Recent slow loading to the point members are giving up

[Nihonto]

Ok, so my forum is a fairly large (maybe not by many standards) international one, hosted on a VPS here in South Africa.
Fairly reputable and large data centre, and full managed as I am mostly clueless when it comes to technical stuff.
Recently I started to get a lot of complaints about slow loading times. As in pictures not loading, or waiting forever for the page to load.
Not everyone is experiencing this, and for me the site is 100% fast and up all the time. I have not been able to duplicate any of the issues. the hosts (nice guys, not giving me the runaround) say there is no issue this side, everything is ok and fast. And that the issue must be with isp's or lines overseas. But I cannot think that the USA, Oz, UK etc all have members with dodgy lines.
I have tried to ask people to fault find the problem, change themes, do ping tests etc.
Nothing changed my side.
The hosting seems adequate to me. 4 Cores, 8 Gigs of RAM, Php 7.2 (asking them to upgrade that) MySQL 10.5, Apache 2.4.48....adequate webspace and bandwidth.
I really cannot diagnose what would cause pages to take so long to load than people give up. And yet many/most members don't have a problem?

I wanted to pay with caching, hoping that would help. But the hosts have not found anything familiar with installing Redis, and there are no other options.
I have tried File System and MYSQL database....neither seems to have changed anything. I am on file system currently.
Much of the problem has been with images. I allow free uploading mostly, and there are a lot of images. But that shouldn't cause this? Or will it?

I have considered Cloudflare CDN but am a novice and don't want to break anything. Can likely do the $20/month option, even though this is a free forum that runs on donations.

Frankly, I don't know how to troubleshoot this issue and see what is causing it. Nothing obvious I can find, especially since it was running fine for years.
Would pay someone if they can assist. Love to hear any suggestions in a way that I can understand.
Not being able to experience the slow times myself is a problem.

Forum is at http://www.militaria.co.za/nmb and would really appreciate any advice or way forward. Losing members that I cannot afford to lose, and am lost what to improve or try.
Think I've tried all the obvious settings, with Redis being the only one I haven't managed to do. Do you think that would help?
What else can I check or get the hosts to do/check?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. This is a respected and vital forum worldwide in my field of interest with many important members.

Thanks.
 

[Chris Anderson]

1 hour ago, Brian Robinson_47676 said:

Recently I started to get a lot of complaints about slow loading times. As in pictures not loading, or waiting forever for the page to load.

The number of bad actors on the internet has exponentially increased after Russia invaded the Ukraine.  Attacks could be originating from all over the world and could impact internet routing between your members and your server. 

Sometimes data might flow as expected and sometimes the flow could be dramatically reduced for periods of time. Problems might exist within your very own server farm that they might not be detecting or willing to admit to. 

Something you might consider investigating is how large is your connection from your server to the internet. 

Your server might have a very high-capacity network card installed but the service provider may throttle the connection down to several hundred megabytes to support handling thousands of servers at a reasonable price point for one and all. 

Things you might want to look into:

• What kind of connections does your service provider use to connect with the internet?
• Can they increase their overall bandwidth at a moment's notice and downgrade when the peak subsides?
• How intelligent are the routers they are using internally and to connect to their internet providers?
• Do they have employees well versed in network routing to garner every last bit of throughput and reduced latency the hardware can support at the network and server level?
• The internet providers contracted by your service provider might not have the infrastructure and support staff to consistently offer stellar performance for everyone globally connecting to them. 
• Internet traffic can travel down multiple paths to go from one country or countries to another and ultimately make it to your server.  A path taken this hour might not be the same path taken hours or days later.  

You might consider seeing if there are any local network support forums with experience with your server provider. They may be able to help you better investigate the root causes of your problem (or at least eliminate possible causes) and guide you to a path to address it.

 

Edited April 4, 2022 by Chris Anderson

[KT Walrus]

I don't know what your specific issue is all about, but I recommend you sign up for a free Cloudflare account regardless. You will need to move your domain's DNS to Cloudflare to put Cloudflare in between your users and your VPS. Cloudflare will really make a difference, even if you don't end up upgrading to a paid account. 

[stu_m]

As above! move all dns to cloudflare 

looking at your specs of your VPS its a decent size and there will be loads of tweaks you can do to get it running fast 

What sort of size is your forum? how many posts, members and concurrent members? 

[stu_m]

Just had a look myself and it loads fine for me! a little lag at times but nothing to worry about 

[Nihonto]

Thanks guys. The hosts updated the memory to 16 Gigs, and that does seem to have made a big difference. Not getting a lot of complaints. But I'd still like to fine tune as much as possible.
I wonder if allowing members basically free hosting of images, and most posts having 5-10 pics, for many years...will take its toll? Hosts aren't complaining, but I wonder if there is a downside to this.
I'll look at adding Cloudflare. I'm a bit in the dark as to what's needed without any issues with IP's etc, but will look into it.
IPB forums don't have any clear and concise threads on this.
Don't even mind the $20/month options, but seems a bit technical. I'll check it out. Thanks.

[stu_m]

Moving your DNS to cloudflare can help but I dont think you need any more than that 

I think you need to look at PHP and Apache (if you're running it) 

I have a VPS with 8gb ram and have 3 sites hosted on it and mine flies! 

I have tweaked a few things which made improvements 

What PHP handler are you using? I recommend using lsapi 

[KT Walrus]

On 4/10/2022 at 1:25 PM, Brian Robinson_47676 said:

I'll look at adding Cloudflare. I'm a bit in the dark as to what's needed without any issues with IP's etc, but will look into it.
IPB forums don't have any clear and concise threads on this.
Don't even mind the $20/month options, but seems a bit technical. I'll check it out. Thanks.

You don't need the $20/month option since the free account will probably work just fine. You can always upgrade as you need the additional features that go with a paid plan.

As for set up, this is very easy and should only take a half hour or so. You will need to point your domain's DNS to Cloudflare's servers, but Cloudflare helps by importing your existing DNS records when you add your domain to your Cloudflare account (or you can manually create the DNS records you need).

 

[Hostingunlock]

have you tried to use nginx to see how it works for you

[Martin A.]

On 4/14/2022 at 4:21 AM, Hostingunlock said:

have you tried to use nginx to see how it works for you

This ^

Nginx + PHP-FPM and Cloudflare will make wonders for your site. Moving uploads to S3 may help tremendously too. This must be done in combination with Cloudflare as most S3 providers doesn't have server locations in ZA, except for AWS. CF have two and these will cache your uploaded images for you. This will also free up space on your VPS and possibly lower the RAM usage as more than 50% of the requests will be handled by Cloudflare.

If you reach out to @ASTRAPI he may be able to do a one-time optimization for you. I can assist you with moving your uploads to S3 should you need that.