IPS4 server response time

[Kirill N]

I was running my site through Google's PageSpeed Insights and one of the recommendations was:

Quote

Reduce server response time
In our test, your server responded in 0.26 seconds. There are many factors that can slow down your server response time. Please read our recommendations to learn how you can monitor and measure where your server is spending the most time. 

Now, I'm not among people who think that the PageSpeed score should be a 100 or anywhere close to that - I completely understand that those are just recommendations.

However, as an experiment I ran about 10 other IPS4 sites, including this community, through the test and it suggested reducing server response time for every single one of them. 

Could it be that there's some sort of issue with IPS4 that makes the server respond slower?

[sasiko]

i think the result depends on the server configuration

from my site

http://prntscr.com/9axgkw

[Makoto]

A server response time of 0.26 seconds is not really slow. The response time you get will depend on how well optimized your server configuration is, and how powerful your server is in general.

IPS4 is a powerful and fairly heavy application. Consequently, it takes and requires more power to run than most other forum platforms. But 0.26 seconds is really not bad. If you want to get this lower, look into tuning your server configuration and/or consider moving to a more powerful host.

[Lindy]

I don't see that.

 

[Kirill N]

4 minutes ago, Lindy said:

I don't see that.

 

This is what it shows for me:

[Lindy]

It's an inconsistent tool. I just got a "reduce server response time" inputting www.apple.com. I really wouldn't put much stock in that tool beyond "oh yeah, I can cache images" type of things. It ranks Facebook 27/100. 

As Makoto indicated, IPS4 is a complex and heavy application - but performance is on the radar and is an ongoing process. 

[esquire]

I work with this tool a great deal. It's awesome and I love it. That said, I agree with @Lindy and his implication that you need to use it for what it is along with perspective. It's a guide. It's not absolute. I am confident that somewhere Google has stated that they do not use this tool to rank your site. Identifying performance requires looking at a drilldown of the detail. 

Best example - you get a mediocre grade because your jpg files could be compressed further for a whopping 50% savings! Wow, big oversight buddy. Well, if those files are 8kb, 4kb and 6kb then the "offense" is actually insignificant and the tiny savings may be nowhere near worth the degradation in image quality. The tool is meant to identify larger files such as  jpegs that haven't been optimized from posting, e.g. 2600x2600 image on a page meant to be displayed only a max 1200px resolution.

[Day_]

I have given up on page speed and gtmetrix tbh, a lot of people on here obsess over it and for a while I got sucked into trying to please Mr Google but when you compare popular sites mine is coming out better. Is Zukerberg at home now losing sleep over his 43/100? Is he heck

Im bored of chasing that 1%, the 0.01 second boost by making changes. Use your own eye, I can't tell the difference between a second loading. IPS 3 to IPS 4 I can't tell the difference and I've not had any members complaining, it loads instantly just like 3.

Here is my site vs Apple and Facebook yet I'm on £20pm shared cloud hosting, no server tweaks, no modules, fancy settings, no CDN, no cookie free domains 

[esquire]

Google is not giving you lots of credit for having a site that is so much zippier than it needs to be. You're not going to burst up the ranks because your page speed is beyond fast. As long as you're within a reasonable range, any impact on page speed will be negligible. Google is quite aware and no need for Ludicrous Speed.

[Morrigan]

Like many others have said Page speeds mean nothing to me. I use those and other tools to be sure that I'm serving a low impact site to the other ends browser.
 Basically they are looking for something that responds in less time than a ping... but even pings are 26-85ms.

[Kirill N]

I think you guys missed my point here... I understand completely that PageSpeed's recommendations are just recommendations and most of the time they mean nothing. What I'm talking about is the fact that I ran over 10 IPS4 sites through the tool and it mentioned server response time for 100% of them. And then I tested a bunch of non-IPS4 sites, and that recommendation came up for none of them. That's why I'm concerned, it can't be a coincidence.

[Morrigan]

What we don't know about those servers is:

• Are they shared hosting?
• What is there current load?
• What sorts of resources does it have?
• What sorts of resources is it using?
• What is the internet speed of the server in question?

All of those things play in to the "server response time" even Google recognizes these things as "bottlenecks":

Quote

You should reduce your server response time under 200ms. There are dozens of potential factors which may slow down the response of your server: slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation, or memory starvation. You need to consider all of these factors to improve your server's response time. The first step to uncovering why server response time is high is to measure. Then, with data in hand, consult the appropriate guides for how to address the problem. Once the issues are resolved, you must continue measuring your server response times and address any future performance bottlenecks.

 

I'd even go so far as to including ISP speed can cause issues but that's on the client side more than anything. So while it could be the software there are many separate elements to consider that may not have anything to do with IPS on a whole.

[TSP]

Personally I've seen the server response time on average to increase by 3 times from 3.4.8 to 4.0.13.1. Which is not ideal, you could say. From an average of 0.3 seconds to 1 second.

Can be seen on two different installations. 

I'll leave it up to you to guess when each one was upgraded...

I just hope the improvements made to IPS 4.1 will be significant enough to notice, when we're able to upgrade to it. Want to see it a lot closer to what it was with 3.4, as it seems to have negatively affected the search engine traffic quite a lot.