Performance problems...

[shmax]

SpaceHarfang, I'm posting this on behalf of a tfw2005 member who send me a PM through that site:

I can't give you any exact pages that are slow. I just did a test where I went to the main page. It took about 7 seconds to load. I then clicked 'log in', and I timed it. It took 16 seconds to finish loading. To me, that's unacceptable.
I clicked login after filling out my information, and it took 8 seconds before the page finished loading.

I thought perhaps the issue might be due to our corporate firewall, but I have used the site at my house and seen similar lag.

Not too much in the way of details, but I thought I should pass this along.

[shmax]

I just clicked on "Home" myself, and it took about 13 seconds for the page to appear, even though the page timer reports a time of less than 2 seconds. I'll install Dynatrace later and do some front end profiling...

[paladine]

I sent the information to you.  If you need me to perform any testing/etc, just let me know.  I'll be glad to help in anyway possible.  I'm a professional SW developer myself, so I know a thing or two about these kinds of things.

[shmax]

Thanks much, Pal. The performance optimizations are underway, and we'll let you know when we're ready for a guinea pig.

[spaceharfang]

One thing we might want to look into, the amount of data that is transfered when you load a page.

I tried the home page and a product page and saved the complete pages with Firefox.  I got respectively 1.5 MB and 1.75 MB worth of data.  The microsoft home page transfer about 380 kB.  

All the space is used up by a file named saved_resource(1).

Could be something worth validating.

Database wise, I checked the logs and there doesn't seem to be issues other that what we already know.

[paladine]

It seems to be performing better.  So far so good.

[Tripredacus]

I noticed the slowness from work as well on the main database part of the site. The forum isn't a problem. I am thinking it is related to the flash banner that appears on every page. While the animation is cool looking, it doesn't need to be on every page. I ran into a similar problem when I took over design for an MSP company. I don't have the information anymore (I don't work for that company anymore) but it has something to do with the inability to get the Flash player to use the local cached copy of the file. Or to be more specific, any browser we tested in *would* always use the cached file (if it existed) but only after downloading the file first to compare if it had been changed.

Not saying this is exactly it, but just a note about it and my experiences. Maybe when I get some time I'll do a site critique for you, but keep results private.