ClearFoundation

Hi alll,

You may have noticed that the web site is slow and has now reached the "unacceptable" level. The issue *is* on our radar and we hope to improve the site performance over the next couple of months.

// personal rant

On a related topic, my web browser needs to be restarted a couple of times a day. Bit by bit, it slows to a crawl. I can see why Google released their own web browser -- I can't keep Google Apps open for more than a couple of hours. I might have to go back to using lynx!

Peter Baldwin wrote:
Hi alll,

You may have noticed that the web site is slow and has now reached the "unacceptable" level. The issue *is* on our radar and we hope to improve the site performance over the next couple of months.
Hi,

perhaps time for a new server? maybe this one is an option: comes fully loaded with nice 'must have' specs and at an affordable price

regards,
Ruud./

Thanks for the advertisement Ruud... where do I send your check?

Hi Peter,

Besides the costs for the hardware, I wonder what the specifications are for this web server.
As far as I understand it, the System Requirements focus on the LAN and not so much on the web.

What are the hardware- & bandwidth specification and the known bottle necks for a website like this and are there any limitations to the amount of sites that can be run from 1 server in combination with the amount of on-line users ... ?!?
Or should the focus be on the type of data used in combination with the browser(s) plugins and such ... ?!?

Thanks,

John

That depends on the web site!

Nobody has done an analysis yet, but my gut tells me that the clearfoundation.com bottleneck is the database. A good chunk of the web site (forums, community stuff, some content) runs off of Joomla. Due the nature of this beast, there's a lot of database activity on a page load. Doing a quick check on our test server, I can see that loading the front page of the forums takes 483 (not a typo) database queries. Yikes! Very good hard disk performance and MySQL tuning is the name of the game.

The documentation section, on the other hand, uses Dokuwiki. You could easily build a simple web site using just dokuwiki. No databases involved and it's very lightweight.

Team,

The ClearFoundation website excluding the "forums" have been optimized and you should see a huge improvement. The "forums" will be another story and we hope to make a huge improvement here as well.

Special thanks to Shad Lords!

Best regards,

Michael Proper

The website seems to load well for the last month or so. These forums though.. yeah PLEASE don't let it languish......

Michael,

Any progress on this? Lately, I find myself in the situtation that loading the forum start page consistently fails (times out) 1 or even 2 or 3 times before succeeding. This in spite of the fact that we have recently moved country of residence and now have a much more responsive connection (much lower latency - by a factor of 3 or more and much higer international transfer speeds) than before; when national gateway congestion was an issue.

Thus, I had expected an improving, not a deteriorating connection to the forum. As a matter of fact, on clicking the forum tab, it is the other way around. On any and all of the many other European and North American sites we regularly visit, inclusive of the Clear home page and the forum once you have struggled through the entry point, the expected gains are clearly apparent.

Peter

I find that looking at Firefoxes status bar (bottom left) it seems to hang for ages waiting for translate.googleapis.com. I guess that's the translation widget on the left? Might be interesting to remove that for a day or two and see if things speed up?