Some threads are almost unusable slow to load in browser

[sorin]

I have had this problem for a long time now: when I am loogged-in, some threads are almost unusable slow to load in browser - it takes many minutes to load such a page, many times they just time out and I give up posting in such threads.
While if I log out, they load very fast.

This seems to be the case only with the threads that contain lots of images/sgfs.

Has anyone else seen this problem before? Any idea how to fix this?

I see the same problem both in Chrome and IE - I only tried this on Windows.

[Joaz Banbeck]

[admin]

...While if I log out, they load very fast...

How many posts per page are you loading? This site works best when that is set to ten.
To change that

1) go to the 'user control panel' ( in the upper right )
2) On the left side, choose 'board preferences'
3) From that list, choose 'edit display options'
4) In the middle bottom, the last entry will be 'posts per page'. Edit that.

We don't know about any server problems, though we will check into that.

We have seen a recent spike in the posting of images and videos. We are taking steps to decrease that.

Has anyone else been having the same experience that Sorin has?

[/admin]

[mhlepore]

First I have heard of such a problem. I think my settings are set to 20 per page and have never experienced this.

[sorin]

Thank you so much - looks like 20 was too much, setting it to 10 works!

[Kirby]

Can you post a link to a page that loads slowly when you view 20 posts/page?

Changing the number of posts per page is nice, but I'd like to investigate the root cause more thoroughly.

[sorin]

Can you post a link to a page that loads slowly when you view 20 posts/page?

Changing the number of posts per page is nice, but I'd like to investigate the root cause more thoroughly.

Thank you for looking into this, Kirby - here's the most recent example: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=13751 (the "Following Iyama Yuta" thread).

[Joaz Banbeck]

Can you post a link to a page that loads slowly when you view 20 posts/page?

Changing the number of posts per page is nice, but I'd like to investigate the root cause more thoroughly.

Thank you for looking into this, Kirby - here's the most recent example: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=13751 (the "Following Iyama Yuta" thread).

My browser ( Chrome running on Linux ) displays the first ten posts of that thread in about one second. Other randomly chosen pages from that thread also display equally quickly.

[sorin]

Can you post a link to a page that loads slowly when you view 20 posts/page?

Changing the number of posts per page is nice, but I'd like to investigate the root cause more thoroughly.

Thank you for looking into this, Kirby - here's the most recent example: viewtopic.php?f=13&t=13751 (the "Following Iyama Yuta" thread).

My browser ( Chrome running on Linux ) displays the first ten posts of that thread in about one second. Other randomly chosen pages from that thread also display equally quickly.

I switched back to 20 and it is working pretty fast for me too now...

I start to believe that my setting was not 20 earlier, but 200 (but the browser displayed only the first 2 digits, so I thought it was 20?).
Reason for that: when I had trouble loading long threads, I think I remember that the "Following Iyama" thread was shown as being paginated only into 2 pages, which is consistent with a 200 posts per page (since the thread has a little less than 400 posts now).

[schultz]

This sounds like a new instance of a very old complaint/concern/problem that people have had with loading large numbers of posts per page.

We process every diagram every time it loads, so it makes sense that with diagram heavy pages the server is being tasked with doing an enormous amount of work whenever the page gets refreshed/reloaded. I still hold to this being the root cause behind these issues.

The old godiscussions used the same/similar function to process the diagrams, but created an actual image file with a hash key that it could retrieve and not reprocess if it already existed. This creates other problems (storing ridiculous amounts of images), but cuts back on processing.

Kirby, what do you think about postponing the processing of the diagrams until they're scrolled to (or some other delay)? With fast scrolling you would get pop-in of the diagrams as they load, but it might be the best solution for people who prefer not having to paginate their threads.

[Kirby]

Kirby, what do you think about postponing the processing of the diagrams until they're scrolled to (or some other delay)? With fast scrolling you would get pop-in of the diagrams as they load, but it might be the best solution for people who prefer not having to paginate their threads.

It is feasible to do. Maybe I'll have time to play with some things this weekend.

[Bonobo]

I think 40 entries is maximum. There used to be a time when things were slow for many L19ers, a few years ago (many posts titled “connection problems” or similar), and setting the number to 10 was the only thing that helped (I think it was especially with pages that had many playable diagrams). Then the admins did something (I think it was a move to another server?), and things got better. I set it to 20 then and have never had any of those problems again.