Serendipity Forums

Hello Again All,

As you can probably already guess from the subject title, my site (http://www.celebri-net.com/serendipity) seems to be running quite slow recently. At first I assumed it may have been cause by the flood of traffic I've been receiving lately, but after some closer analysis I'm starting to think its being caused from some where else.

I have read, and reread Chief's my site is so slowwww? post and have tried to make similar changes, so that my site might load quicker.

I realized that my list of categories was running a little long (169 I believe), but it is quite necessary to have within my sidebar for navigation perposes. I tried to follow the instructions to "compress the list of categories" into a hierarch format from mariah's thread, but was unable to figure out how to set the categories into a closed set default on load, so that there wouldn’t be any requests to the database for the 169 different ones. So I just put the whole categories side bar plug-in on hidden, which inevitably sped up my load time a little, but not enough to account for the 30 second load time or the timed out error message.

I want to try to post a picture of my "Version numbers and the use of indices in your serendipity tables, especially serendipity_entries and serendipity_entryproperties." from MySql, but unfortunately I personally didn’t set up the database. I had GoDaddy intergrade Serendipity through a "free software" section that they seemed to have now removed. I checked my Databases that GoDaddy gives you with registering a domain, but of the 10 free MySqls the only one I'm using is for my Forum through PhPbb.

I thought maybe it was the fact that I was sharing an IP with a thousand or so other sites, but after upgrading to a dedicated IP address I realized that couldn’t be the case, especially seeing as my forum, and previous Dreamweaver site loads like lightening.

If you had any ideas on how I could keep my categories without the added lag, where exactly MySql database is, or how I can improve my sites speed, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank You and Happy New Years,
Celebri-Net

Hi!

Before we dive too deep into optimising: I use Firefox with the Firebug extension.

It shows me that many of your graphics load slow or are not existant:

http://celebri-net.com/serendipity/temp ... img/bg.gif (this loads a complete new s9y page - 5.9 seconds!)
http://www.celebri-net.com/serendipity/ ... cution.jpg (4.39 seconds)
http://www.celebri-net.com/serendipity/ ... canner.JPG (4.17 seconds)

If images load slow, this is definitely a sign of your apache running slow, not the application therin. Please check your server load times. Maybe you have a RAID system and one of your HDDs is down/defective? Or you have too little RAM.

Also I see you are using the automatic backup plugin. This one takes a lot of time. I'd suggest you to do manual backups instead and remove that plugin.

HTH,
Garvin

Hi GavinHicking,

Thank you so much for the quick response, I have been receiving numerous e-mail and phone call complaints asking for solutions. I'm afraid that I may be losing quite a bit of my daily loyal viewers, and am in desperate need of help.

I have noticed the long load time on some of my images, especially http://celebri-net.com/serendipity/temp ... img/bg.gif which has resulted in 43,630 errors on download this week alone, and when I checked my hosting stats the majority of the files that were requested from my site but for some reason or another were unable to transfer seemed to all be of Serendipity Glossy White Template images (i.e. bg.gif, xml.gif, bodybg.jpg)

You'll have to excuse my ignorance, but I unfortunately am not sure what a "RAID system" is, or if my "HDDs is down/defective". The part about the RAM sounds like it could be the reason for the lag, but I don't know how to check, fix, or improve it. I did however remove the "auto backup" plug-in, but my site still will not load.

As I had said, I host through GoDaddy.com so I'm not sure exactly what I need to go about to check for defective HDD, RAID system, or insufficient RAM. Would that be something I would have to check with Godaddy, or on my own?

I just got off the phone with Go Daddy, who insisted that it’s a "script" problem and coincidently they don't help with "script issues". But before I was brushed off the line, I was able to squeeze I few details out of the "Not my problem" telephone lady...

I am on a shared server, and only purchased a dedicated IP yesterday. None of GoDaddy's servers are on a RAID system, so no HDDs are down or defective. And as far as RAM, I'm unable to expand it without switching to a dedicated server, which isn’t something I am willing to do just yet.

So basically I'm lost, and don't know if my solution will be as simple as I had hoped.

Desperately waiting,
Celebri-Net

Let's at least get the bg.gif out of the way.

I was going to say:

Copy serendipity/templates/glossy_white/img/bg.gif to your document root (likely htdocs/ or webroot/ or something).

Make a backup of, and then edit, serendipity/templates/glossy_white/style.css. Find where it's trying to get img/bg.gif. Change the reference to http://celebri-net.com/bg.gif.

If style.css doesn't use this image, find the .tpl file that does, and make the same change to each instance.

Then I figured I could check for myself with FireFox's EditCSS extension. Heck, I could just get the image directly! I tried to visit the image directly, but it loaded the whole site frontpage instead.

This indicates to me that you're using Apache's ErrorHandling URL rewriting, and bg.gif doesn't actually exist. (I could be wrong here; I'm not an expert yet.) If it actually does exist, or you're using mod_rewrite, then it seems as if there's something wrong in the .htaccess that is causing Serendipity to be called for every image.

If we can get that one image loading, I think we'll get the problem 90% fixed.

judebert wrote:Then I figured I could check for myself with FireFox's EditCSS extension.

Totally off topic, but you might want to check out the Firebug extension, which in my humble opinion can do anything EditCSS does (and much more), but better. Just my 2 cents ...

YL

Thanx judebert, as always your assumptions were correct. I checked and there is no "bg.gif" file located in my "serendipity/templates/glossy_white/img/" directory, which I can guess caused the whole frontpage site to load through "Apache's ErrorHandling URL". So I checked the style.css and noticed that there was a line of code that was requesting the file, so I changed it to what I believed the original creator want it to load which is "bodybg.gif", which DOES exist within the noted directory. Unfortunately I'm stuck on this crappy Mac and can only use Sh*tty Safari to check my site, meaning I can't check the load time on the images, or check to see if its still requesting "bg.gif". the only thing I can notice is the faster load time but I'm not sure if thats credited to the low traffic my site receives around this time or the change I implemented actually worked.


You Guys Are Amazing. I can't express how greatly I appreciate all of your suggestions, help, and time, thank you all very much.
-Celebri-Net

P.S.
YellowLed thanks for the input on the Firebug, I'll give it a try when I get the chance.

Well I guess it did'nt work, because I'm still getting a crazy long load time, so bad that I can't even post anything new. I don't know what to do, anyone have any more ideas?

Hi!

Firefox's Firebug extensions till shows me graphics that do not load:

http://celebri-net.com/serendipity/temp ... bodybg.gif

Does this file not exist? At least it throws a 404 and leads to the same problems discussed above.

Best regards,
Garvin

Way too much graphics! Consider splitting your posts, and put the movie/picture/animation in the full post (after your readers click Contunue, Read More...)
Also, the quality of the webhost is important. I recently moved to a new webhost, was twice a expensive, but well worth it. My site was diggity slow, now it loads very fast!

Hello,

Thanx garvinhicking I accidentally changed the BodyBg.jpg to Bodybg.gif, but I made the correction so now the right file is being loaded. My site is much fast, but unfortunately it is still pretty slow.

Neut thank you for your suggestion, I see what you’re saying with the "too much graphics!" but I recently lowered the amount of post I show per page. With each post I only have a single image associated with it, so I wouldn’t expect that a singe page with only five images would be too much for my server to handle even if each image is between 50kb-1.5mb.

For the larger images I usually host them on a separate site, out of my serendipity upload folder to allow for less stress on the database. None of the images hosted on my servers are bigger then 320pixels wide or larger then 50kb, so I don't think that should cause such a lag, but I'm not an internet expert so I might be wrong.

I just want to thank everyone who’s spent their time and energy with adding their suggestions and helping me fix my site one image at a time. I really do appreciate it and am so glad I choose to use Serendipity for my site.

Celebri-Net

Hi!

I really urge you to install Firefox+Firebug and have a look at your page load times yourself. You'll spot an awesome lot of images that all take half to up a second to load, many from foreign servers which also slow down your load times.

The one currently spiking is the dynamic Serendipity stylesheet:

http://celebri-net.com/serendipity/serendipity.css

It might be good to de-dynamicize that file. Just view the CSS source of that file, save it as a static CSS file in your serendipity directory (like mystyle.css) and then edit your template's index.tpl file to only reference that stylesheet, and no other ones.

You'll lose dynamic capabilities like plugins adding their output automagically to the output but at the gain of speed.

The rest of the missing speed sadly seems to be caused by your webservers latency and traffic load. If images need a second to load, that means purely that fileaccess is slow on your webserver. No PHP is involved in delivering your JPG/GIF files, so the speed impacts cannot come from any PHP script itselF; they purely come from the slowness of your webhost-connection.

Best regards,
Garvin