Serendipity Forums

hello!

what could be the reason of sudently HUGE slowdown of loading extended entry (with comments) page and with gravatar plugin active? a few days ago everything ran smoothly but now it is a disaster. deactivating the plugin brings back the smoothness of serendipity (it's really fast and renders pages like a charm).

i ran gravatar/favatar plugin with caching of gravatars enabled. i looked into templates_c/favatar directory to see for myself how the cache is doing. i found 1,3mb of data, most of it .log files. some of them really big (100 Kb and up). is serendipity somehow parsing them? maybe those files are the cause of such a big slowdown?

the mentioned slowdown itself looks like this: clicking on any url that brings full entry view (with comments) stops the whole thing and keeps it stopped for sometimes 20 or so seconds. the plugin is doing something (what?) and after that, the page gets rendered. 20 seconds to parse the cache seems to be far too much. my question is: what can cause this situation and how can i get rid of it? gravatars are cool, give some personality to comments and my blog readers just like to have them. but they don't like to wait half a minute to see the page

even more strange - a few days ago everything worked fine. i did not change my configuration. i asked admins of my serwer if maybe they changed something in apache configuration - no, nothing was changed. this sudden slowdown surprised me and i'm just curious what can be a cuase of this not so cool situation.

PS. right forum now, right garvin?

Hi!

This forum is okay, yes

Are you sure the gravatar is a PLUGIN issue? Could it be that it's a BROWSER problem? Because if s9y is showing you half of the page, and then the loading slows down this would lead me to think that your browser is having trouble parsing gravatar images from your page.

You currently have that plugin disabled, right? Maybe we could find some time to try to debug it together, so you enable it and we could run some tests?

If you've got time, drop by the IRC freenode #s9y channel, I should be there today.

Best regards,
Garvin

finally i found the right forum section

yes, it's gravatar plugin issue. as soon as i disabled it promblem disappeared. i'll try to describe how blog reacts when the plugin is active. i know the problem of slowdowns because of slow other serwers response and feeding of images/contents. that's why i'm using plugin's cache abilities. i have some regular visitors who are commenting quite often and who are using avatars. well, some days back this gravatar thing caused sooo much slowdowns that browsing was almost impossible. the problem existed under firefox 1.5.0.4 and latest opera distribution. on both - windows and linux. BUT i had also a report from my friend, who did not noticed any slowdowns with ie and maxthon installed. so after all it could be a browser problem but why?

i asked only for possible reasons of this situation because it is strange to me that two popular browsers did have problems with gravatar support and this ie thing did not. i just can not understand how is this cache thing working and okey, that is not my problem to solve

i just made the plugin active for test and know what? it's working perfectly! no slowdowns, no problems. and that makes me even more curious of sudden slowdown reason with cache enabled. now the plugin works without cache and goes well.

all this is little confusing. maybe there was a problem with serwer, on which my blog is running? maybe gravatar serwers had some problems for past few days and after caching period plugin started to have problems with avatars download. but there again - why ie with maxthon ran smoothly and firefox with opera had such a big slowdowns?

i just enabled caching for the plugin - slowdown. switched it off - runs good (with other comments, where were some comments with other gravatars - browser cache of course clean). so it leads me to conclusion, that something's wrong with plugin's cache stuff.

one thing is sure: it is not an easy thing to be a coder