It just took FORTY SECONDS to refresh the BMG front page. This is at 11:25a on a Saturday morning — surely not prime time. Notice that this is reload — it doesn’t include whatever is already in my browser cache.
I’m nearly certain, by watching the messages fly by in the status bar, that the page load is being slowed by accesses to the facebook, google, and twitter services. However meritorious their utility is, this kind of performance will destroy the BMG audience. Few but the most ardent readers are willing to wait nearly a minute for the FRONT PAGE of a site to load.
I don’t want to be a curmudgeon or crank, I’m happy to help in any way I can. My point in writing this is to emphasize that this is a very real problem and we need to solve it.
…that clicking on a comment will not jump directly to that comment, but rather only load the diary page. That’s especially inconvenient on one particular currently active post that runs more than 100 comments. As for social media, if you really want to share something you can always copy and paste the URL into a new post on that site, which is what I generally do anyway, so the direct pluggins and applications aren’t necessary.
and it will jump to the comment. Now *that* is an issue, because sometimes it takes more than a few moments, but a minor one (you can always jump to the comments yourself) and not uncommon on any comment platform (disquis, livefyre, home brew ones, etc.).
Also, bear in mind that the longer the stream of comments, the longer it may take for the browser to jump you to the right comment. If it’s a 100+ comment thread… issues are almost to be expected. The only real way around them is to move to a more robust comment platform like dailykos’s, where every comment is minimized at default (so no body text is shown unless you click on it), but the development costs for such a thing would be substantial. BMG would have to do a real kickstarter-type effort to get something like that.
Personally, I think we should just all realize that BMG — while successful — is still a small website in the internet grand scheme of things and probably runs at a loss as is. The editors have done a lot to make it fairly robust and to keep it independent, especially when the former platform put BMG at risk and wasn’t being further developed.
There are really no great solutions, just best-we-can-dos. Though, I think the BMG community should consider something like a Kickstarter campaign in the future, either for BMG alone or (better yet) in conjunction with other progressive blogs to create a new universal platform that’s truly robust and open-sourced.
I’ve noticed that the page content arrives and paints very quickly, it’s the right sidebar that takes so long. The CSS, therefore, paints the page essentially without the sidebar. I then get in a race between my scrolling down and the right sidebar content arriving. Typically, I get in the neighborhood and start reading. Then the sidebar loads, the CSS repaints the whole page into a narrower element, and I have to scroll lots further to find where I was. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure that my scrolling overrides the page’s attempt to automagically move to the comment I clicked, and so I end up lost.
I find the thrashing about more disruptive than just going to another site (in another window) until the page finishes rendering.
Like many wordpress sites, with widgets aplenty, BMG’s loadtime isn’t perfect…. but 6 seconds is a very reasonable time to wait, and I have crappy comcast on a wifi signal.
If you’re waiting 40+ seconds, I think this is on your end. Or, at worst, there was some server issue or something at the exact moment you had your problem… but rest assured, there is nothing on BMG’s site that should inherently cause anyone to have a 40 second front-page load time.
Not on my end. I tried at work, and it’s just as slow there. It takes much, much longer than it did six months ago, at both places. I never see six-second loads. Also Comcast/wifi at home; wired ethernet at work. I have Facebook and Twitter blocked, so what I see is google taking a while to load, but I don’t see that until I’ve already waited a while.
Too much flair; it blocks the functional stuff.
I have a high-speed RCN connection, a fast Windows 7 machine, I see no similar delays with other websites.
According to Firebug, the load time for the IRS thread (http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/2013/05/the-irs-scandal-and-the-false-hope-of-tea-party-revival/#comment-317830) was 30.32 sec from request start for the DOM content load, and 30.84 sec overall. That’s the real cause of the delay, not much can happen until the DOM content is loaded.
One call, to the “count.json” in the twitter API (http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http%3A%2F%2Fvps28478.inmotionhosting.com%2F%7Ebluema24%2F2013%2F05%2Fthe-irs-scandal-and-the-false-hope-of-tea-party-revival%2F&callback=twttr.receiveCount) is still hanging. Apparently the page loaded without it.
This is almost surely a wordpress issue, there is little that can happen on my end to cause the extended (30+ sec) delay on that initial request. I’m guess that your 6 second load time was, in fact, something specific to your end — maybe the page stayed in your browser cache, or something like that. Try clearing your cache and reloading. If you get the same 6 second load time, that’s worth understanding more about.
Though it was perfectly usable in 6. All on Chrome so far.
I opened up Internet Explorer. 11 seconds. I practically never use IE, so doubted I had it cached.
Cleared the cache on IE, did it in 9 seconds. Pretty much confirmed my thoughts on it in the first place.
Pretty much all of these loads were usable in almost half the time — ie you could at least browse the first story or two and see what posts were recommended.
I’m using Win8 with a core i5 ivy bridge, 8 gigs of RAM. It’s not a bad rig, but nothing special. I really, really don’t think it’s on BMG’s end, not a 30 second load at least.
It wouldn’t make sense that I could load it so much faster than you if it were. I’d say maybe it’s win8 that’s a help, but honestly, my win7 loaded things just as quick if not quicker and was a very poorly spec’ed machine.
“My old win7 machine loaded things just as quick if not quicker” in that last sentence.
Your ping times are good (22ms)
and it looks like you are hosted at Rackspace and domain services by godaddy
WordPress uses MySql for it’s database – I’m wondering if it needs to be optimized ?