with topics that do not have videos embedded within them?

[Wayne Luke]

There aren't really tools to track this for cloud. All cloud sites share the same files and have the same basic settings. They all use the same PHP and MySQL versions. All use Memcached for the cache. The kicker is your site is running on multiple virtual machines at the same time. So a page load from User A is loaded from machine 1 and User B is loading pages from machine 2. The next page load, this can switch. The trick is trying to find out what is causing this issue on your site. It doesn't occur on the majority of cloud sites but a couple others have page loading issues. If they were all the same behavior it would be easy to track down. However, your symptoms are different than other sites with slow loading issues. The large majority of cloud sites experience no issues.

We are working to figure out what the problem is. Including cloning the site and running on staging servers where things can be tracked more easily but don't have the same overall traffic. Unfortunately, that causes problems of its own.

When I visit your site, the first topic load is slow. Reloading that topic is quick. This will be per user. Clearing the cache in Memcache will cause the problem to recur. The developers are looking at the issue.

[josh-v]

It has been five days now since we made the suggested changes to permissions. There was a 2-3 hour period yesterday morning where the forum was loading much faster (1-3 seconds). But before and since then, it remains extremely slow for all users. There has to be something outside of our settings going on that could cause it to be extremely slow, then much faster, and then back to extremely slow in the same day. Is there any way to check the performance of the server or other factors that could be impacting the page load speed?

[Joshua Gonzales]

As there is not an official way to test this, we'll have to play it by ear. I would say give it a couple days and more than that, see what your users/moderators are saying to see if they notice a change.

[josh-v]

Great, thanks. I have done that and we will keep an eye on to see if that improves performance. How long would you estimate for it to take to see improvement if the permissions setting is the source of the issue?

[Joshua Gonzales]

Go into your AdminCP -> Channel Management -> Channel Permissions.
Find the Forum Channel and edit the permissions for Unregistered/Not Logged In.
Enable the permission to Can View Channels. Scroll down and click Save.

[josh-v]

I am needing to figure out quickly (this week) if this issue can be fixed as the business using this forum is going to scale quickly beginning on 12/1. If we are not able to get the forum running at a faster speed, we're going to have to do something else before 12/1 (which I REALLY don't want to do) to accommodate the growth.

So I greatly appreciate your efforts in trying to troubleshoot this effectively and as quick as possible.

[josh-v]

Thank you for your responses. No, I'm getting long load times (30-45 seconds) consistently... never 2 seconds or less. I am not using the Remember Me but I'm assuming many moderators (also experiencing slow load times) are because they're most active on the forum. Even with caching completely disabled in browser, still having slow loads.

What specifically do you suggest we change for non-registered users and how do I do that (it has been awhile since we started this and I updated the permissions so I want to make sure I exactly what you're suggesting).