Loading speed of Forum home page

[altenbach]

Whenever I enter the forum home page after some idle time, it takes 10-20 seconds to load. This seems excessive.

Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me (possible because of higher than average activity ;))?

What could be the problems? Maybe the server has issues collecting all the "custom" information to construct the page?

To test, I tried a few things, e.g. dont display the subscriptions at the bottom. bzzt! Doesn't work! I could not find a way to disable the display of subscriptions, at least one must show! (If I set "Number of Displayed Subscriptions" to zero, it displays all of them instead. :()

[RayFarmer]

I sometime get a delayed response on displaying any page in the forum, especial coming from a link on the dashboard. I just hit F5 (refresh) and it kicks it into life.

Ray Farmer

[tst]

Maybe when you need to log in (because 3 hours had passed since the last time), it takes longer because of the verification process.

[RayFarmer]

No, logging on has nothing to do with it. In fact, the only time I login, is when I clear my IE cache and delete all cookies. Even though my profile has been set not to remember passwords.

Ray

[tst]

Ray, I wasn't refering to explicitly logging in, but just browsing to the site after a some time you weren't here.
Molly said that the users are kept logged in unless they explicitly log out for 3 hours after their last action, so if that time has passed, I presume you need to log in (even if you don't know it), something that wouldn't be needed if that time hasn't passed. This is all assumption.
From what I've seen, it seems that if you don't browse to the site for a certain period of time (I think it's 24 hours), you're not automatically logged in and you have to click log in (without entering your name and pass). I quite like the way this works.

[altenbach]

No, it has nothing to to with logging in. For example, I can go to a forum post directly via a link in the mail notification and it is fast, then I can browse to other posts or my profile page, and it is still fast (I am definitely logged in!). Only if I now click on the main page link NI Discussion Forums, it takes a long time. I just timed it and today it was faster than usual, ~8 seconds. Still too slow. 😉

[Molly K]

altenbach -

The response I have heard from the forum developers on your "slow main page load time" issue is that it is in fact related to how many subscriptions you have.  I know that you experimented with changing how many subscriptions are displayed on your main page and that had no impact, but they say that this could still be impacting the performance of the page load regardless of how many are actually displayed.

They recommend that you keep your subscription list to less than 200.  My recommendation would be to change the majority of your subscriptions to boards instead of threads or messages.  Another suggestion would be to use bookmarks or floats to keep particular threads handy.  And finally, I would recommend that you change your personal subscription defaults to NOT subscribe you to every thread that you post to.

I hope this helps!

Thanks,

[altenbach]

Thanks Molly for confirming my suspicion that it had to do with subscriptions. I now removed all subscriptions and the speed is definitely improved. 🙂

• If I had a way to sort threads according to last activity in the list of my posts, subscriptions would be less important. Ths has been requested elsewhere and should be on top of the to-do list. 🙂
• Maybe we should have an option to auto-expire subscriptions after a defined time interval (1 week, 1 month).
• We should have an option to not show any subscription on the front page. The current minimum is one. Setting it to zero display all messages instead.

Maybe you just need a faster server. It should be able to handle a few altenbachs :D.