Ok,help me out here. I bounce around the web like a goblin on too many haste potions I touch down at Paizo because I love your boards,products ,on and on and it is like landing in molasses.Why is this site so damn slow. Loading ,flipping through pages anything you do is painful. My computer screams so it isn't this end...whats up?This should be a stronghold of super geeks the website should move like it !
Real bad earlier today. Otherwise it is usually only moderately slow for me.
Senior Software Developer
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Believe me, this is one of my biggest concerns. We are continually working to improve performance, reliability and availability of the site. Right now we're averaging around 1-2 seconds per page request, which is in my opinion, Not Good Enough.
A guess as to why occasionally you'll see page response times even slower than that: We run several copies of the website software simultaneously, and they are scheduled to restart every few hours. When an instance is first starting up, page response times can be very slow, on the order of 10-12 seconds, because it's still filling caches. After 5 minutes or so, the caches are full and the instance is responding quickly because it doesn't have to fetch from the database so much.
If your session happens to be assigned to a newly restarted instance, you'll see the slow page loading. We have some ideas how to improve this, but only experimentation will show us whether or not we've succeeded.
But rest assured, we make improvements in the software that runs this site daily, and performance enhancements get highest priority (after fixing bugs, of course).
Well thank you for the quick response! I really think your forums are some of the best the web has to offer. Very little moronic flaming and a well read group of regulars,not to mention a responsive staff managing it.Good to know your working on it. I will put up with the speed ,it's worth waiting for!
Believe me, this is one of my biggest concerns. We are continually working to improve performance, reliability and availability of the site. Right now we're averaging around 1-2 seconds per page request, which is in my opinion, Not Good Enough.
{Edited for brevity}
That's really nice to know. When this thread originally posted, I thought to myself "this should be interesting." It's nice to know that you folks are as dedicated to your job as we are to the hobby. You're doing good stuff with the site. Thank you.
Very little moronic flaming and a well read group of regulars,not to mention a responsive staff managing it
I think that's the real reason I like this site so much. I don't IRC, IM or do any of that "chat" stuff, but I like posting here, because even when gamers argue, it's...well,....it's not the same as when football fans argue.
(I'm not knocking football fans, I am one myself, but you get my drift, I hope)I've inadverdently started a few arguments on this site, but I am learning, but I still feel guilty about it. The responsiveness of the staff is incredibly refreshing in the corporate world. Try posting a question on Megacorp's website and see if their CEO chimes in!!
A guess as to why occasionally you'll see page response times even slower than that: We run several copies of the website software simultaneously, and they are scheduled to restart every few hours...
Personally, the big slowdowns seem to occur for me for about 24 hours after your 'This Week at Paizo' email arrives. Those emails have a lot of images, e.g. this week's email has 25 images or so for a total of about 150kb. That's a lot of traffic on paizo.com every time someone just opens or scrolls through their email.
Assuming this is indeed a problem (and not just coincidence), maybe:
1. You could offload the email traffic to an image server? OR
2. You stagger the email rollout, so that, say, some subscribers don't receive their emails until a few days later? (These emails don't seem to be too time-sensitive to my layman's eyes.)
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Senior Software Developer
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That's a good idea, but the drag on the server for loading images is minimal. (That server averages around 10 percent CPU load, so we have room to grow there. :-)
The bottleneck I'm exploring right now has more to do with the database server. We're also taking a look at our round-tripping to external services such as address correction, credit card processing and shipping.
The bottleneck I'm exploring right now has more to do with the database server. We're also taking a look at our round-tripping to external services such as address correction, credit card processing and shipping.
Are these all handles on the same machine (i.e., the webserver) at the same time? I've had issues when trying to handle CC processing and webserving on the same machine. (Damn banks, grr!!)
Agreed it is slower, about 10secs per page for me. It's very nice to have quick response on this topic, it could easily have be overlooked as a whiny post. I'm always somewhat shocked and bewildered that this messegeboard has nice people and that all the goodwill isnt drowned out by "nerf this, nerf that" attitude of other game related sites.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Are these all handles on the same machine (i.e., the webserver) at the same time? I've had issues when trying to handle CC processing and webserving on the same machine. (Damn banks, grr!!)
No, credit-card processing and public web services run from different groups of servers. That's for security reasons as much as it is for performance reasons.
-Vic.
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Good God is it sloooooo tonight! I'm gonna watch this as I wait!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7521044027821122670
Now speed this up before I sic a varsity football team on ya all!
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Senior Software Developer
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Good God is it sloooooo tonight!
Heh. We're actually rolling out a new version of the website right this minute that should help things a bit.
Previously, page requests were queued up for any individual instance of the website application. If you requested a page that should take .5 seconds to render, but someone ahead of you had requested a page that would take 10 seconds, your request would take 10.5 seconds. If there were two 10-second requests ahead of you, well, then it would be 20.5 seconds. Of course, if the person who made the 10-second request got impatient and clicked the link several times, that would queue up that same 10-second request multiple times, and, well, you can just imagine what happens then....
I'm crossing my fingers, but for the most part, things should be faster now because if you're requesting a .5-second page, you should get it in around a half a second. (Except for the instances that haven't yet cycled over to the new code -- that will take around an hour or so. If you want to switch to the new code, relaunching your browser will do the trick.)
Of course, we also just released a 43.6MB PDF download that lots of people have been waiting for, so no matter how fast our server can respond, our bandwidth will probably be a little constrained this weekend while everybody grabs it. (I see 12 people downloading it in the last 5 minutes....)
Oh, and we still have tons of places where we can optimize our code. The site should keep getting faster as time goes on.
Bah! This site has actually bogged down more! I don't mean to sound harsh but I can fry an egg faster than this site flips pages. I will stop by to check ya out now and again but all my board time will be spent at Monte's site . The folks over there are very well read and it doesn't remind me of a visit to the Dentist! Really guys this site is slower than any other site I visit on the web...period!
Is there another download blitz happening, or is it just because it's Sunday and everyone has the day off to browse Paizo, but the site today is incredibly 'bytes' slow today. Cable isn't supposed to be 14.4 slow. :-/
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Chief Technical Officer
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Is there another download blitz happening, or is it just because it's Sunday and everyone has the day off to browse Paizo, but the site today is incredibly 'bytes' slow today. Cable isn't supposed to be 14.4 slow. :-/
I was checking shortly after your post, and didn't notice any problems.... Hopefully whatever you experienced was temporary, localized, or both.
-Vic.
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I was checking shortly after your post, and didn't notice any problems.... Hopefully whatever you experienced was temporary, localized, or both.
I believe it was. Thankfully. Thanks for checking.