Why are the forums so freakin slow?

[Septembersrain]

I'm on Tapatalk and you can tell when the forums are running slow because the unread column starts taking forever to load the next group of posts.

You have to scroll up and then wait for a while. Compared to them loading instantly. Today it's been a lot of waiting.

It looks like this for about 30 seconds to a minute whereas it usually is instant.

 

[grahamperrin]

I'm guessing it is related to this …

… slow forum speeds today since this https implementation.

There was a config issue. Should be speedy again

Here

East Sussex, UK and for me, issues with performance are extremely rare. None recently. I'm reasonably close to a London point of presence (PoP), not far from Paris and Amsterdam points. Note:

• I do not assume that I am always served by the closest point.

Generally

End-to-end speeds depend upon the abilities of a number of things to work in concert. In no particular order …

Fastly

A 2017-02-02 screenshot from @TurboPGT! showed use of Fastly for certification. There's a range of products; with an assumption that MacRumors uses the Fastly content delivery network (CDN), I should draw attention to:

• Fastly POP locations - About Fastly services | Fastly Help Guides (2016-07-06)

– and from the linked network map:

… high-density POPs enable us to serve more from cache, including static and event-driven content. This improves your cache hit ratio, resulting in better user experiences. …

Caching

MacRumors aside, for a moment: I recall FIX: properly specify default on no cache on all resources · discourse/discourse@63d9d4f (2016-11-15, linked from post 3 under Firefox 49 often represents stale Discourse content …). tl;dr:

• excessive caching of some types of content can be unexpectedly troublesome.

I wonder what's configured for MacRumors forums.

Routing, DNS, hosting etc..

$ route show forums.macrumors.com
   route to: forum3b.hdxen.com
destination: default
       mask: default
    gateway: 192.168.1.1
        fib: 0
  interface: wlan0
      flags: <UP,GATEWAY,DONE,STATIC>
 recvpipe  sendpipe  ssthresh  rtt,msec    mtu        weight    expire
       0         0         0         0      1500         1         0
$ uname -v
FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT #24 cea905a(drm-next): Sat Feb 11 04:42:40 UTC 2017     root@gauntlet:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
$

Pages such as http://whois.domaintools.com/hdxen.com and https://w3bin.com/domain/macrumors.com show the association with Host Duplex.

grahamperrin@momh167-gjp4-hpelitebook850g2-trueos ~> drill forums.macrumors.com
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, rcode: NOERROR, id: 7495
;; flags: qr rd ra ; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; forums.macrumors.com.        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
forums.macrumors.com.   1       IN      A       162.254.116.214

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
macrumors.com.  4535    IN      NS      ns2.hostduplex.com.
macrumors.com.  4535    IN      NS      ns1.hostduplex.com.
macrumors.com.  4535    IN      NS      ns3.hostduplex.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

;; Query time: 2 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1
;; WHEN: Sun Feb 12 09:00:07 2017
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 119
grahamperrin@momh167-gjp4-hpelitebook850g2-trueos ~>

Security and performance

… session resumption.

The Qualsys SSL Labs report shows two aspects to session resumption: caching, and tickets.

In Stack Overflow, the accepted answer to Will HTTPS slow down page loads of my web application? draws attention to three earlier questions:

• HTTP vs HTTPS performance (2008-09-29)
• How much overhead does SSL impose? (2009-02-13)
• What is the overhead of using HTTPS compared to HTTP? (2009-12-12)

 

[Ulenspiegel]

...Is there any way to avoid images? Some threads have nothing but images, and - depending on where I am - they can take an age to load, which is very tiresome.
Personally, I'd love an option to disable them.

S, when you are in those places/areas of the world you can disable images in Safari. (Safari "Preferences" > "Advanced" > select “Show Develop menu in menu bar", then in "Develop" menu > "Disable images" option).

 

[Scepticalscribe]

S, when you are in those places/areas of the world you can disable images in Safari. (Safari "Preferences" > "Advanced" > select “Show Develop menu in menu bar", then in "Develop" menu > "Disable images" option).

Thank you very much for that, that is very much appreciated, and brilliant to know: There is nothing more tedious and tiresome than an image that takes forever to download - or a short clip on the news that would normally run for a minute, or 40 seconds, - taking five or more minutes because of buffering, and stuttering, and seizing up.

I'd prefer it in text - I can speed read after all, and it is a lot less trying on my eyes.

Actually, to be very honest, I'd be very tempted to use it for here and now; there are far too may tiresome images on the site - people use them instead of words, assuming that you'll "get" the point they are trying to make without any further explanation.