Full speed ahead

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
During work I did a few things to make the site even fasterer.

* I've set up Cloudflare, a global content delivery network which should allow international users (Murcans, etc) to get content faster; probably mostly images and the like. I can't accurately measure whether it's gotten any faster, but I effectively live next door to where the server is located.

* I've reinstated WP Super Cache, apparently that's been off for forever. That helped change page load times on the front page and front page posts from 300 to 30 ms.

Front pages (from cache) now take about 20-30ms to load (from request to download finished), forum front page about 80-90ms, thread list about 100, thread pages about 150-200 but I guess that depends a lot on what's on them; there may be something to gain from there.

Here's Google's page speed insights results from before and after; I didn't screenshot the before desktop version, but you get the idea.

before: http://i.imgur.com/OHyfErK.jpg
after: http://i.imgur.com/hs2JsK9.jpg
after desktop: http://i.imgur.com/n0VE8cI.jpg

The score on that one can be increased by doing things like moving JS down the page, but there's warnings left and right saying that might break WP plugins. I think there can be more to gain there if we can get Google's PageSpeed mod installed, but at the moment that requires me to manually recompile nginx and I don't really want to do that because I'd probably do it wrong.
 

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Has anyone (esp. those living not in NL) noticed any significant speedup? Just asking because this CDN thing comes at a cost, we can't accurately track IP addresses from users anymore (it's all / mostly the Cloudflare CDN)
 

Lex

Administrator
Not particularly if I'm honest. I still occasionally get that thing where I hit "thanks" and have to wait a couple of seconds or refresh for it to show up. Or well... the site has been loading fine for me, no slowdown for ages, so maybe it is speeding up?
 

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
I'm pretty sure the dynamic bits of the site - the thanks system, etc - won't actually become much faster, those still need to be generated by the forum software. Things like images and javascript and other such static resources should be a lot faster. Not that they were slow to begin with, but, you know, there's almost always something to improve on speed-wise, :awesome:
 
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