You should set the environment mode for EasySocial to be on "Static" if you are on "Optimized" or "Development"

Hi Mark,

That is not a js/css issue. What is those POST requests in public mode? What they POSTS before logged in. Also the same logged in mode. There are many POST requests on everwhere. These POST requests kills all performance. All problem is about those POST requestes (some of them takes 3.5-4 seconds) You can see onload time (8,49 seconds) at the bottom on the right - 2.Screenshot

Most of my users lives after 2-3 mins from my web site because of slownes, i am really sad because of this

Hello gokhan,

I am sorry but I strongly disagree with you here but you are wrong about this. These are all AJAX calls and it DOES NOT affect page performance in ANY WAY at all. For instance, if you submit a link, it is done via AJAX calls and the php end will crawl the URL to fetch contents on the site. This does not affect any performance related in any way because POST requests are performed on specific actions that you need to perform and not the general display of items.

Alright,

Can you have a look at with Firebug or somethin to mysite.com/sosyalpano without logged in also log in please with credientials on site details. Maybe you can tell me what is the problem

Not sure what you want me to look at here? Do you mean the first request that is made to the site takes about 3s ? Try to view now with protostar template

Ahahah, You say i should use Protostar on my web site to accelerate loading time, Jooking apart, there is a speed problem with dasboard. And that is not about my template, because there is a big difference between dasboard and other pages on my web site. Any way, I will copy my website to a test subdomain after that you can check and investigate it. Since 4 days we have focused on this issue. There is at least 3-4 seconds loading issue

We tried all known cached systems, nothing changed. Also something prevent us to use varnish cache with easysocial. Do you have any suggestion for this.
Actualy joomla itself doesnt support varnish (there are many problems-sessions etc). But when we turned on default varnish, page load time 0.7-0.9 ms. It was perfect...

Hello,

Hm, no I am not asking you to use "protostar" but what I am seeing is that, you can see the noticeable difference when you use protostar so something is not right with the template or some modules that you have enabled.

Hi Mark,

After 10 days, more then 50 hours, and lots of money, we tried all ways to solve speed issue, but we couldnt again. So here is investigation results

1- Speed problem only with dasboard and profil pages

2- There is a serious differencies before login in and after login with dasboard page. There is no extra extention or module except easysocial with both dasboard and profil. Here what they are

*** Before login : my theme+easysocial+ES Toolbar + Groups module
*** After login : my theme+eaysocial+ ES Toolbar+ Groups module

3-There is no speed problem for other pages i have (with the same theme), they are seriously fast!

I arranged an exact coppy of my web site for you. Details on site details are.

Only posting to be notified of future replies to this discussion. BTW, is there a better way to efficiently "watch/monitor" individual discussions?

Hello gokhan,

You are using an outdated version. Can you update to the latest version before I start running those tests. We have made some huge performance tuning on 1.2.9 I believe

Hi Mark,

i Updated to 1.2.10, nothing changed. Still is too slow when logged in, but its ok before login

Only posting to be notified of future replies to this discussion. BTW, is there a better way to efficiently "watch/monitor" individual discussions? [2]

Hello, i'm curious to hear any knews regarding speed

Hello,

I have run some debug on the site and realized that Cometchat adds about 600 ms - 1s (It depends) as the load time for the php script itself was about 3.x seconds. After removing the codes from your template's index.php file, your site now loads about 2s . I am also suspecting that your template Rockettheme is also doing something at the back end. Probably some kind of compiling going on? If I used protostar with EasySocial, the site loads about 1.5 - 1.6s

I should have thought of mentioning that Mark, I had cometchat installed and switched it off because of the speed. I'm using purity 3 and aside form the cache issues mentioned in another thread it appears the only thing slowing my site down is a few bits to do with the template.

I'm still trying to replicate my 0.46s page load I'll jump to the other thread to say how ive got on.

Thanks for sharing Jason. Also, you guys need to understand that the load in EasySocial won't be any lesser than 500ms, unless you don't have any stream at all. Imagine this, you have all the bells and whistles of what Facebook offers and if you want to hit such low load times, it's close to impossible. Why? This is the benchmark that I have tested locally,

1. Without any component / module loaded on the page - 200 - 300ms

2. With EasySocial (With about 20 stream items) - 800ms - 1s

You guys also need to understand that EasySocial is not just an average article extension that just spills out information on the page. It has tons and tons of features in it including ACLs and Permissions. These 2 features are most likely taking up some of the loading time because there's a lot of checking needs to be done. For instance:

1. User is allowed to view stream?
2. User is allowed to delete stream?
3. User is allowed to use application?
4. User is allowed to like on the stream?
5. User is allowed to comment on the stream?
6. User is allowed to repost on the stream?

The above is just a small example of queries that needs to be executed on the site unlike a normal article extension where you don't really have so much queries involved.

Of course, this doesn't mean that we'll leave the load to be around > 1s. We're doing everything we can to make it render below 1s. Probably between the 800ms - 900ms range but this is tricky because there's so many template clubs and modules everywhere that does everything.

By the sounds of it Mark I need to be happy with what I'm getting and stop trying to make a site thats response time is verging on being precognitive

thanks for that useful info i wont kick my self so much now when the site loads in 1 or 2 seconds

To make a site fast is it about having the homepage with virtually nothing on it? I had the dashboard set as the homepage which slowed everything down so created a simple page that loads first, is this the correct way or am I missing how the site actually works/loads.

thanks

Hello Jason,

If you have sufficient budgets to implement tons of different caching, network caching, disk caching then we could get really decent results but the problem is really about the costings. You cannot compare your site with reputable social networks like Facebook / Twitter etc as they have a custom MySQL server and they have tuned their webserver to be a performance monster. Most hosting provider does optimize their webserver / sql but it can only sustain to a certain extend.

If you have decent amount of budget, go for a dedicated server with SSD. You'll definitely notice huge performance leaps. VPS / Shared hosting is only capable of so much Imagine if you are on a shared hosting of 2.4Ghz cpu with about 300 different customer sites on it

Only posting to be notified of future replies to this discussion. BTW, is there a better way to efficiently "watch/monitor" individual discussions? [3]

Hello, Thanks Mark

I hear what your saying, I realize it would be possible to dig an underground tunnel with a spoon but not within a set time frame or before the spoon breaks.

I guess all of those currently on a tight budget are just trying to make the best of what they have currently in the hope that when more funding arrives to expand resources the transition is quite smooth, or at least thats my point of view.

Thats why I'm currently working on getting things running as best i can so that hopefully when i start adding lots of content everything runs as well as possible within the available framework.

I tend not to think along the lines of comparing with sites like face book as they are in a better place technically and financially, that been said such successful sites are useful points of reference & I think it would be foolish to not draw at least some inspiration from such giants.

All any of us on a tight budget can do is tune what we have as much as possible and remain realistic as to what can be achieved with the hosting services we have at our disposal.

I suppose the way I see it is, if I can get my site fully functional and relatively fast on what I have now any future improvement will be fairly easy to implement by just throwing money at upgrading hosting, instead of just upgrading the hosting and wondering why its not as fast as I would like because i haven't took the time to iron out any issues using the tools available to analyze the performance of a site, like firebug, yslow, gtmetrix, seo checkers an what not.

thanks for your advice Mark helpful as always!

Very interesting thread!

I have a power decicated server with 8 Core CPU + 32GB Ram, etc, cpu usage 1.-3% ram 5-10% with optimum settings, memcached, nginx, xcache etc... Unless increase css-Js declarations, speed up post-gets requests or something else... Really not sure how to speed up anymore... The 1. thing my users says its awasome but too slow.

@ Horst Fuchs

Why "Very interesting thread!"

Is your site fast? Then let us to know, how you achived?

@ Horst Fuchs

Ahh i think you have the same problem

Hello gokhan,

If you have 8 core cpus, then something is definitely not right with your server setup and you need to start looking at hiring someone that knows about server optimization. Because when I was checking your site earlier, even without EasySocial loading on the page at all, your page load from the web server to the browser itself already took 1s

P/S: If you are on a VPS, you don't get to use them all and you are pretty much stuck to almost what a shared hosting has if your vps provider ever oversells on their VPS.

I have the same issues - and the same feedback from my users...ES is a great product and I really like the support of the team!

My biggest issue is that I migrated from another social component....

@Mark: please do not understand my previous post as criticism! I really appreciate ES, EB and the work of your team! I also opened a ticket at my hosting providers Service Desk to have a closer look at the servers performance!

I will keep you informed!

Thanks

Horst

gokhan,

Can you check the speed of the site now? I think I may have found the culprit. Seems to reduce about 600ms . By the way, do you have Skype? It's easier to collaborate on Skype

Also, if this server is owned by you, can you provide us with the root access? I want to take a look at your current webserver / database setup.

Sure, i would be happy i added my skype on details area

Hi Guys,

I have produced a survey of speed and performance measurements of sites running Stackideas products on various hosting environments.

http://stackideas.com/forums/want-to-boost-your-joomla-website-s-speed

This is very relevant to everyone following this thread, so run the test and see how your site compares to others with similar set-ups.

Mark.

Hi Mark,

There seems to be an error answering the question for the provider. It's currently not possible to use only the field "others".

Please check...

Horst Fuchs wrote:

Hi Mark,

There seems to be an error answering the question for the provider. It's currently not possible to use only the field "others".

Please check...

Sorry about that, all fixed, so please try again now

Okay guys, the team has massively ran lots and lots of testing for the entire week regarding this optimization issues and this is our findings:

1. There is a couple of sql queries that could be improvised. We have tested several of them and optimized them as well. We saved somewhere between 200ms - 300ms for this.

2. We have also noticed that the theme library was trying to perform file checks that wasn't necessary so it added an extra hit on the files (which doesn't hurt much if your hosting provider is on SSD).

3. Reduced unnecessary loading of files on the library to gain about 30ms - 50ms of loading time.

4. This is crucial, we have also noticed that these plugins are hogging up the delivery time (if your page has lots of html code and EasySocial's dom structure is also larger than usual because of the features that it offers).

- JFBCSystem (Tested this on my local machine with Gokhan's live data), adds an additional of 300ms - 700ms (varies)

- K2 System (Tested this on my local machine with Gokhan's live data), adds an additional of 300ms - 500ms (varies)

- CDN For Joomla (Tested this on my local machine with Gokhan's live data), adds an additional of 200 - 400ms (varies)

- jQuery Easy (Tested this on my local machine with Gokhan's live data), adds an additional of 800ms - 1s (varies)


The above mentioned loading time does seem to happen only when it is on EasySocial pages because the DOM structure in HTML is not just a simple article. It's a little more complex than usual considering the amount of features that you have on your site. I believe, what these plugins are trying to do is to actually perform search / replace operations on the entire output of the Joomla site and this is where the bottleneck is. With more data to search, these searching algorithms might cause bottlenecks on the site.

Now, this also raises up the question, why is only EasySocial's page slow and not my articles? The answer is simple, EasySocial's HTML structure is a little more complex than a normal article. In a normal article, you really only have paragraphs and texts but some of you who have a fairly complex html structure would notice the same loading issues.

Also, we did thought about rendering the stream via AJAX so that your initial page load would gain about 700 - 800ms. What are your thoughts on this? We could make this optional so that you get to choose if you want it rendered via AJAX (ala Facebook style) or want an instant result on the stream. When rendering over AJAX, the difference is that the stream does not appear immediately.

I believe, what these plugins are trying to do is to actually perform search / replace operations on the entire output of the Joomla site and this is where the bottleneck is. With more data to search, these searching algorithms might cause bottlenecks on the site.

1) A vibrant and feature-rich social platform is key for the future of most Joomla-based sites on desktop and now mobile platforms. Therefore, it is important for the success of our Joomla-based sites that the best social platform is not hindered or hampered because of the customer-driven feature/performance trade-off as we've asked for: features, features, features Maybe there's a way to make it work?

What if ES established a new HTML5-based custom element (or other implementation of this idea) that indicated to all Joomla extensions/plugins/modules that the following code is NOT applicable to any search/replace algorithm. Certainly that single check would save time and could be built into whatever parser or regular expression tool is being used.

Could any variation of this idea work?

2) Are you aware of any social platforms that use AJAX to render the stream so we could take a look and see what the user experience is like?

Thanks for the update, Mark. I've been tracking this issue to know what you guys might discover on these particular pages of EasySocial. I'm guessing they are the most visited pages and can thus effect user experience.

I set up a test site I'm building with EasySocial for this summer and I'm starting with a super clean install stripped down to a couple users, no content, on a no-framework template from Joostrap (w/ the fitting name of "Cleanliness") and uninstalling every stock component and plugin I don't need. However, for the time being, I'm on Siteground shared hosting so it doesn't have APC or nginx, only Varnish. I may upgrade later to Cloud hosting with these modules. My benchmark load times with this install are pretty dang good, even on dashboard and profile pages but, I imagine, as content and my users tables are added it will begin to slow down a bit so I will keep monitoring as I add to EasySocial and Joomla to see what creates the biggest hit.

With this setup, dashboard and profile and group pages are only about 200-400ms behind other pages. My concern is primarily with the waiting time portion of page load time, or the time it takes for the server to respond in sending data -- not so much the onload time. To me, wait time on the server is the most important metric for user experience because even if it takes a few more 100ms to load everything on the page, the user has visual confirmation that the page is loaded by appearing data and can begin to process what they are ready to view. The hit on UX is when there is nothing is happening on screen. That is when the user begins to become impatient and won't spend as much time on the site. I believe that right around 500ms to data population from server is the minimum competitive standard. My stripped down set up achieves that on all pages except dashboard, profile and group pages but they are not far behind, about 200-400ms, sometimes only 100ms. I'll keep tabs as stress is added, however. And again, I'm only on shared hosting right now.

Mark wrote:Also, we did thought about rendering the stream via AJAX so that your initial page load would gain about 700 - 800ms. What are your thoughts on this? We could make this optional so that you get to choose if you want it rendered via AJAX (ala Facebook style) or want an instant result on the stream. When rendering over AJAX, the difference is that the stream does not appear immediately.

I would be interested to try the stream with AJAX loading because that would cut down on server response time. An option to use AJAX for the stream would be a good idea to start and get the feel for what we like better.

I want to add that StackIdeas team is offering a great product and service and are way ahead of the curve in the CMS world with EasySocial. The amount of features/options and aesthetics in this product coupled now with the drive to see it's performance at the same level is impressive. I'm confident the team will resolve all issues in regards to performance.

Hello Eileen,

Thanks for the input on this. Yes, we did thought about adding some hacks on those "plugins" but come to think of it, what's the point of doing that when the primary purpose of these plugins is to say for instance, replace urls to cdn urls. It kinda defeats the purpose these plugins were installed in the first place

John,

Thank you so much for helping us with the tests and yes, we've tested this internally where we generate a maximum of 25 stream items per page load and at max, we only hit about 1.2s - 1.5s which is considerably very good because we're dealing with streams and stuffs like are known to take up lots of resources.

We'll try to introduce the new settings for stream to be rendered via ajax and will monitor the progress on this.

Subscribed.

@Mark, I see the point that if ES provided a hack for various "plugins" it could be detrimental to the primary purpose of those plugins, not to mention the fact that it would be a never-ending job to write and maintain But if the DOM size is really an issue maybe there's a way not to actually hack plugins from other 3rd party's but rather simply supply a markup or tag and leave it to the "plugin" to take advantage of the opportunity to optimize its work. For example, an ES custom tag could identify a DOM block without urls that could safely be ignored by any plugin searching for urls. A cdn plugin that was "ES performance tuned" by ignoring that code could then advertise itself as such and could market the fact that it shaves, on average, xxx ms over competitive plugins because it's "ES-aware".

Hello Eileen,

I would rather think that the job should actually be done by mod_pagespeed rather than the plugins. What pagespeed could offer, is to replace urls, compress images, compress html codes and last but not least, cache the contents.

With page speed, all these actions only occurs once and it's later cached by pagespeed so you don't really need to use any plugins at all :P

Thank you Mark! I have to say that's the difference between active listening and passive forum engagement. You guys even find the questions when the customer doesn't know enough to ask

I've taken a look and seen that I'm able to enable Google's mod_pagespeed on my site's server and I'm looking forward to learning how to leverage it for my site!

Mark, I am a huge fan of AJAX and am very supportive of using it wherever possible, so +1 for AJAX loading stream!

You are most welcome Eileen Yes, we'll most likely add an ajax-ed 'stream' in 1.3

Sweet, I absolutely love AJAX it makes for a much better experience, best thing to happen to the internet imo :-)

Thanks Jannik

Subscribed

Any one have experience with LiteSpeed WebServer? would this have any impact on Joomla/ES speed?

Hm, to be honest I have never tried litespeed before because it's a little pricey and I don't think there's much hosting providers that utilizes litespeed . However, based on their benchmarks here, http://www.litespeedtech.com/products/litespeed-web-server/benchmarks/small-static-file , it does seem to have a pretty solid speed!

I also agree that an ajax stream option should exist. Ideally it could not only work on the dashboard, but also on the profile.

Noted

any update on this?

This thread has been all about the web servers so not sure what sort of updates are you looking for?

any further streamlining of ES, etc...

e.g.: "We'll try to introduce the new settings for stream to be rendered via ajax and will monitor the progress on this."

so you do recommend PageSpeed if it is available on the server?

I know that SiteGround offers it on their solutions.

cheers

Andrew, I just added PageSpeed and I definitely recommend it. Tuning it right can be a bit of a challenge, but once you do it, it certainly is fantastic.

Yep, as Jannik pointed out, pagespeed is the way to go. It doesn't perform any string replacements unlike the compressor plugins on a Joomla site.

Jannik, I have setup PageSpeed. It seems like there is certainly a difference. What about enabling the CDN functions on EasySocial and image storage on Amazon?

95% of our user base is in The Netherlands though... so will CDN really improve our site speed and performance?

Did some testing here.
For me it looks like it comes down to my server choice.
Shared Server = about 4 seconds.
VPS = about 2 seconds
Dedicated server = less than 1 second.
Hope that helps you guys.

Hi Jthm0138,

What were the specs on the different hosting options? e.g. Shared, VPS and Dedicated?

Thanks,


Andrew

Andrew Gous wrote:

Jannik, I have setup PageSpeed. It seems like there is certainly a difference. What about enabling the CDN functions on EasySocial and image storage on Amazon?

95% of our user base is in The Netherlands though... so will CDN really improve our site speed and performance?

Yes, you definitely can use it with CDN, however, you must add a couple of lines to your .htaccess or nginx.conf (depending whether you run Apache or Nginx).

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/domains

Also, yes, it definitely will improve things in The Netherlands, as long as the CDN has servers in Europe. I am using CacheFly, and it shaved 2-3 seconds off the load time in Amsterdam (my main server is located in New York)

No idea what the specs are for the shared server. I do know that a reverse IP lookup tells me there ~140 other websites hosted on that server.
The VPS was 1/8th of 2.53Ghz Xeon Quad core with 1 gig of ram.
The dedicated server was a 2.53Ghz Xeon Quad core with 4 gig of ram.
And for benchmarking purposes, my hosting company has also agreed to copy my site to a Dual Processor, 2.6Ghz Octo-core with 128 gig of ram, and cloud sync technology. It will be a few days before they have it setup, I will let you know how it goes. But at a cost of $825 a month, that is a server I will not be able to afford for quite awhile.

Thanks for sharing this

Jthm0138 wrote:

No idea what the specs are for the shared server. I do know that a reverse IP lookup tells me there ~140 other websites hosted on that server.

A reverse IP is just matching domain associations with an IP address even if it says "websites." So a single site might have multiple domains known as "pointer" or "parked" domain but is actually not a unique website. A reverse IP lookup would count each parked domain as a unique website - when it isn't. On the flip side of that equation, a server can have multiple IP addresses and most of the popular webhosts practice what is called overselling. In other words, they will put way more virtual hosts than should be on any given server in relation to its capabilities. Often is it thousands on a single server. None of them would admit to that of course but that is the webhosting game in a nutshell. So they may in fact have 140 actual virtual hosts (web sites) dedicated to that IP but who knows how many more on other IPs for that server? And even if it is 140 now, their goal is to oversell any given server. This is how ALL of the hosts that sell $<25/mo hosting stay in business. Otherwise the math does not add up. This is also one of the reasons why you may be working with a webhost for a long time and they have been providing great service and almost instantly after they were acquired by a larger hosting company, they started sucking big time. The big companies (and many of the smaller ones) are focused upon sales and marketing first, quality and service are at best afterthoughts despite anything they tell you. They oversell the servers and under-staff to maximize profits. I remember being astounded actually, finally getting on the phone with a host when one of their servers was hosed, and finally getting the guy to admit that he was the only staff member on duty. This for a company with tens of thousands of customers. He was the only guy supporting all of them for his 8 hour shift. 99.9% uptime, guarantee this, guarantee that yada yada...

I am aware of all of this, hence why I used the " ~ " to indicate 'roughly'.
But, thank you for putting it into a better description than I could, I am sure this will help many people in understanding what is going on.
My plan is to team up with 8-10 other webmasters and get an entry level dedicated server that we then share, and then upgrade as we need. Just have to start hunting down reliable people to share it with.