Is WP slow all the time now?

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As I said the posts per user seems to being going down as you also observed so why is the site becoming progressively slower. There is nothing 'wrong' with WP so I'm not sure where you took that conclusion from but almost everybody has seen a significant degragation in performance. Mere page views should not account for that on a dedicated server as we have been told this is.

That is where I drew the conclusion that you feel there is something wrong with WP.

Even a dedicated server can be swamped with traffic, suffer issues with its connection to the backbone, be affected by the accumulation of information, users, viewers, and software differentials that may cause problems. When I upgraded to FireFox 3.0, there were several sites that actually loaded slower for a time until updates on both sides seemed to improve the situation. My knowledge of the technical workings of this site are limited, but regardless of server status there are many possible causes for slow times.


M.

I was talking about the old server computer not the site.

Clarification appreciated, Gary - thank you.


M.

Well, I'm glad you're not in control of deciding that. .I love HDTV

This site is slow for several reasons:

• The forum software is phpbb version 2, which is old, and which slows down as more posts are added to the database used for the site.
  
  One short-term solution to this is to disable search (as has been done here) and to empty the search tables in the database. I don't know if the search tables have been emptied here, but emptying them does generally speed up phpbb2 forums.
  
  Upgrading to phpbb version 3 would increase speed to some degree.
  
• It's possible that Alex's site hosting company doesn't have a fast enough internet connection to serve(send) so much information, or possible that Alex's hosting company handles databases poorly. Certain hosting companies are bad at dealing with databases. They may be fast for other things but very slow for dealing with databases.
  
• Modern html is separated into different parts:
  1. an html file, which is just a listing of the elements/items on a page
  2. stylesheet file(s), which contain instructions about how items in the html file should look(things like colors and fonts)
  3. javascript file(s), which add extra functionality or content to pages. If you click on a word and a menu drops down, that's because of javascript.
  
  These are separated this way because it means that less code is needed to write a page. In a stylesheet, one line of code is all it takes to apply a style to every instance of something on a page. If I wanted all images to have a blue border, I could specify that in a stylesheet. And stylesheets are downloaded by your browser and stored in case there are other pages at the same site which use the same stylesheet. Once your browser downloads a stylesheet, that stylesheet contains most or all of the styles for every page you load on that site. That means if I downloaded this site's stylesheet last night and it said all images had a blue border, and if I loaded ten different pages of images right now, they would all still have that blue border. And because stylesheets don't change very often, your browser saves those stylesheets so it doesn't have to download them again. This means your computer has to download less code, which means your computer gets the pages faster and loads them faster.
  
  If I designed a page like this site is designed, every time I added an image, I'd have to write extra code to specify that that image had a blue border.
  
  This code adds up, and makes the html files(the pages) much bigger, sometimes several times as big. And if there are thousands of people viewing thousands of pages, there is a whole lot of extra code, meaning it takes more time for the site's server to send it all out.
  
  Also, javascript(which adds the extra functionality to pages) takes longer for browsers to handle than plain html does. So every time there's javascript within an html file, your browser has to stop laying things out, execute the javascript, and then go back to laying things out. This slows down things a lot. The time it takes to load pages could be decreased significantly by doing what's called "deferring" javascript to not load until the rest of the page is laid out.

Upgrading to phpBB3 would be good but, as you may have noticed, the version of phpBB2 this forum runs is heavily modified, so upgrading would be a hard job.

Yeah, a wee bit... but it's been worse for me before - once it gets working, it generally has few problems.

Slow slow and SLOW!! !!

grumble moan complain

I'm guessing the biggest problem is server/bandwidth related rather than code related - but I'm willing to help out with code upgrades and mod migrations if anyone's enlisting helpers?

And Matt - you missed out the php files that generate html pages and javascripts!! Pixie LIKES php

If we could ditch the damn ads that'd save about 30% bandwidth usage too
Ditching Google and Yahoo bots would save another 50% - but might not be at all helpful for recruiting new visitors

Yup - the old girl is ailing and in need of attention for sure!!

I run a web hosting company and build websites - hundreds of em - so anyone interested in making improvements or launching alternative sites can give me a shout if you need any help or advice

Ah. You need to look at the graphs, garyww. The posts per user has always been going up, and is doing so still, except for a weird patch through most of 2006, when it oddly stayed fairly level. I.e. the membership increased rather a lot, while people were posting about the same.

I don't have a "post per new user".

The thing that you are seeing going down is the posts per user per day - which is a pretty useless statistic, really.

To my mind, WP is primarily a support site. People join, stay active for a while, learn about themselves, in the context of other people on the spectrum, for a change, and then move on.

There are people who stay active for longer, because they have benefited from WP, and wish to put back something. I count myself as one of those.

Anyway, I never did figure out a good way of applying further analysis to the data. It is all based purely on the total number of posts and members at the various sample points. Everything is derived directly from those figures. There is some interpolative juggling, to make the figures more valid. E.g. if you look carefully at the graphs, the data is either presented at the sample dates or the mid-points between dates, as I am presenting derivatives, and I make them show as central. (And yes, I do have a degree - an MA in Maths )

Another thing to note is that the main graph, of total posts and members, has logarithmic y-axes. I.e. WP's growth is pretty much exponential. The load on the server doubles every 18 months(-ish).

"Lies, damned lies, and statistics"... Benjamin Disraeli

It does seem like it's slow a lot. Almost daily I'll get a message that says "Wrongplant has too many users posting and can't handle the load".

It has been slow for the last 45 minutes and is slow at this time every night. I know that because I'm here every night at that time. Still haven't figured out why.

a spot of tea while we wait?

Sure , but I don't have a "tea specific" mug. I hope this will do.

They should increase the bandwidth.
If I owned the site and it was experiencing a problem like this often then I would be seriously thinking about an addition to my bandwidth.