Need help optimizing my forum for speed

[Jordan Miller]

Hey fam!

So, I just switched to 4.5.3 this week and it appears most of the kinks / bugs are worked out now.

I also upgraded to PHP 7.3 and changed the caching method to Redis.

I've noticed my forum loads slower than before the upgrade (when I was on 4.4 and using memcache). I've also had member complaints about it. 

I checked out a few other IPS forums and noticed they load lightning fast. Mine... not so much. It takes a few seconds for the pages to load. 

https://www.breatheheavy.com/exhale/

I have ads on my forum for non-subscribers, but even when viewing the forum with an ad-free account, it doesn't load quickly. Additionally, I visited some forums that also have ads on them and they load nearly instantaneously. 

Here are a few things I've noticed. For instance, there are always background processes running now. It wouldn't look like this before. These are always there now:

 

A few other need-to-know items:

Data Storage Method: Redis

Cache page output for guests: 10 minutes

Task Method: Cron

Cache sidebar, header and footer blocks: 10 minutes

 

I have a pretty powerful server as well, so I do believe this is something that can be resolved on my current machine. 🤞 

I would really appreciate some help figuring out a few things I can do to help speed up performance. Thank you!

 

Related:

 

Edited September 23, 2020 by breatheheavy

[CoffeeCake]

We saw a slowdown with 4.5 from 4.4 as well in testing on identical hardware as our production environment with only one user browsing (compared to hundreds on production). Also went from memcache to redis, though we switched to redis preemptively in 4.4 before upgrading.

We turned off redis caching for guests entirely (where you have 10 minutes, turn it off or set to zero), and left sessions and threadviews on MySQL. Significant performance increase when we did that. Not sure why. Disk I/O was super high for redis before we made the change.

I'd give that a try and see what impact that has.

[Jordan Miller]

1 hour ago, Paul E. said:

We saw a slowdown with 4.5 from 4.4 as well in testing on identical hardware as our production environment with only one user browsing (compared to hundreds on production). Also went from memcache to redis, though we switched to redis preemptively in 4.4 before upgrading.

We turned off redis caching for guests entirely (where you have 10 minutes, turn it off or set to zero), and left sessions and threadviews on MySQL. Significant performance increase when we did that. Not sure why. Disk I/O was super high for redis before we made the change.

I'd give that a try and see what impact that has.

Thanks for the reply! 

I checked out the guest caching. It says this: 

Quote

If your site rarely has many guests online at the same time, it may take more resources to store the cache than is saved by it and so it may be better to disable it.

Thing is, we do have a lot of guests on at any given time. Am nervous this will hog resources? 

I changed the settings to what you suggest - let's see how this goes 😆 

[Jordan Miller]

2 hours ago, Paul E. said:

We saw a slowdown with 4.5 from 4.4 as well in testing on identical hardware as our production environment with only one user browsing (compared to hundreds on production). Also went from memcache to redis, though we switched to redis preemptively in 4.4 before upgrading.

We turned off redis caching for guests entirely (where you have 10 minutes, turn it off or set to zero), and left sessions and threadviews on MySQL. Significant performance increase when we did that. Not sure why. Disk I/O was super high for redis before we made the change.

I'd give that a try and see what impact that has.

Ok so I did see an improvement in speed (yay!), but now the forum isn't counting views on threads (wahh).

I'm fairly sure it's because of the settings changes. Thoughts? 

[DawPi]

Views are counting but updating each 5 minutes by task. 

[Jordan Miller]

1 minute ago, DawPi said:

Views are counting but updating each 5 minutes by task. 

Ahhh interesting. But how could a thread started 1 hour ago with 22 replies have 0 replies? 

[DawPi]

Not sure. Send ticket and they check your board. 🙂

[CoffeeCake]

29 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

But how could a thread started 1 hour ago with 22 replies have 0 replies? 

I think this is a separate issue related to the background tasks you're seeing that appear to be stuck (based in the screenshot in the first post in this thread).

You might want to check cron and make sure it's correct. Have paths to php changed in your upgrade to 7.3, for example?

Edited September 23, 2020 by Paul E.

[Adlago]

3 hours ago, breatheheavy said:

https://www.breatheheavy.com/exhale/

In your site have too many reasons for delay loading, but none due to IPS. See screenshots from test GtMetrix.

See this test

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.breatheheavy.com/Q3mXeLpf

 

 

 

[Jordan Miller]

2 minutes ago, Adlago said:

In your site have too many reasons for delay loading, but none due to IPS. See screenshots from test GtMetrix.

See this test

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.breatheheavy.com/Q3mXeLpf

 

 

 

😩 

18 minutes ago, DawPi said:

Not sure. Send ticket and they check your board. 🙂

Just submitted a ticket!

[bfarber]

Views are stored in a temporary table and then resynced over to the main content items via a task. The taks may run every 5 minutes, but depending upon activity it can take longer for the view updates to be copied over. Just a heads up.

[Runar]

22 hours ago, breatheheavy said:

😩

I can understand that you need ads to survive, but your website is insane.

I disabled the built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox (81.0b8) and reloaded your website, but I had to abort after close to two minutes, with 530 (!) requests and 11.32 MB transferred. This is nothing but extreme, and obviously one of the (if not the only) reasons as to why the website feels slow. With the tracking protection enabled, the website stops loading after 20 seconds, with 61 requests and 7.46 MB transferred.

Compare this to my own community: 1.91 seconds, 42 requests, and 2.47 MB transferred. Or the Invision Community forums: 3.32 seconds, 52 requests, and 3.35 MB transferred.

I'm probably not in your preferred audience, but I would never in my life use your website with the amount of ads and trackers used.

Disclaimer: I'm currently using a 4G LTE connection, but the number of requests and MB transferred would be the same with high speed Internet.

[Jordan Miller]

1 hour ago, Runar said:

I can understand that you need ads to survive, but your website is insane.

I disabled the built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox (81.0b8) and reloaded your website, but I had to abort after close to two minutes, with 530 (!) requests and 11.32 MB transferred. This is nothing but extreme, and obviously one of the (if not the only) reasons as to why the website feels slow. With the tracking protection enabled, the website stops loading after 20 seconds, with 61 requests and 7.46 MB transferred.

Compare this to my own community: 1.91 seconds, 42 requests, and 2.47 MB transferred. Or the Invision Community forums: 3.32 seconds, 52 requests, and 3.35 MB transferred.

I'm probably not in your preferred audience, but I would never in my life use your website with the amount of ads and trackers used.

Disclaimer: I'm currently using a 4G LTE connection, but the number of requests and MB transferred would be the same with high speed Internet.

I feel you. I am trying to convert the culture of my website away from ad revenue to subscriptions, but it's difficult. People believe the Internet should be "free." 

I am only using two ad networks. One for the footer ad, another for the banner ads. Not sure what else I can do to minimize the amount of ads. The learning tech with the banner ads displays X amount of ads based on the user's information (like location, whether they visit frequently or not etc). 

[CoffeeCake]

8 hours ago, breatheheavy said:

I am only using two ad networks. One for the footer ad, another for the banner ads. Not sure what else I can do to minimize the amount of ads. The learning tech with the banner ads displays X amount of ads based on the user's information (like location, whether they visit frequently or not etc). 

This is verbatim what the sales rep I spoke with recently told me.... Ezoic?

Is the logic such that it detects you being in the fifth circle of hell and then inundates you with the non-popup version of popup ads?

Edited September 25, 2020 by Paul E.

[Rhett]

You have 18 ads on your main page, I'm shocked that you have any traffic, as mentioned nobody wants to visit a site like this in 2020.  If they do they will have ad blocker up and running, which defeats your purpose.  You would be better off wit 3-4 ads tops per page. Not only would your site load better, but you may get an actual few users who stick around.  

[Jordan Miller]

1 hour ago, Paul E. said:

This is verbatim what the sales rep I spoke with recently told me.... Ezoic?

Is the logic such that it detects you being in the fifth circle of hell and then inundates you with the non-popup version of popup ads?

Yes Ezoic 💀

32 minutes ago, Rhett said:

You have 18 ads on your main page, I'm shocked that you have any traffic, as mentioned nobody wants to visit a site like this in 2020.  If they do they will have ad blocker up and running, which defeats your purpose.  You would be better off wit 3-4 ads tops per page. Not only would your site load better, but you may get an actual few users who stick around.  

Yea I feel you. 18 tho?! Wow I usually don’t see that many.

Ezoic works by creating multiple placements on the page, and then their learning tech decides how many to deploy based on the user. Idk idk

[CoffeeCake]

8 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Wow I usually don’t see that many.

I guess the learning technology learned to hide it from you.

Is the video that loads in the corner an ad too?

[SC36DC]

I've visited your site a few times, and I've never seen an ad before, then I realize that they were probably being blocked by my ad blocker (uBlock Origin), so I turned it off to check.....




There are quite a bit of ads.

By the way, your site loaded pretty fast for me, I didn't notice any major issue. I will message you back later when I have more time to write, with some ways you could possibly earn money  without using any ads. Congrats on the ipsfocus purchase. I use Chameleon Pro myself. @Ehren is the best. You are definitely in good hands.

Edited September 25, 2020 by SC36DC

[Runar]

1 hour ago, breatheheavy said:

Ezoic works by creating multiple placements on the page, and then their learning tech decides how many to deploy based on the user. Idk idk

You don't need to answer this, but how much do you make from Ezoic? Is it worth it? 18 ads is a lot, but if they make you a lot of money I can understand (though not agree with) why you don't want to immediately remove them or replace them with paid subscriptions.

[Jordan Miller]

10 hours ago, SC36DC said:

I've visited your site a few times, and I've never seen an ad before, then I realize that they were probably being blocked by my ad blocker (uBlock Origin), so I turned it off to check.....




There are quite a bit of ads.

By the way, your site loaded pretty fast for me, I didn't notice any major issue. I will message you back later when I have more time to write, with some ways you could possibly earn money  without using any ads. Congrats on the ipsfocus purchase. I use Chameleon Pro myself. @Ehren is the best. You are definitely in good hands.

Haha.

I would LOVE and welcome any feedback / advice to help me shift away from the ad revenue model. That would be greatly appreciated. 

Still waiting for @zayed to update his awesome Enhanced AdBlock Blocker plugin for 4.5 😇 

And yea my users really like the Chameleon theme thus far! And the support has been awesome @Ehren

9 hours ago, Runar said:

You don't need to answer this, but how much do you make from Ezoic? Is it worth it? 18 ads is a lot, but if they make you a lot of money I can understand (though not agree with) why you don't want to immediately remove them or replace them with paid subscriptions.

I make enough to work for myself full-time, however it's not generating a huge profit like I want. 

I think if I told people it was subscription only, most would just disappear. I would basically need 1000 subscribers at $3 a piece to know it was worth my while. 1000 people out of the hundreds of thousands that visit per month doesn't sound too difficult to get, but from my experience it has been 😆 

I would LOVE subscription only because I find the ad model to be unreliable. Some months are amazing, some are awful. Very unpredictable. I would love something more stable. 

[bfarber]

A hybrid approach works for many people. You use ads, but then you allow subscriptions which remove those ads.

(I'm not sure if you're doing that already or not)

[CoffeeCake]

Speed is a constant alert we receive as well from Google's Webmaster tools (and Analytics). I'm wondering how much of this is related to the default theme. Looking at some of the themes available from other providers, it seems that they score higher on things like PageSpeed Insights.

I'm sure ads are an issue for @breatheheavy, yet I'm not sure they are the only issue, and lots of sites with ads are able to load without issues. Following this conversation as I'm sure there's lots of us that could have improvements.

I've debated trying mod_pagespeed, yet am a bit reluctant as precompiled *.deb nginx versions aren't available direct from the project.

[Runar]

19 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

I've debated trying mod_pagespeed, yet am a bit reluctant as precompiled *.deb nginx versions aren't available direct from the project.

I ran mod_pagespeed for quite some time, with varying degrees of success. I had to main issues: The issue with WebP images I mentioned in the WebP topic, and an issue with static files seemingly deleting themselves at random. I tried to get help from the official mailing list, and even offered to pay for assistance, but no one managed to solve the issue. In the end I spent a lot of time making it work but it still felt like a hack, so I turned it off completely and went back to Cloudflare.

[CoffeeCake]

1 hour ago, Runar said:

I spent a lot of time making it work but it still felt like a hack

That's exactly my aversion to it. However, without a doubt, IPS is too slow. We're using Cloudflare now, yet even there, it's still 2-3 seconds.

[Jordan Miller]

13 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

That's exactly my aversion to it. However, without a doubt, IPS is too slow. We're using Cloudflare now, yet even there, it's still 2-3 seconds.

😩 

Yea even with all my ads turned off, it still takes a few seconds for the page to load. I've aiming for less than a second. Is that possible 😏