What's wrong with DP?! Something went really wrong!

Discussion in 'Support & Feedback' started by genius777, Jul 12, 2012.

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  1. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #21
    Oh, and I'm in agreement about vBulletin's markup. It's *incredibly* bloated and most of the crap in there is unneeded. But my time is also better spent doing other more important thing than rewriting vBulletin's idiotic style to save a few bytes. :)

    In fact, vBulletin's problems run a *lot* deeper than the front-end style. I more or less have given up trying to help their developers fix things that should be common sense. Is it really my responsibility (as nothing more than an end-user) to take my time to literally report hundreds of bugs, and for the most part track them down and supply a fix? I decided no... which is why there aren't many bugs reported from me any longer.

    [​IMG]
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  2. sarahk

    sarahk iTamer Staff

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    #22
    javascript certainly isn't my strong suit but by "adding in" I can speed up certain things. I looked at childNode etc but they didn't want to play on the html I was asking it to work with ... which perhaps proves your point ;)
     
    sarahk, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  3. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #23
    The stupid auto-links inside posts? The annoying sidebar ad that sucks down 64k+ every time it switches images? (hmm... just tested in FF where I don't have the blocks, that seems to be gone) The image that's placed askew in the header overlapping the menu making it useless? The stupid malfing fly-in "did you know" idiocy I could give a flying purple fish about? The crappy social media asshattery that takes a good 16 seconds to load every time you go in? The "adChoices" adverts randomly thrown in to users posts?

    You know, you can't even type the **** word "windows" without it trying to turn it into an advert link to some hosting company? Though at least it no longer seems to auto-pop-up some "adchoices" window crap when you mouse-over it; that was a hefty part of why I wrote the "kill it" css/scripting in the first place.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  4. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #24
    In other words where I ended up with SMF... I hear ya on that. Sad part is it's like EVERY off the shelf system at this point is headed down this road of apathy, ignorance or just plain wishful thinking on the part of the Dev's. I can understand that on a 'for free' project, but it's outright shameful to see on something they expect you to pay money for.

    Which is why of all the systems I have contempt for, my wrath is specially reserved for vBull -- ESPECIALLY after the last major version revision. (though UBB/UBBThreads is a close second, thankfully NOBODY meaningful uses that anymore)
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2012
    deathshadow, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  5. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #25
    What sidebar ad? We don't even *have* a sidebar on this site (nor have we ever).


    I actually did the math, the tiny little corner that overlaps ends up being less than 4% of the button. Certainly never had a usability issue because I wasn't able to click the other 96%. :)

    Which you will never, EVER see if you are a logged in user.

    Click the button to collapse the bar and it will never load the stuff.

    They aren't there if you are logged in, except for a couple sections that are more or less idiotic sections and we would like to annoy people into not using them (places like Politics and Religion)...

    It never did on our end. If you ever saw any sort of mouse over nonsense, it was from something installed on your end.
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  6. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #26
    I'm with you on that... Unfortunately it's not quite as easy as clicking a button to migrate a site like this to a different system (like SMF)... Since we have will over a million lines of code of custom stuff built around the vBulletin framework.

    That being said, I've been working on abstracting all our custom stuff out so it could fairly easily be moved to any platform/framework. And no... not because I have nothing better to do. ;)

    There are most definitely more efficient/faster/better designed platforms than vBulletin... here's one for example running the same code, doing the same thing, on the same servers...

    Check the rendering time, memory and queries needed. lol vBulletin is quite silly...

    [​IMG]
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  7. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #27
    Was there last month when I first came back and ended up making that code. Was position:fixed on the right hand side to stay in the middle. (was overlapping content on my netbook too)

    The rest of yours... Mind you, Opera 12, large font/120dpi user, but:

    Completely obscures the text here on "products" and "what's new"... and seems to prevent clicking on the ENTIRE menu.

    I just turned off all my fixes, and sorry -- bullcookies. (see screencap below)

    which still loads it's **** in the background, and only hides 50% of the width, doesn't change loading jack.

    With my blocks off, I see them in every thread... logged in... can't be a cookie issue, otherwise I couldn't be logged in...

    and no, it's NOT something on my end; Hell, this is a clean OS install as of monday and does it on machines that haven't even been given LAN access here... -- edit -- though I have seen adchoice add adverts to people's pages without asking in both IE and Opera... one of the reasons they're on my *** list.

    Just a quick screencap with all my 'fixes' turned off -- gah, that's useless. (the lack of a max-width and the px metric fonts on EVERYTHING)
    http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/digitalPoint/loggedIn.jpg

    Just for comparison, same thing with my 'fixes' in place.
    http://www.cutcodedown.com/for_others/digitalPoint/loggedInWithFixes.jpg

    Unless there's something wrong with what's supposed to remove those things and Opera... Never really tested other browsers when logged in, since I saw them logged out, assumed they were everywhere.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  8. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #28
    You can log in without cookies... Think most of the issues you see is something mucking your cookies (or not having any would do it too of course).
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  9. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #29
    How exactly would that work given I'm seeing no session ID info being passed in the URL or via .js? Much less that php sessions ARE cookie based, and that's what vBull uses...
     
    deathshadow, Jul 30, 2012 IP
  10. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #30
    Oh, I thought you were talking about something else. You are right... the stuff from the screenshots wouldn't be affected by cookies. But... the issue with the ad overlapping appears to be something you have installed on your browser that is mucking something somehow.

    I just tried it with Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and even Internet Explorer and nothing shows it how you are seeing it.

    A screenshot from Opera:

    [​IMG]

    The social bar *does* still load the social buttons, just not the Twitter feed... Sadly, those aren't going away, it's simply too much traffic that come in from people using them.

    Back to what you were saying before about a page taking 30 seconds to load. Truthfully, I'm not sure how that would even be possible unless you were on a Commodore 64 or something. All static content (images, scripts, CSS, etc.) we have using the appropriate HTTP headers that tells your browser to not even check if the resource was modified (since it never does). So for the most part nothing needs to be reloaded. For me, the entire page renders in about a second, with the only HTTP request of any sort needing to be made is for the page itself (the first line) and then the Google ad. Everything else doesn't even do an HTTP request to see if the resource was modified.

    [​IMG]
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  11. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #31
    Firstload AFTER my 'fixes' and with all the blocks in place is ~15 seconds here... once caching is in place it's more like 7 seconds per page load -- most of that can be blamed on the >1 second for the initial document, >1 second apiece for the scripts to run even when cached, 1 second apiece to fetch the scripts... the overhead of the DNS requests for off-domain elements, etc, etc...

    Not everyone is going to have the magical mythical fiber broadband multi-connect or hit that peak 8 simultaneous request. The index for this site is 58 separate files totalling 350k -- in handshaking ALONE on firstload that could be anywhere from 1.5 to 12 seconds... subpages like this one, and even with caching you could see as much as 8 seconds request overhead. Some of the subpages hit as many as 150 separate files (leaving one asking FOR WHAT?!?) which means an easy 30 seconds or more -- and that's with many of the annoying bits blocked. Turning them back on and letting them through doubles that number easily.

    ... and I'm on the best connect in this area, a 22mbps/1mbps cable connection; I'd hate to see what this does to my neighbors with their 768/384mbps that appears to be limited to 8 simultaneous connects for their whole network.

    It's painful to watch load -- particularly since (using the main index as the example) it's all that crap for a mere 15k of plaintext and no content images/objects.

    ... and let's just say my waterfall isn't that pretty... the first 8 connects sucking down the first 3 seconds before multi's kick in on the various png files, which is fine until it gets to the js where it turns into a train wreck... more than 2/3rds the page load time takes place after the markup is there... and hangs it rendering.

    ... and let's keep in mind that's just bandwidth/connections; we're not even talking render or waiting for all that painful javascript to do it's thing -- especially all the rubbish that waits for onload to fire or is stuck waiting on some other server.

    Oh, and just because social is bringing in traffic, doesn't mean it's bringing in quality visitors... Had that problem at a site I was maintaining for a while; the addition of social networking just resulted in quadrupling the spammer bans and garnering no real useful visitors... Take a look around at all the ten word wonder-posters who seem to just be spamming to get up to where they can post links to see that in action -- though again, a blocker like stopforumspam could really help with that.

    But then, I don't really "get" social media... kind of like i don't "get" HTML 5, I don't "get" frameworks... etc, etc.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  12. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #32
    Yeah to be honest, I'm really not sure what's going on for you. I just made a video where I start on this page, clear the browser cache completely to force every resource to be loaded, go to home page, and then to a forum. The video was not sped up in any way... so even with the cache completely wiped out it's not anywhere remotely close to 30 seconds (or even 5).

    And your Internet connection is even a little faster than mine (I'm 18Mbit down, 1.5Mbit up... servers are not local to me or anything else weird. This is not some sort of crazy super computer either. This computer is nearly 5 years old.

    If I saw anywhere remotely close to the slowness you see, we'd be fixing it... but not sure where the slowness is coming from for you, and without being able to replicate it (with everything enabled and the cache completely wiped out), it's a little hard to troubleshoot on our end...

     
    Last edited: Jan 23, 2013
    digitalpoint, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  13. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #33
    Funny, I've never in my life seen a website load that fast on any machine or connection... Including my own sites which typically weigh in at a piddly 70k in 16 or less files per page.

    But then where I am in west BF New hampshire, ping times of 500ms is the norm regardless of what your connection is... on logic ALONE that says I should see a minimum of 4 seconds handshaking firstload -- and real world more like 8-10 seconds. My neighbors DSL with it's 800 to 1000ms ping would be hell.

    What's your ping time on that? 10ms? that's the only way it could possibly be going that fast! I'm watching that video and my jaw is dropping out of my head -- GOOGLE isn't that fast here. Part of why I hate the new google and am questing for a replacement -- it used to be that fast before they added all the stupid javascripted asshattery like 'search as you type'...
     
    deathshadow, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  14. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #34
    Well, you may want to try out a browser with SPDY support (Chrome and Firefox). Opera has it coming, but it's not there yet. That's going to help you quite a bit on sites that support it or sites that use secondary content from sites that support it (for example all 3 social buttons we use). That will all but eliminate your handshaking bottleneck. But a 500ms ping to *any* site in the same country is pretty crazy too, but I guess you are also being bottlenecked by your ISP.

    Just for sake of seeing exactly where you are bottlenecking, you might want to fire up Chrome and render a page with the Network tab open so you can see timing for each resource.

    I like fast sites just as much as anyone else, but I'm almost thinking maybe some plugin or something in your browser is causing super slowness somehow (try it with all plugins disabled). If some plugin is taking 2 seconds to rewrite to DOM to save you a 1s load time of a secondary script or something, it's not saving you any time in the end.

    I mean as you can see from the video I posted, even with a flushed cache and every option on the site enabled, it's still rendering pages more or less instantly on an old computer (by Internet standards).
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  15. timbonitus

    timbonitus Active Member

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    #35
    DP should not allow service to third world countries for a bit and see what happens. Would be interesting.
     
    timbonitus, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  16. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #36
    Opera has the same functionality in dragonfly, which is where I got the numbers for that "the moment it starts trying to download .js" and found where the .png seems to load fairly quick en-masse... one of the worst offenders is latest.js, which uses that stupid malfing "lets tack a query string onto it so it doesn't cache and has to download every time" on it -- it's taking 3 seconds alone just for that one .js file. The two css.php files (generated CSS is ALWAYS a disaster) are running two seconds APIECE, and don't get me started about how long like.php, oauth.php, the tweet button iframe, the tracking pixels, etc, etc take.

    Which is why blocking the social media crap alone cut the pageload time in half... and the pointless .js (leaving just the minimum functionality) further reduces the problem.

    ...and it's no better in the crippleware known as Chrome. Sorry, there's certain functionality in-built to Opera I can't believe other browsers either don't come with or you have to jump through stupid hoops to even get with "extensions"-- like portrait tabs, flip navigation, etc, etc...

    The point though being, all this could scare away a lot of legitimate posters -- I mean look around the forums; it's now chock full of ten-word wonder spammers and legitimate posters have gone where exactly? Something made people leave -- the above is a hefty part of why I stopped coming...
     
    deathshadow, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  17. Cucumba123

    Cucumba123 Well-Known Member

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    #37
    I second that. Just block them and watch the change.
     
    Cucumba123, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  18. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #38
    Well be that as it may, I'm fairly certain that others are not experiencing the same slowness as you, looking at web logs and Google Analytics page speed data it looks like people are getting the same experience as far as speed as the video I posted show. Have you tried it from a friend's computer by chance? Just seems totally bizarre you are seeing 30s page load times when others are *never* more than about 2 seconds (and that would be for someone in Antartica on a satellite connection). More or less impossible to troubleshoot when it appears rove something specific to you (either ISP or computer).

    Edit... I've just spent a bit doing rendering tests from remote locations/servers, and even tests from places like Germany are coming in under 3 seconds on the slowest possible test (not a single thing cached). And that's downloading every resource needed (including third-party ones), executing all JS/CSS and rendering the page output. Something definitely seems weird/unique with your setup somewhere/somehow.

    What type of speed test are you seeing for *really* far away sites like Australia's government? Even trans-Pacific, It's 2.12s for me...

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jul 31, 2012
    digitalpoint, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  19. deathshadow

    deathshadow Acclaimed Member

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    #39
    Most of my friends are stuck at 768 DSL with higher ping times than mine -- Though it's good for a laugh, I get better ping times to Europe (100ms-ish) and Vancouver (150ms-ish) - thousands of miles away, than I do to Boston (500ms+) or even the 'legendary' high speed chicagoland area (650ms+). It's like I'm on the wrong side of the pipe or something. (even more of a laugh, I see 400ms ping times to seattle, which... well, how far is that from Vancouver again?)... thankfully most MMO's and services like netflix/hulu I only see 100ms ping time...

    Well, lemme show ya this:
    
Pinging crystalmethod.digitalpoint.com [216.9.35.56] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.9.35.56: bytes=32 time=500ms TTL=46
Reply from 216.9.35.56: bytes=32 time=501ms TTL=46
Reply from 216.9.35.56: bytes=32 time=502ms TTL=46
Reply from 216.9.35.56: bytes=32 time=499ms TTL=46

Ping statistics for 216.9.35.56:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 499ms, Maximum = 502ms, Average = 500ms
    Code (markup):
    First load with 58 files and you find that hard to believe?!? Sorry, but duh? You cannot rely on everyone having magical ping times of less than 200ms -- that just flat out does not exist everywhere to everyone and is why having more than ~16 separate files on a page is a steaming pile! Try a phone some time with it's 1 second+ ping times.

    Keyword -- SERVERS. In other words sitting on top of big fat pipes that shove it into them hard and fast. (figured we needed some innuendo given what a lady-friend of mine thought reading the post title over my shoulder -- thanks :D ).

    I've lived a lot of places that see similar issues -- not everybody lives atop the big fat pipes; I remember my last visit to florida being shocked at the differences; It's one of the key factors in development that people sitting in the nice fast city connections lose sight of; If it's this bad for me 20 miles from the taxachussetts border on a 22mbps connect, how's it going to be for the 60%+ of the nation for whom 768kbps DSL is the fastest broadband, or the folks in places like northern NH, western ME, the Dakota's... where unless you're willing to drop $120/mo on satellite (that is effectively neutered to shotgun speeds due to LoS issues) the best you'll get is 33.6 dialup?

    6 seconds here -- so faster than DP with all the extra stuff. Of course that steaming pile of a website was built with YUI. It appears to do the smart thing and load it's CSS and scripts BEFORE the images -- something DP fails to do here, which means despite the rather long (2 second plus) load times and handshake times, they overlap better resulting in a faster page load despite being about 20 more handshakes. The complete lack of the stupid social media scripts, caching chicanery like appending queries to the CSS links, etc, etc... results in it loading faster for me than DP does.

    australia.gov.au isn't set up to respond to ping, but if I pull up the waterfall I'm seeing 320ms as the average response time -- compared again to DP's 540ms.

    Just because you're testing off fat pipes or happen to be sitting on one, doesn't mean the rest of us are. That's WHY code bloat, scripting for nothing, and dozens if not over 100 files in some cases can reduce many sites to being effectively useless for many users -- PARTICULARLY if you spread it across domains.

    that's somewhere I disagree with the "experts" at google on -- their 'page speed' analysis thing seems to not really rate on speed, but on how many goofy stupid tricks you use on a site to build it... since they give the same rating to a 1 megabyte site built from a hundred separate files as it does to my 72k (or less) pages built with 16 files or less... If that doesn't cry bullshit on their "page speed" I don't know what does. You know, a page built from less than eight files and they ding you 20% for not using a CDN? Herpaderp.

    I swear 'spdy', CDN's, whitespace compression -- it's all just a bunch of BS used to cover up ineptitude.
     
    deathshadow, Jul 31, 2012 IP
  20. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #40
    Well, SPDY and CDNs (when configured properly) are actually pretty amazing. Certainly a CDN in itself doesn't mean it's configured properly, nor does it mean you can't do the same thing with your own servers. I'd think you could appreciate what they could do for you since they *really* help with high latency connections by more or less eliminating the need to even do a handshake (among other things). Whitespace compression... not really going to change much these days.

    Obviously using them isn't a substitute for other things, but there's certainly no reason to ignore them. Would be like a racecar driver saying, "You know, the engine runs fine screw aerodynamics, we don't need or want it... that's for sissies and just a bunch." :)

    Here's something interesting... You are seeing 500ms ping times from your IP to our server, but SSHing into the same server and pinging your IP... we see 100ms ping times in that direction...

    PING 74.xx.xxx.205 (74.xx.xxx.205) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 74.xx.xxx.205: icmp_req=1 ttl=42 time=101 ms
64 bytes from 74.xx.xxx.205: icmp_req=2 ttl=42 time=100 ms
64 bytes from 74.xx.xxx.205: icmp_req=3 ttl=42 time=102 ms
64 bytes from 74.xx.xxx.205: icmp_req=4 ttl=42 time=103 ms
64 bytes from 74.xx.xxx.205: icmp_req=5 ttl=42 time=103 ms
    Code (markup):
    Not sure why a ping between the same two IPs would be 5x worse in one direction than the other. If nothing else, I think we can agree your ISP has some serious issues. :)
     
    digitalpoint, Jul 31, 2012 IP
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