Optimising the board

[Saurabh Jain]

Email form my host: Board : http://spicyflavours.net : Plz advise


Thanks and REgards
Saurabh jain

Copy of email
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Hello,

The load is on the server is not the problem. The server is spending about 1/8th of it's time idle, and the sites performance is not related to the servers performance or configuration. Looking through your sites code optimization I do notice several poorly optimized areas which will lead to slower load times, and slow site performance. I've included a few of them below:

There are a large amount of external http requests being sent by your site. This is most likely due to content on the site being referenced using the site URL rather than the path on disk. This forces apache to connect out and back into itself, then download the image/file before it can display it. A simple page load with one connection then can become a new connection for each element, flooding apache with traffic for that page load, causing the page to load slowly. This is a fairly easy fix however. Files just need to be referenced using their path on disk rather than their URL. For example:


becomes
images/picture.jpg
or
/home/user/public_html/images/picture.jpg

This allows apache to simply grab the file, and display it. No loopback connections or transfers necessary.

Additionally related to the external linking, there are several external domains in the code, this means that a separate DNS request has to be execute for each external link, this will also greatly slow down site loading. It is always recommended when possible to mirror external content locally, then reference to it locally in the code.

It appears that there are a large number of javascripts running at the top of the document. Javascript pauses all parallel processing, waiting for itself to complete. When javascript is referenced at the top of the document it forces the site to hang while all the javascript code is parsed through. Once it has the site will load just fine, but it causes a delay before the site fully renders. For this reason it is always recommended that javascript is referenced at the bottom of the document, as this allows the site to load fully and appear completed even while the javascript is processing.

I would recommend going over these with a developer to improve the optimization of the site.

[Clickfinity]

Is that true about local content (can't view source from my iPhone) - doesn't the web server recognise the domain and serve is as local? Is it parsed as local as it's built? if not, that would seem a ridiculously unneccesary overhead.

And what about JavaScript - what templates is it used in, so we can manually move it if we want to?

Cheers,
Shaun :D

[Clickfinity]

Looking at the source of the IPB community site all the images seem to be referenced with http:// rather than a relative path.

I can't think of a technical reason for doing it this way, so how do we modify our sites to use local paths?

Cheers,
Shaun :D

[Clickfinity]

It would make sense to reference internal content with a path rather than a URL - Anyone able to offer any advice on how to do this? or would this require a fundamental change in how IPB is coded?

Cheers,
Shaun :D

[Saurabh Jain]

plz advise....

[Gary.]

As a hoster, I think what there getting as is external loading requests, You have to many of them calling from httpd rather than local.

I viewed your page source and there are tons of http:// requests, Now without accessing your site / settings, I can only guess that you have "Upload form action domain" enabled in the general configuration, This will force everything to load from HTTP rather than /local/

ACP > System settings > General Configuration >

Upload form action domain

Override the form action for uploads. This is useful in a load-balanced environment to force uploaded files to a specific server. (Most users can leave this blank)

Ex: http://master.mysite.com/forums

Make sure this box has NOTHING in it. This is just a random guess, Like I said.. Not many will be able to explain things without access.