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Boot Up Speed is Slow
 
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vbindi



Joined: 30 Nov 2005
Posts: 12

PostPosted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 3:14 am    Post subject: Boot Up Speed is Slow Reply with quote

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to speed up the boot up time of my blog at www.OCRealEstateBlog.com When I type in my URL, there is this delay of about 4 to 8 seconds before it boots up, while several other similar but larger blogs with more photos boot up much faster - ie: www.LA.Curbed.com and www.RainCityguide.com Does anybody have any ideas as to what I can do to speed up my boot up time?.. I removed many photos, reduced the nubmer of articles on the Index page to 15, and used suammries on about 1/2 of the 15 articles...
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Wed Feb 07, 2007 2:10 pm    Post subject: Re: Boot Up Speed is Slow Reply with quote

The speed at which your page loads is dependent on the speed of your Internet connection (dictates the speed at which your computer can receive the bytes your page is composed of) and the processing power of your computer (dictates how quickly your browser can transform those bytes into a picture on the screen).

The Web Site Analyzer shows that your home page requires 413014 bytes to be transmitted to your computer. That's a bit less that half a megabyte, or about a third the size of an old floppy disk. Not necessarily a whole lot, but not insignificant. The Analyzer says it would take 82.71 seconds for a user on a 56K modem connection to see your page load completely. A user on a high-speed connection like a T1 would still need 2.59 seconds to download your page, at which point your web browser would need some additional time to render that data, to transform it into a web page.

Another factor that will be out of our control is the use of third party services or external images, in your case you load one external image and some Javascript from Sitemeter. Even if your page loads from our server rapidly, the browser will still pause if there is any delay in loading the content from a third party service.

I use a debugging tool on my Safari browser which tells me how long it took the browser to retrieve your home page and all images and scripts, and then render that information into a web page. Your home page tested just now at a mean time of 2.399 seconds based on 10 samplings. For reference, our demo page showed a mean of 2.506 seconds and CNN.com showed a mean page load time on its home page of 2.240 seconds.

As for the two sites you used in comparison:

http://www.la.curbed.com/ - 1.621 seconds
http://www.raincityguide.com - 8.242 seconds

So one was faster and one was significantly slower.

www.la.curbed.com appears to be hosted on a dedicated server hosting several of the *curbed.com sites, that server probably costs four or five hundred dollars per month at minimum, not to mention requires a full or part time server administrator to manage. So yes, it is possible to get better performance that we can offer, but at significantly more cost than the $8.95 per month rate for our Standard plan. And we are a hosting specialist, if you need that level of performance and have a budget for it, please let us know.

www.raincityguide.com appears to use a more standard consumer level shared hosting setup, and pricing is probably similar to ours. On every test I ran, your site significantly outperformed that site.

Just for fun, I ran 2 more tests on popular sites hosted at Typepad:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/ - 12.693 seconds
http://www.micropersuasion.com/ - 14.119 seconds

So to sum it up, from my computer (not connected to the hosting network in any way, I am sitting about 454 miles from the servers) I don't see any issues in your home page load time... It loads just about as fast as I'd expect a page of that size to load at this price level. It seems to have better performance than comparable sites hosted on standard shared server web hosting packages, and significantly better performance than sites hosted at Typepad, a similar managed blogging service.
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vbindi



Joined: 30 Nov 2005
Posts: 12

PostPosted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 2:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks John but there is still something that does not add up... I ran those same tests using Web Site Analyzer and others, and I got the same results you quoted... But in the real world, I have now checked on 5 different computers (Cable modem and T1) and each time, the blog www.RainCityGuide.com boots up literally twice as fast as my blog does at www.OCRealEstateBlog.com... and the RainCiytGuide.com blog is substantially larger then mine. I removed all of the external references except for those few that are there now... and I even removed those three that I still have and it did not make any noticeable speed difference... Is there anything else I can do to speed up the boot process... My blog is now producing some substantial business and it means a great deal to me...
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Feb 08, 2007 2:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm sorry but I don't see what you are seeing. When I run my browser-based debugger it says that RainCityGuide loads in an average of 6.170 seconds, and your blog loads in 2.782 seconds, more than twice as fast.

When I run Host-tracker.com it says your html only loads in an average of 2.5142 seconds, while your comparison site RainCityGuide loads in 2.8924 seconds.

Your page load times look just fine, higher than any of the pages you are seeking to compare with.

While I think you don't really need to load 15 articles on your home page, especially since you seem to post less frequently than the blog you want to compare yours with (you posted 7 articles in the last month, so why not limit your home page to say 10 articles, which is the same number your comparison site uses), I am not sure whether that will make a difference in what you are perceiving.

One last thing to test... Try removing your external scripts, like your Sitemeter page counter, to see if that changes anything... There's a possibility you may be seeing latency from that service.

Beyond that, I really don't have anything else to offer you on this issue. I think you are seeing a problem that doesn't really exist, I can not see any speed issue here either subjectively or objectively.
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vbindi



Joined: 30 Nov 2005
Posts: 12

PostPosted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 12:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks John for the input...
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