What's up with WP webpages today?

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It's not that much of a problem (I'd rather this than the problems I've had recently like not allowing me on), but has anyone else's WP been taking an extra second or two to adjust itself each time you enter another page? Like I said, it's not really a problem but can be annoying when you go to click on something just as the page jumps down a little and you've clicked on to the thing above of what you wanted. I'm really quick on the computer so when I enter a webpage I immediately start clicking on to things and can't always be bothered to wait a couple of extra seconds for the page to adjust, since I've always been so quick on computers. It does this on Youtube too, when I go to watch a video the page jumps down a little so you have to scroll down a bit to see the video (due to stupid adverts at the top of the page).

Anyone else's WP like this? Just wondering. Not the end of the world, I am not acting like this is my only problem in my life, I just want to see if anybody else's does it and seeing why it's suddenly took to doing this.

WP doesn't appear to be working at the moment with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera, none of the graphics are showing! However it is working with Chrome but with Chrome I notice there is a few seconds delay after a page displays before the graphics on the page are showing. As a guess are you using the Chrome browser?

Take a look at this thread:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt200616.html

Chrome isn't very happy with WP either; I just got a warning message from AVG saying it is hogging a lot of memory and it suggests restarting the browser. Interestingly I only have one tab open in Chrome - WrongPlanet!

Something is badly screwed up with WP today.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I'm using Chrome as well, but it's supremely laggy today. Something is wrong.

As mentioned on the other thread on this subject (gotta love double postings...)

This issue should be resolved. Cloudflare loaded some epicly awesome javascript apparently. For me at least, it's been working just fine (OSX Chrome latest build).

Anyway, I've forcefully turned off this javascript which was actually designed to optimize the loading of images on the site - particularly for mobile users - which can incur large overages for bandwidth consumption.

In other news, we've made quite a few other performance modifications on the backend which cut the load times on a lot of pages from 6 seconds to 3 seconds from my testing.

Just for an example - this is from a third party performance monitoring site (tools.pingdom.com) which reports the site being faster than 87% all of the websites they've tested performance on.



Even the forums have come a long way-



Something of note is that both of those performance checks include image assets that are outside our control (Ads, etc).

Odd. Why would a test that is only using a non-logged-in guest have any great relevance?

If you are logged in, every page is constructed on-the-fly explicitly for you. Cloudflare can do nothing to help with that - other than just preventing your access with one of its "the site is busy" messages - which stay locked in until you clear your local browser's session data.

Once you are also blocking adverts, again, any "benefits" from Cloudflare are near to useless, as they do no more than add a layer between your browser's cache and the actual media - which may well be being profitably cached at various other points directly along the route.

I'll admit that the server time consumed by the multiple logins that Google (e.g.) uses, to scan the site, might be reduced. I never worked out exactly how much time the server wastes on that sort of stuff.

So... a thought for users: don't log in. just access the site as a guest. You might then see some tiny percentage benefit.

Yes - logged in users have dynamic portions of the site built on-the-fly for them. However, Cloudflare is smart enough to detect portions of the site that don't need to be rebuilt for the individual user, which cuts server load down drastically (even for popular forum sites - load before/after Cloudflare can drop 80 to 1, literally).

The amount of resources saved by offloading static content and portions of dynamically built pages for non-logged in users drastically improves the performance to drive how quickly those pages are being output for you. In addition, we're working closely with Cloudflare to enable things down to optimizing the way TCP operates on the servers, to new "beta" optimizations and their upcoming new technologies such as Railgun (more on that at http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/06/cloudf ... -accounts/). In addition, we turned up peering with one of their upstreams to accelerate the speed at which we're able to deliver content to their edge CDN nodes. The end result is that the site is ridiculously fast at getting delivered to end users, and would only be improved further if Wrongplanet was capable of doing things such as Opcode caching and Memcache (which the current platform doesn't provide for). There's really not anything we can do to help with that, it's on Alex/WP to rebuild the site.

With that said, the performance we're able to provide for a site at the scale of Wrongplanet with the resources provided is actually quite astonishing, and a lot of time and effort have been put towards that effort. At the end of the day though, Wrongplanet is in the top 50,000 websites globally, and the top 25,000 in the United States (per Alexa rankings, updated daily). Traffic continues to rise daily, as do attempted attacks against the site. Without Alex's request, I won't publish any numbers in terms of overall traffic load - but I will say that we're blocking over a million attempted attacks per month against Wrongplanet, and Cloudflare is off-loading 2/3 of all page requests without pass-through to the servers - to put some numbers into perspective.

Last edited by sliqua on 10 Jun 2012, 8:26 am, edited 3 times in total.

I have been posting here almost exclusively using my phone. I rarely have any issues with the site other than the occasional "site is busy" message but those are rare.

Glad to hear it - we've been working on quite a few mobile optimizations. In fact, I'm using the site currently from a coffee shop with a shared T1 (around 384 kbps available to me) to test the optimizations we've applied over the last few days. And, in case lau was wondering - I am logged into the site, and it is lightning fast even after clearing my browser caches

You're telling me someone actually spends time developing this site, and it looks and functions like this?

As the hosting service provider, yes. I cannot speak for Alex from a content/code perspective though.

Can you comment on the frequent delays in posting and occasional failures in posting that I've been experiencing for the entire 3 years I've been using this site?