Subscribed. Mark is pretty good at finding bottle necks with page loading time.

Hi David, here are somethings to check. Are all your site images optimized and reduced? If not you can use https://compressor.io/compress or punypng or yahoos smushit to reduce size, if you did not already do so and do not have photoshop or simiar program to reduce and optimize images. You can quickly find out if any images are not optimized by running the test I mention below. They will give details on your images too.

Have you checked the backend (admin config ) of your site. Make sure it is configured for production and not development. Is gzip compression on? Are you consolidating your css and js files into one, are there any unneccesary components, or js libraries loading or modules loading that you do not use but have installed. You can remove any that are not neccessary under extensions, manage tab but make sure before you unstall or disable any . I suggest Jotcache (free) JCH optimize (free) and paid https://www.jch-optimize.net/ version for assisting you with speeding up your site after you have run tests. You will need to carefully read config iinstructions and it may require some tweaking of settings to get it right. I would suggest adding the components after you run (FREE) test on sites. The pro version of JCH has a wizard with different one click settings you can use if you are not that confortable with some of the tweaking. GTmetrix http://gtmetrix.com and http://www.webpagetest.org/ type in your website address and in a minute or two you will have detailed analysis of your site. You can also get an inexpensive CDN from cloudflare for 20.00 a month for the first site, Netcdn and incapsula also haveaffordable cdns. You can also use cloudinary to host and serve your images as well as optimize them in there system there is a free plan and paid plans. Nonumber.nl has an extension for adding CDN to your site however you will have to get site ground to assist in changing you dns records for cloudflare to serve content unless they are partnered with cloud flare. I hope that helps !

Best of success,

Byron

Hi Byron,

First of all thank you for your reply. To make it clear, I am not a wiz by any stretch of the imagination. I do have someone who is helping me but neither one of us is an expert in the web optimisation field, which I don't doubt is very important.

I must admit that I did not do all the things you mentioned but I will definitely pass on this list to my associate. I do however use JCH optimise Pro. On GTMetrix my site scored pretty well. After the help of my helper the numbers certainly improved but there are still very worrying.

Example: My Dashboard (I call it 'News Fees') is given 98% speed rate on gtmetrix.com (with an A rating), and YSlow grade of 88%. I know these numbers are not perfect but they are obviously not bad. The total page size is 1.04mb but the load size is 6.65 seconds to load.

I am sure you appreciate that those numbers are impossible to work with and users will definitely not continue to use the site. Before the help I got, my site loaded between 10 seconds to 15. Now I am 'happy' to declare that it is between 6.5 seconds to 12

subscribed

Disable JCH Optimize right away, it currently slows down sites with Stackideas components, rather than speeding them up. A much better alternative is Mod_pagespeed which is server side, but I am not sure your host allows that? Worth asking though.

Dont look at GT-Metrix scores, it is easy to get 99% score, but if you do it via speed optimizer plugins, what you really are doing is fooling those speed testers, but not actually speeding it up. JCH Optimize is great for simple sites, but when it comes to stuff like EasySocial dont do it

There is some encouraging news though, the developer of JCH Optimize is in talks with Stackideas to get access to their product suite to test and optimize things. But for now, disable any speed boosting plugins. Generally the trick to optimizing speed is server side, not plugin side.

Dear Jannik,

Thank you for your answer. I understand what you say about GT metric and not to rely on it too much. The thing is that JCH has cut the load time by an average of 3 seconds. The sad reality is that I have to live with a site that loads on average on 7 seconds per page. I am not an expert and I was not warned when purchased ES that I need to spend hundreds on euros more on expert advice on how to combat the slowness that ES will bring to my site.

It is also a bit disappointing not to see any comments from the support team. This issue is something that effects my site incredibly!

You do not have to spend a penny on expert advise. There is tons of expert advise on this forum. I have participated in many threads about optimization and server setups. It is awesome what I have both been able to learn and share on these forums.

That said, you should be able to get the load speed down a lot by disabling conflicting plugins incl. JCH Optimize. There is no reason why you shouldnt be able to get it down to 2-4 seconds on your current server/site.

One tip... try Too Many Files instead of JCH Optimize, as I said from my experience JCH Optimize just makes things worse with ES. *However: do note that it can break some features on the site if configured improperly, so monitor and test the site closely after enabling it.

That said JCH Optimize should get better in the near future, as the developer is aware of it breaking and slowing down ES, and is going to be working on optimizing it for ES.

Hi Jannik,

I am just a bit afraid that as JCH already cut 3 seconds off the average load page. There must be some other serious problem with EasySocial that is causing this. Like I said, 7 seconds per page.

I will try Too Many Files and keep the forum updated. Obviously the Stackidea team are not going to say anything here. Very disappointing

Dont worry, I am sure that the stackideas team will take the time to look into your load speed... and I dont honestly think its an issue with EasySocial. It is most likely a compatibility issue with another plugin or component, and it is just a matter of identifying it. I had some page speed issues myself, it I narrowed it down to a couple of plugins incl. JCH. Lets wait and see.

Hello David,

Firstly, I do apologize for the delay as the entire team is extremely busy with the internal developments of EasyBlog. To be honest, I never rely on GT Metric simply because I have no idea how they are calculating these stats. Instead, I often use Firebug and Chrome's net panel tool to monitor the time spent to render the site.

Okay, I have done some slight alterations on the site just for trial purposes, can you try accessing the site and see if it is much faster for you now?

Dear Mark,
Thank you very much for your response. Unfortunately I do not experience any difference. I checked it with gtmetrix and the load pages are very much the same, if not slightly (0.5-1 seconds on average) worst. I do not blame you, I am just a bit disheartened. Clearly I cannot have a site that loads on average of 7-12 seconds on pages EasySocial is active. I am not inviting a mass criticism of you guys. I love your products but I just cant see myself able to continue like this. We do not have the financial resources to try and tackle the speed effects of such an advanced component such as ES, and to be honest I am not sure that is my place to attempt to do so.

Thank you.

Hello David,

Are you on a normal shared host or are you on a vps / dedicated machine? By the way, can you try to set the template to protostar and see if there's any significant difference? When I tested earlier with protostar, the page loads within 2s.

This is something that most of you need to take note and I am going to be very honest here. If you plan to run a social network site, do expect that it would take somewhere between 1 - 3s for your initial page load. Reason is simply because you are not running a simple CRUD site. Social networks are complex and it requires very complex SQL queries. I have never seen social network sites out there that can load within 1s (Try to monitor the network tab in firebug on Facebook, you'll be surprised)

Dear Mark,

1) I do pay for a cloud VPS account (around 50 euros per month) with Site Ground.

2) I did like you said and used the Prostar template and checked the site and it was just as slow. I also tested it (speed wise) with gt medtbix which confirmed my feeling. The measurements were exactly the same as with the YooTheme template i have installed.

Hi Mark,

I don't mean to be rude but I would appreciate a response. I can't see how a load time of 7 seconds per page or more of EasySocial based page, is of no interest to you. I am surprised that I need to 'chase' for a response from Stackideas!

Do note that the stackideas team has been busier than usual. They are not intentionally ignoring this thread, but they do however know that it will require a well thought out response and possibly some extra testing. StackIdeas doesn't have a big staff like Microsoft. But with the few that they have they take on a lot of things. I too had been wondering about a few post's I made this week (recently addressed). For years the stacked team has had excellent response times which leads me to believe this is just a phase while working on EasyBlog5. They know people have been really wanting EB5 which is why they have put such an intensive focus on it recently.

Hello David,

Firstly, I do apologize for the delay of this reply, I have been extremely occupied this week. Yes, you shouldn't be chasing for an answer and that is my bad for not passing this thread to someone else to assist you with.

Okay, I have been monitoring your site for quite a bit and something which I noticed on your site, even on the back end which does not load any of EasySocial's extension at all, takes close to about 2 - 3s for the page to load http://screen.stackideas.com/2014-12-06_0116.png . I have a feeling that there's something not right with your VPS. If Joomla itself takes about 2 - 3s for the initial loading time, EasySocial would utilize close to about 1 - 2s. Which accumulates up to about 4 - 5s . I am monitoring this with Firebug and not using the Gmetric app.

Do you have root access to your VPS? If you do, could you pass the login credentials to us so that I can check on the server?

Dear Mark,

Attached find access to my server account.

Hello David,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply as it is a weekend for us here. Hm, the access that you provided is actually for siteground. Is there any access provided by Siteground for the vps? I need to login to the server via SSH and look at your current setup.

Hi Mark,

Here is the access details.

Hello David,

Hm, this is odd as I don't see any information here. Where did you place the SSH access?

Hi Mark,

I put it under 'Site Details'.

Hello David,

How do I access to the SSH? The login which you have provided, is this for Siteground or the SSH access? I need the root access to the vps to take a look at your current web server setup and the load of the server.

Hi Mark,

I am sorry, I am not an expert. I contacted Siteground and they gave me the following information on how to access SSH, etc. They said that you would have to generate keys for the SSH connection through the SSH manager in your cPanel.

http://kb.siteground.com/how_to_log_in_to_an_account_via_ssh_in_mac_os/

http://kb.siteground.com/How_to_log_in_to_my_VPS_via_SSH_in_Mac_OS/

Hello David,

Could you kindly please provide us with these access again? We have done some reset on the stored username / passwords as outlined on http://stackideas.com/blog/improving-our-sites-security .

Sorry for the inconveniences caused.

Ok. The details are below under Site Details/Optional Information

Is there any chance someone will get back to me?! The only reason I am not hassling you is that I used to get great support from the team before but not anymore. If you do not wish to look at this issue that I raised, just let me know. I am not sure what I am supposed to do now!!

Hello David,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply, I just got back from the conference in Bangkok. Hm, I have tried to generate the ssh keys but it seems like the user account is actually not a "root" account. Without the "root" account, I can't really do / check on anything

Did you purchase a VPS account from them? If you did, you should also obtain the root account from Siteground. Did they provide you with such login credentials?

Hi Mark,

I just learnt that I do not have access to the root access as my hosting is cloud based. I presume that means that you cannot look into what is the cause of the problem and I have to live with an average 10 seconds per page loading on my Easysocial based pages?

This is simply unsustainable. I presumed that for the price Stackideas charge I did not have to be a master of web technology. All I did was install a paid template (Yootheme) and Easysocial and now my site is loading extremely slow.

I am not sure that is the best publicity for ES or SI, it is definitely means that ES is not something that I can use as it means I am forced to look into other alternatives. Today was the first time I looked into Jomsocial as I am afraid I have no alternative anymore.

A webmaster should always have access to their files. If anything ever goes wrong on Joomla, it's essential that you can do something about it. Take for example during summer of 2013 my site was hacked. I had everything up to date, used safe extensions, and had a seemingly safe host. It turns out upon a big investigation I made I found out the hacker only targeted people on the hosting provider I was using. Access to the files was critical in this attack in both the investigation and restoring things back to normal.

What I'm getting at is regardless to what you decide to use, if your expecting to have a community of users you will absolutely need access to the files with or without Joomla/ES. If your hosting provider has everything else down but does not give access to your files, you may need to look else where. This isn't just about security, in the past I've installed updates that have broken my entire backend of Joomla. Access to my files made the situation fixable. Another scenario is if another extension of yours has an issue that only occurs on your site, the developer will need access for them to be able to debug it.

While I'm a loyal Stackideas fan, the advise above isn't just about EasySocial. It's about your entire site and should be one of your highest priorities to get the access you need. Even JomSocial could very easily run into a problem where access to the files is required. It's not just a possibility, its actually a likely scenario. Murphy's law very much comes into play in the Joomla world. I'm letting you know so that you can prepare yourself in a stable direction for your site.

Before Giving up

- Ask for access. If they say none exist, tell them that it will be a deal breaker for you. I've seen on this forum people "threaten" to leave EasySocial over a missing feature which indeed isn't nice on the requesters end (understandable why the Stacked team does not take kindly to such requests). However this is something they absolutely should be giving access to, especially for a price of 50 euros per month. It would be like selling a plane without landing gear.

- If they do not give access even after getting as far as you can, it's time to find a new host.

- Assuming you get access either way, send the login details to Mark. He should be able to find the bottle neck. The Stacked team has been pretty good at finding these.

- Bottom line: Try these methods out. Ideally it shouldn't take too much of your time.

Hello David,

The page load on your site WITHOUT EasySocial takes about 3 - 5 seconds alone and there's definitely something that is hogging up the CPU of your site. EasySocial will at least take a minimum of 1 - 2 seconds of the page load. If you are looking at building a social network and expect that the site load within 1 - 2 seconds, I am afraid you need to reconsider the purpose of the site. There is no way at all to get a social network with activity stream (That respects user privacy) to load within 1 second.

Believe me, I have tested various social networks like JomSocial, Community Builder, Buddy Press and NONE of them load within the 1 - 2 second marker.

Since you are on a VPS, I am taking the extra effort to help you check on your server which WE WILL NOT EVEN CHARGE you for. All we need is the root access to look at how your server is being setup. It's very unfair if your hosting provider did a sloppy job on the VPS setup and you come here blaming us for making the site slow!

Anyway if your hosting provider wouldn't want to provide the root access, let me get the stats and details for you, I need the Joomla back end access and FTP access to your site first as we have deleted all previous access due to the multiple hacking attempts on our customer's account.

Dear Mark,

I have no problem with ES taking 1-2 seconds to load. Last night I was talking to a Siteground agent and they assured me that pages with no ES installed were loading around 1.5 seconds per page (they of course sent me a link to a third party report). I just did a test on a random ES page and it shows it is loading at over 6 seconds. (http://gtmetrix.com/reports/twigit.org/OeJyuSWE)

I am not blaming you guys but the only reason I chose Site ground was because you partner with them and recommend them. To come now and ridicule them does not reflect poorly on myself!

It just feels a little like them blaming you (Stackideas) and you blaming them (Siteground). The thing is that me (the customer of both) stands to suffer.

I have no problem with paying, for services or for you looking into it by the wayI (no need to use block capitols). I just want everything to work so I can concentrate on my site and not on making sure that your and Sitegrounds products are working correctly.

Details below.

Hello David,

Don't get me wrong, we are not blaming anyone. We never blamed anyone unless 3rd party templates / components are causing the page to malfunction. We are not even blaming, we even take the courtesy to disable the problematic plugins for our customers without any charges at all. In fact, at times when we have free time, we even take take the decency to debug it for the 3rd party plugins.

Even so, right now I am requesting the root access to look at how your current VPS is being setup (I believe no one else would even go this far) so that I can find the bottleneck rather than just blaming SiteGround

Nevertheless, give me some time today and I will thoroughly check this as I have some free time during my weekends. The past few months have been really hectic for me and I am truly sorry for that as I have some family matters to take care of!

Dear Mark,

I do not expect you to work on weekends. Definitely not on my account. Please relax today and get back to me early next week.

This is the equation I worked out on 10 second loading sites:

1.5-2 seconds for Joomla
1.5-2 seconds for EasySocial
2-2.5 seconds for Bloated template
1-2.5 seconds to bloated plugins and extension add-ons
1-3 seconds additional for dodgy server providers who overloads their resources.

= 7 to 12 seconds of misery for users and admins

This is what I would do - strip everything down to barebones and build ground-up carefully choosing only what you need. Dont bloat the system or it will haunt you. This is a painstaking process and there are no shortcuts unfortunately.

I understand your point Neel. If that were true though, most sites would load around 10 seconds which they don't. In my own case I have a paid template by Yootheme. No free plugins, only well respected (quite expensive ones) and it still loads between 6-11 seconds on Easysocial based pages.

Hi David, My list is the common bottlenecks I have noticed in slow performing sites. This doesnt mean that all sites should be slow, but rather when a site is extremely slow its usually due to some of the things I have mentioned in my list. I agree EasySocial might not be the fastest and can be a bit of a bloat to the website but that is the price you pay if you want any serious Social Network on your site. Also I dont think 7-8 sec loading speed is all due to EasySocial. Its usually a mix of many things causing the slow page loads. You need to strip everything down and start building ground up carefully assessing each step. That is what I am doing to my site. I have brought it down from 5-6 seconds down to 2.5 seconds now with EasySocial installed.

PS: Another thing I've noticed with hosting providers is, they will never admit if their system is the cause for slow loading speed and most them oversells their resources. They always refer you to extension developers and point fingers at others and will never admit that 'yes, we have allocated very small ram, cpu power and limited server resources for your account because we are greedy and like to oversell'. Trust me since I have had experience with many providers until I decided to buy and host my own server. I am not saying your host is doing the same. But rather saying - when they say its not their server at fault, always take it with a grain of salt.

Hello David,

I have been checking your site and this is some of the stats which I have gathered:

Page load comparison

Your back end page that takes about 2.2 seconds for the page to load. http://screen.stackideas.com/2014-12-21_1637.png . In other words, without any extensions loaded on your site, it already takes between 2s - 3s (Average around 2.5s) . If you take this into consideration and try adding another 2s for EasySocial, you'll easily hit 4s - 6s for the page load time.


EasySocial Dashboard page

Testing your dashboard currently, the page takes about an average of 3s - 4s to load as you can see from my screen shot here, http://screen.stackideas.com/2014-12-21_1641.png . Which page is generating between 6s - 8s for the page to load?


Article page

For the sake of demonstrating to you that the slow loading time also affects normal Joomla articles, I have created a test menu which links to an article page in Joomla. This is a NON EASYSOCIAL page and it takes about 3.4s to load, http://screen.stackideas.com/2014-12-21_1648.png


The question now is:


1. When you said that the page load takes about 6 seconds to load, on what basis are you testing this on? Like I have said, if you are testing this with GMetrix, they are also taking into consideration all the css, images and js files which are loaded on the site. The tests which I have performed is specifically tested against the "extension" load time (php) on how long it takes for the page to load (Exclusive of css, images and js files)

2. Why would your hosting provider be pointing fingers to EasySocial when the page http://www.twigit.org/article.html which is of a Joomla article also takes around 4s to load on GMetrix?

3. I feel that it is fair EasySocial takes an additional 2s for the page to load. EasySocial is not just an average article extension and you shouldn't expect it to load as fast as an article. It has tons of complex operations like the activity stream, privacy etc. If you want to run a social network site, these are some of the cons which you need to consider. If you can't lose out the 2s of loading time, consider moving to a dedicated machine to get faster response from the web server.

4. Why wouldn't Siteground provide you a root access when you bought a VPS? With a VPS you are / should be allowed to manage the server on your own and perform your own performance tuning.

Dear Mark,

To start with I am very unhappy with your actions. You have published an article as an item on the main menu on my website as ‘Public’ and left it there for nearly 11 hours without my consent. I am not sure on what grounds do you feel you have the liberty to to do so but I am very aggrieved.

I feel we could have moved faster on this issue had you simply did the assessment you have done this morning without the root access. When I reported this issue 3 weeks ago I included the same access to my site you had this morning, but still I had to remind you every few days about this issue. You have to understand that not all your customers have the same level of knowledge as you do and Stackideas does not advertise itself as a company that deals only with tech wiz. I am sure it is frustrating to you but I pay exactly the same as everyone else to your services and have always been a kin supporter.

Here are my responses:

1) Like yourself, I am using GTMetrix. You both ridicule and cite GTmetrix in your recent response so I presume it is ok to use them?! I tried an ES page and got a loading time of 8.35 seconds. You claim that a basic joomla article loads on my server between 2-3 seconds but here is a proof that ES adds about 5 seconds to it. .

2) I am not sure why Siteground said what they said. I am not responsible for their words. I am both of your customers and putting me on the spot obviously does not help me feel supported in this ‘Support Forum’ section. Also, at the beginning of your response you pointed that a regular Joomla article takes between 2-3 seconds to load but at this point you say that it takes 4 seconds. Which one is it?

3) I already said that I fully expect ES to take around 2 seconds extra to load so repeating this point again is making me feel speechless as I do not know what to say other than repeat it again! It makes me feel that you are not talking to me, you are really talking to all the people reading this thread.

4) This point I find the most bizarre. Stackades recommend Siteground as a hosting provider (http://stackideas.com/siteground-hosting). Maybe you guys should reconsider who you recommend as your customers (like myself) take it very seriously.

I feel that the tone of your responses are trying to belittle me and you (or whomever did create a new menu item and left it available to the public) is unprofessional and while I appreciate Stackideas are trying to solve my issue you have clearly crossed the line.

I feel that your support has been going down for the last year or so. Just like yootheme you create brilliant products but I am afraid that the thing that made you stick out (support) is now something I feel I cannot avail of to the same level anymore. If I am having a problem with a Yootheme template I do not bother posting it as I know they will not respond. I am starting to feel uncomfortable asking for support here as well. Even if I am wrong, I still pay one of the highest prices across Joomla components (well over a couple of hundreds euros per year as I have all of your products) and feel that it is more that worth it but I do expect a friendly response.

I know I will not get the support that I need here as you are trying to blame Siteground while they point the finger at you. I simply give up.

Thank you!

Mark is referring to GMetrix in a "qualified instant" because it's something you are familiar with. Indeed he could have used his own resource for the article example, but wanted to prove to you that even with other methods it would show to you the speed problem.

Considering that you asked for this thread to be closed, I'll end with two pieces of advise for you that I strongly recommend for your future websites:

1. (Repeat) You will need access to your files if you want a dynamic successful site.

2. When providing access to a site to admins/developers in the future, it is best to give them access to a test site. This has nothing to do with trust issues. It's about the fact that settings and adjustments often have to be made which there is a good chance you might not want those changes but are needed to find out what is going on. And believe me that a test site is very important for a major production site. This is why you don't see very often public issues (technical) on social network sites.

Dear John,

Thank you for your advise. I will keep the two points in mind. I guess I presumed when you are giving a super admin access to someone that out of courtesy they would not behave in such a way but maybe I was too trusting. Thanks again.

For the most part I agree with what Mark did and how he replied, however I agree that the menu item should have been unpublished. This is one of the many reasons why a test site is a great idea (there are way more important reasons than this by the way). Creating a test site that is a exact replica of your site is not actually that hard. Before I knew SQL, I was able to do this by simply copying the entire site, putting it into a test directory (test.sitename.com), copying the database, putting it into a new one, and fixing the configuration.php to reflect the new paths. A little bit time consuming, but is not very complicated (you don't need any code knowledge to do this), and will save you a lot of head aches when you have a big fan base. Especially if you do your own modifications to things and need to refer back to either one to fix the other.

What probably happened was that Mark was primarily concerned with figuring out the speed, ran the checks, and simply forgot about the menu item that was published. Indeed it was a mistake, but not a very big one in my opinion. I'm appreciative of the fact that Mark went through the efforts to get some good ideas of the situation.

You do bring up a good point about Stackideas recommending SiteGround when you're finding slow speed on their services. You should ask SiteGround again about file access. I've been on their basic plan in the past which they provided me file access. It's wrong on their end if they do not for someone who pays more.

Dear John,

Thank you for your comment. I guess it is a bit hard being where I am where very accomplished customer service representative like Mark and support from Siteground are telling me that it is not their fault and both showing me proof with screen shots etc. I am just going to have to live with a slow site or find an alternative.

Thanks again

In a way, I feel sorry for David Judah. It can be hard when you are not tech savvy and something like site speed optimization can be a tough task which involves a lot of experimentation. I understand your frustration. I wouldnt be happy if a menu link was created on my production site neither. I am sure Mark didnt do it intentionally but still its a shame it happened.

Looking at your site performance, it does seem to load like the sites on shared hosting environment. Do consider upgrading your server to a VPS (or cloud) with higher capacity of RAM and CPU power. You will see an immediate improvement in server response time there itself. I wish you the best with your site speed optimization and hope everything works out in the end.

Thanks for the kind words Neel. I am currently on VPS (Cloud) and paying 50 euros per month. I am not sure how much I need to pay to get a loading time that is more acceptable.

My name is Josh by the way. I'm in the same boat right now having to deal with a slower profile as of now. In my case I know I'm dealing with a slower host due to not being able to afford a VPS. My plan is to wait for ES and a few other extensions to have their bells and whistles and then try to generate money via ads as well as inviting my audience. Indeed it's a tricky business. Coming up I plan on swapping to Linode and am hoping that I get a performance boost when fine tuning things. Figuring out a quality host is a chore too.

Why does your Joomla articles run slow? You should run that by your host. We need to make sure the rest of your site is zipping fast before we address the ES portion.

Hmm... for that price, you should be getting a good machine I would think. Do you know your VPS specs? When I checked the dashboard, I understand what you mean. The loading is really sluggish. All pages loads comparatively slow and ES Dashboard takes even longer. If Joomla loads slow already, no wonder EasySocial page takes longer. For the amount of price you are spending now, you should be getting a much better performance off your server. I dont have experience with Siteground so I cant judge. Maybe its time to try another host? Why dont you set up a test site in another host and see how the same site performs on that. Then you have something to compare to.

Thanks guys for your words of support. Josh, I am not sure how much saving for VPS will help as Siteground was voted the best Joomla hosting company out there, but that is my experience so I hope your will be better

Neel, I know what you mean. Maybe I should be moving to a different host but I have been checking GTmetrix regularly now. My site is slow even with Joomla articles but Easysocial adds at least 3-4 seconds and sometimes more. I do not have the technical skills to look into it in depth as this is way out of my league. I just thought I would call on the team here for support but I should probably look into hiring a consultant which would cost me hundreds of euros to solve something that could have (sorry for the whinge!).

Another factor in this is "how much free time can you spare?". When I created an account on Linode they are offering me a 7 day free account (haven't used yet). What I'm getting at is that by trying out free trials on hosts, you could get a better idea of hosting speed. Stay away from shared hosting. Typically shared hosting says "unlimited" which is a big give away or a cpanel (nice to use, but uses more resources). When using trial hosts, you do not need to go through the efforts of installing every extension/config that you originally had. Instead copy the files and install the database (again, no code knowledge required for this).

Siteground may be the best voted Joomla host, but if they are not providing you with the speed you need you should either look else where or help them help you figure this out. Reference a Joomla article and show them the slow loading time. Another idea is to create a fresh installation of Joomla and see if the article loading time is good (should feel almost instant). On one of my sites that does not have very many extensions the loading time for a Joomla article is 0.5-2 seconds.

Also note that at least from my experience there is one config in ES that has a big influence over page speed. Go to:
Joomla Backend > EasySocial > Settings > System Preferences > System Environment

Change the value to production. Hit save and go back to ES's dashboard. Click the purge cache at the top left. After clearing it, view your profile. The first load may be slow. View your profile a second time and you may notice a increase in speed. I'm not saying it will be perfect, but in my case it was at least twice as fast on my test site to load the profile. This is something to keep in mind regardless to your hosting choice.

Thanks for the tip Josh. What does 'production' on Easysocial system environment mean to my site. What will I not be able to do?

Production compiles the files so that it makes scripts lighter weight. Development mode allows the Stacked team to more clearly identify issues by seeing where they occur. Combined/compressed scripts make it so that all the code is on a single line making it harder to track down. This is yet another reason why a test site is a good idea. Swapping the setting fortunately is pretty easy.

How would that work on a live site?

If "Development mode" is active on a live site, the scripts will be uncompressed and will result in lower speed. This is why "Production Mode" is recommended for a live site. However if you provide the stackideas team with only a live site, they have to test the site out in "Development mode" because they need to see how it operates with uncompressed scripts. Theoretically the option should operate the same on a test site as a "live site". Now a offline site however might be a different story.

Hi Josh,

I just went to the site and checked it and my site was on 'production' all along. Thanks again for your help!

That's disappointing. Anyways, contact your host about the Joomla articles deal (loading time). Also test a fresh Joomla install with articles if you have the time.

Hello David,

Firstly I do apologize for leaving that menu there, I missed it and that menu should be unpublished after I was done testing it. I am sorry if my response sounded a little harsh but I am just trying to get to the point here with all the stats that I have been collecting from your site.

The reason that I am actually testing this with Gmetrix is because in your initial post, you did mentioned that you are testing this with Gmetrix but I personally prefer to test "page loads" with Firebug as they are more accurate. With Firebug, the "page load" on the site with EasySocial only takes about 3 seconds tops (This is the page load from the server and it excludes the other resources on the site).

Here's another stats that I was able to gather,

1. Page without EasySocial http://screen.stackideas.com/2014-12-22_1034.png (It takes about 4.66s) for the page to load.

2. Page with EasySocial loaded http://screen.stackideas.com/2014-12-22_1035.png (It takes about 6.31s) for the page to load

You can see that with EasySocial rendered on the site, it adds an additional 1.65s on the page load and I think that is a fair amount of load added since you mentioned that it is acceptable for an additional of 1 - 2s of load.

As for the Siteground partnership, we have actually partnered with Siteground since the days of EasyBlog as their hosting environment seems to work best out of the box with our extensions. We cannot guarantee that it works best for every other extensions.

Regarding our support, I have to admit that I haven't been having the time to actually go through each of our forum posts and those that are being replied by our junior staffs which just joined us. I am rallying to ensure that our support quality is being raved again. I appreciate your insights on this.

All in all, my biggest concern right now is the page load of Joomla itself like both Neel and Josh mentioned earlier. If the page load for Joomla itself is already so slow, EasySocial adding another 1 - 2s will cause it to be even slower.

Hello David,

I have an idea / proposition for you and not really sure if this would be ideal for you. You did mentioned that you are paying Siteground $50 / month for a vps and I am pretty sure that their VPS is not really a VPS considering that you are not getting the "root" access.

With Digital Ocean, you can get a very good cloud server which is at the rate of only $40 / month. That gives you a better deal I believe? https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ .

I could help you to set this up with the appropriate LAMP stack and also assist you with the migration over to Digital Ocean. I am very sure that the load would be much better than the shared hosting / vps which Siteground offers. Of course this would be a 1 time setup and thereafter you will need to manage your server by yourself (I am not really sure how this works with Siteground) currently?

DigitalOcean is awesome! Much better than Siteground imho.

Or you can even consider linode. It's unmanaged with them just like Digital ocean (meaning you have to run and maintain your own server) but atleast they have paid professional services if you need that extra help on server. Also I heard their service is really good too. If you feel unmanaged servers to be intimidating, there are also a few fully managed providers available too. You need to try and see since it appears what you got now is not working.

Yeah, Linode is incredible. I have several sites hosted on Linode.

Thanks for sharing this guys Perhaps what we could do in the future is to build a ready made cloud server with already optimized LAMP stack with Digital Ocean and Linode. This way, any customers wanting something more affordable, we could just deploy them easily

That sounds really cool Mark. But how would that be applied to customers to use Linode or Digital Ocean? A copy of the configurations? A demo to see? Just trying to get an understanding of this considering that I am soon planning on swapping to one of those hosts.

Hi Mark, that might not be a bad idea but there is risk of overloading on customer service. If something doesn't work right, users are more than likely to point to the server which means you will be sorta obligated to help which adds to more work. But if that is not an issue, then it is a good idea.

Hello Josh,

In Linode and Digital Ocean, we could create "images" which is a copy of probably the stock configured LAMP stack. Then, all you need to do is pre-load this image on the respective provider to load that image.

I am actually contacting Siteground to find out why they are denying root access for David's account. If he purchased a VPS, he has all the rights to be able to access the root unless it really isn't a VPS.

Anyway David, is it possible for you to start a new thread if you are interested in this? This thread is getting lengthy because of various input's from different forumers here.

Hello everyone,

EasySocial is very slow. Why? because it uses heavy resources. Those resources are:

1) Stylesheets = "base.min.css" + "style.min.css" + "more.min.css" = 148 KB + 313 KB + 210 KB = 671 KB (It is very heavy for single component)
2) JavaScripts = "easysocial-1.3.13.static.min.js" + "others.." = 1,047 KB + 25 KB = 1,072 KB (its very heavy)
3) Graphics/Fonts - didnt calculated, doesn't matter based above number. In "Graphics" i mean EasySocial media image files/theme images (and not itself user avatar/cover or others ones), which are not compressed.

so EasySocial uses minimum 1,700 KB - and its crazy heavy.

of course, all EasySocial customers users Joomla, and their template on it, also other modules, plugins, let say they use minimum 300 KB, and with EasySocial it becomes 2 MB.

So, what it the way to solve this issue on EasySocial component? My point of view:

1) Dividing "base.min.css" + "style.min.css" + "more.min.css" CSS files, for example Dashboard page dont needs to load all stylesheets, here is "Google Chrome Audit" - http://postimg.org/image/yoonnzzkn/ - you can test yourself about it.
2) Same for Javascript files, i dont know if it possible or not, but try to divide it also. I mean it is bad to load on "Dashboard" page 1 MB Scripts, if that page dont need it.
3) Minifing Graphic images, use for example those online tools - https://tinypng.com/ - https://tinyjpg.com/
For example, compressing this file "joomla_root/media/com_easysocial/images/icons/icons-sprites.png" can save you 50% of that file.


Mark, i have a small question, as i see EasySocial all pages loads those stylesheets: "base.min.css" + "style.min.css" + "more.min.css", is there any other stylesheets on other pages which can be loaded? i'm working on new theme and i want to know if there are any other pages where can be loaded different stylesheets which i dont know (I dont mean EasySocial apps or modules, i mean core theme files.)
So all theme styles are loaded on those 3 stylesheet files, right?

Thanks you very much,
Maksym

Excellent post Maksym! While complex queries are being ran by ES which result in some time delay, the JS/CSS could be adding to that time. Now I'm curious about how this affects browser cache. In other words, theoretically the 1,700 kb of data should be cached in the browser after viewing the page the first time right? Or is there some thing that makes it reloaded each time? If it is cached into the browser, it shouldn't have much effect on the loading time unless pulling the big file from your browser cache some how makes it take a bit longer.

I absolutely agree. ES files are massive and anything over 1MB - 1.5MB asset for any component is crazy. But I do understand that ES is not like any average component and a lot of js is involved. However I guess its okay when these assets are loaded in EasySocial pages but on my site I am using ES Notification Module is all pages and even when the module needs only a very small part of css and js, ES still loads every assets in all pages. It does bloat the pages big time. So splitting the files into 3 or 4 parts and loading only whats needed will help a lot. If it is this size now, its only gonna get bigger and bigger when more features are added to it. I cant imagine what the file size will be in ES version 3.0!

Even if the users can download the file fast in a few seconds, the parsing of javascripts can take really long time in some devices and its worse on mobiles. So this added with the rest will give a slow loading experience to the users for sure.

Josh Lewis wrote:Now I'm curious about how this affects browser cache. In other words, theoretically the 1,700 kb of data should be cached in the browser after viewing the page the first time right? Or is there some thing that makes it reloaded each time?

it depends on many factors - here are excellent article which give you a clue how everything works
http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-http-caching/

Josh Lewis wrote:If it is cached into the browser, it shouldn't have much effect on the loading time unless pulling the big file from your browser cache some how makes it take a bit longer.

just loading (i dont mean downloading) small piece of javascript can slow your site - here is good explanation - http://www.jedi.be/blog/2008/10/10/is-your-jquery-or-javascript-getting-slow-or-bad-performance/


for example, based on this simple audit - http://postimg.org/image/yoonnzzkn/ - if you load only on dashboard the CSS files which that EasySocial page needs, you can save 90% of style-load - so easysocial will load 60 KB instead of 671 KB
i'm sure same can be achieved for javascript files, i dont think that "Dashboard Page" needs to load 1 MB scripts.

when i said "with EasySocial it becomes 2 MB" - here i didnt consider 3-rd party image files, for example if user viewing photogallery page, it can easily become 3-4 MB, and browsers have to paint all this.

i think the only way to make it faster, is in dividing resources, loading only the resources which each easysocial page needs.

same problem has also JomSocial - they use 900 KB resources, and my customers always complain about site speed.

Best Regards,
Maksym

Hello Maksym,

Thanks for the heads up on this. I think the issue that we are talking about here is the "initial page load" (Not inclusive of those JS and CSS) but I must admit that there's definitely something we need to do about with the CSS / JS file size. As we add more and more features, the JS is going to be extremely bloated.

The reason that we split out the css files into multiple files is simply because we need to solve issues with IE9 where there is a limit of the number of selectors allowed.

Mark, does theme all styles are being loaded in those 3 stylesheet files ("base.min.css" + "style.min.css" + "more.min.css")?
are there any EasySocial pages, where ES theme loads any other stylesheets? I mean theme core stylesheets, not "ES Apps" stylesheets or "ES Modules" stylesheets.
So, EasySocial theme on every page loads those 3 stylesheet files, right?

Thank you very much,
Maksym

Hello,

Yep, that's correct. These stylesheets are being loaded on each EasySocial page. It does load other stylesheets as well especially the module stylesheets because there are times where if you are on a non EasySocial page, the stylesheet for the module needs to be loaded.

I fully agree with Joomforest, splitting the js and css would be a great idea, if many non ES pages utilize ES modules like notification or latest members, then i believe the full suite of js & css is not needed for that page.

Secondly if possible, if there can be common js/css for some of the common elements for all stackideas components it would help a lot.

Example, if a site uses Easyblog + Easysocial + Kommento + Easydiscuss.
Now imagine a page using modules which showcases the Top Blogs (EB), Top Discussions(ED), Latest Comments (Kommento), Notifications (ES) & Latest Members (ES), this would lead to loading of multiple js/css (All Jquery / Custom Bootstrap etc.. for each component) and would adversely affect the server load/load times and user experience.

A possible way out would be to have a central framework component (e.g. Stackidea framework) for all common js/css files and then individual components can pull in required js/css from this pooled component. (I'm aware of browser caching but still for the sake of optimisation).

regards

p.s i've no technical knowledge of PHP/Sql etc.. but purely commenting on the base of logic. I might be worng.

Good post Sunny. Indeed that would be ideal to have the notification module to not load everything that the ES component would in terms of JS/CSS. Perhaps it already does this to some degree? Notifications site wide is an important thing which is why I use the notification module on every single page of the site.

Hi Josh, Possibly SI must have implemented for Notifications module.

My Home page has a preview of all whats inside the site
(Top Rated Jreviews modules/ Jreviews search module/ES Login/ES Notifications/ Latest Blogs/ Latest Discussions/ Latest Members/ Easysocial Stream Module/Latest Groups + 3 other custom modules + Adsense)

So the js/css just from Stackideas components is too big for me ( Plus there is template js & css: jquery+bootstrap+jquery UI+Fontawesome)

For the framework component, one other point i would like to submit is that: as Stackideas relies on custom jquery/bootstrap + fonts + Icons.
The common framework component should have an option of not loading jquery/bootstrap/fontawesome/jqueryUI (if the template is allready loading this by default.) Jreviews has this option of not loading jquery & jquery UI if its allready loaded.
Only the js/css for the custom parts should be injected as overrides (?)

I do remember that Mark had once commented in my previous posts somewhere else that common js/css for all SI components is on the drawing board (if possible Mark can update us on this).

Hi all.
I've just run into something very odd with SiteGround also.
phpMyAdmin is recommending that I change some settings to improve MySQL performance. I went into my WHM panel and found most of the functions required to do this were missing. I created a support ticket and got this reply.

Hello ,

Our Cloud servers are provided as Managed solutions. This means that you do not have root level access to the server and some of the functions on the WHM require this level of access. Your account currently has reseller privilleges on the server. If you need to be root on your hosting server, you should consider upgrading your server to one of the Dedicated Server Solutions with root access.

If you need some modifications on the server, like changes to the values in the PHP environment, post a ticket, provide the values that you need and we will help you change them on the server level if they would not come into a conflict with our server setup.

Whilst I need help running and answers to server issues (not being a linux person), I wouldn't expect to have this level of restriction imposed. Also, I've questioned their terminology of a "Cloud VPS" as I would have assumed that being a VPS meant that the entire server was segregated.

Mark... what would you suggest I do. I've been with SiteGround for under a month now, and I am concerned. I know you guys have used them in the past, but I didn't think having a dedicated server (which I cannot afford at the moment) was the only way to get access to all the features of WHM. I will always need help if problems arise from the Linux/LAMP setup, but don't want to be so restricted that if a change to the paramaters of the server are needed (e.g. MySQL, PHP etc) I cannot potentially do them.

Dave

Dave I take it you have access to your site files, but not the server files? "A VPS runs its own copy of an operating system, and customers have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS. For many purposes they are functionally equivalent to a dedicated physical server, and being software defined are able to be much more easily created and configured. They are priced much lower than an equivalent physical server, but as they share the underlying physical hardware with other VPSs, performance may be lower, and may depend on the workload of other instances on the same hardware node." - Wikipedia

Sounds like it's not a real virtual private server. I'm starting to wonder if other hosts will pull the same tactics as your facing with SiteGround.

Hi Josh.
I think you're right. The reply I got when asking them to define what my VPS server is, and why I cannot have the full functionality of WHM to manage aspects of my server (i.e. configuration of PHP and MySQL parameters) received this reply:

No other people are sharing your server's configuration - it is a dedicated solution for your accounts and sites. However, we have custom and proprietory monitoring and security software on your server that allows us to monitor it and react should there be any issues on the server (this is what managed means).

There are managed and unmanaged Cloud servers. Ours are pre-configured, managed ones. If you need root access, we offer it with our Dedicated servers only.

This makes me think that SiteGround are not offering *true* VPS in the sense that effectively you have your own segment of the server, but have no true SuperUser access. This is a bit of a surprise to me as that's not how it was sold to me, and I thought for £93 per month I was getting a true VPS.

Time is ticking for me - I have until the 18th Jan, and now thinking I made a terrible mistake transferring to SiteGround (probably explains why they said take the first month as a package then consider if I want to pay up-front for 6 months).

If anyone has any suggestions on how I can move away from them to something far better, without losing data, I would be really grateful as I now think I've been lured into a non-VPS environment mascarading as a VPS. Even on my old host (eUKHost) I had full WHM capability, but moved because the servers were too slow.

Dave

You should not have to worry about losing data as long as you have access to your main files and mySQL.

Hello Dave,

I am really sorry for the delay of this reply as it is a weekend for us here. I think we should start a new thread to discuss your issues because there's too many opinions / feedbacks on this and I think we're straying off course from David's original issues.

Whilst we are on this topic, this is what I would suggest you guys to consider if you want to have full control over your server / services environment:

1. Do you really need cpanel / whm? While considering that these are good tools to manage your domains / sites, if your site is already heavy, I would think that placing multiple sites on a single server / vps is a high risk because you are not dedicating the entire CPU for your main site.

2. Can you afford the plans at https://www.linode.com/pricing or https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ ? I would say that a good cloud server would cost you an average of $60 - $80 / month. However, these are unmanaged pricing in which you should get your own server admin to manage them for you (or even better, manage it yourself!)

3. I believe what Siteground is offering you guys is a managed service where they determine what is best for you and they will not allow you to gain full access to the server because at the end of the day, if your server is messed up, they would be blamed since it is a managed service. So you need to consider what you are opting and of course, which is more sustainable in the long run.

Try Serverpilot with Vultr or digitalocean, just great !

HI Jan!,

Thanks for sharing this with us. Is this the Serverpilot's official website url https://serverpilot.io/ ?

Thanks again.

Hi Sam,

yes here is the official website, they have many plans (free and paid), currently i use a free plan and just great, to get more feature like logs and analytics and premium support you can take a business account (10$ or 49$).

They use Nginx reverse with apache, with an ssd vps the performance is just great, you will leave siteground certainly like me

https://goo.gl/BpWmo1

Hi Jan!,

Thank you so much so the information. Will definitely give this hosting a try