Is there an objective way to determine how fast my shared server is? I use superb.net and I have been loading my site with firefox and firefox tells me that the homepage took 50 seconds to load ! ? Does this mean I have a dog of a server and hosting company? Tom
Host bashing is fun. However, there are many variables to consider in how your pages are made too besides the obvious pitfalls of shared hosting. Can you be more specific or maybe provide a link to see if the problem exists for others?
Tom, fast is really relative. There are several factors that are going to determine how fast your web pages are delivered, and along the way there are literally thousands of factors that will play a role in performance. Everything from the speed of your computer's processor to open/running processes, as well as the connection speed both internally and externally are going to have an affect on performance. Your server could be the fastest in the world, and so too could its connection to the internet, but depending where you are, ie., what network your computer is physically located and what networks in between are traversed from your server to you, things could certainly be slow. Your best bet for determining performance is to look at both the routes from point A to point B on various networks, along with good end to end pings. I would suggest doing this from a number of route servers and or looking glass. I typically look at network performance via France/Europe, US - (LA, NYC, Chicago), and whatever else makes sense at the time. Here: http://www.netdigix.com/servers.html Or visit http://infopages.mia.net and look through the "Tools" section on that page. There are a number of traceroute/ping tools as well as links to looking glass which will let you traceroute/ping directly from routers on our network to your server. Ultimately again, I like to remind people that speed on the internet is completely relative. I would really look at the routing matrix and route to various popular networks/host on the internet when attempting to define if a host is a "dog" or not. You'd be surprised how many people learn too late that it is their own home cable modem that holds the key to the slow down. Good luck.
He pm'd me and we did just as you suggest. He's doing some server side tests now. The problem seems at the server from what we have seen.
I think the problem is in the call to external images and content and scripts. I notice quite a bit of the site is being pulled in from other sources not local to the server. All that external site feed and news feed, as well as content feeds are probably the cause of the slow loading time. The other area of potential slowdown are in the large sized css scripts. I would try shrinking them, combining them, or compressing them. I see about 30ms to that server from my network. I could be wrong about the server itself, as I have no idea what you are using, but the network the server is on does not look to be congested. I'd pay more attention to potential problems surrounding the sites content and css scripts than the server at this point.
The techs when contacted restarted a service which they only identified as a service and the page is pretty crisp and fast loading now. But as you say, the more external sites ya depend on, the more likely you can have page load issues.
Yeah, it does seem faster now... Probably some run away process. Would be interesting to know what that "service" was.