Site Load Problems Alleviated

• August 11, 2006

Some of you may have noticed that Say Anything has been loading slowly or acting buggy lately. This was due to some slow load times from the Gravatar service which hosts those cool little pictures that appear in the comments. If you don’t have a picture, sign up for one now.
Anyway, in order to solve the slow load times the Gravatar images are now routinely being downloaded from the Gravatar service and cached here locally on Say Anything’s servers. This will ensure that if the Gravatar service goes down load times here won’t be impacted.
I have noticed one side effect, though. Occassionally the text will disappear from the comment listing on the sidebar. Not sure what’s causing this, but it’s nothing serious. The comment text will come back if you refrhesh. I’ll look into getting it fixed eventually, but for now SA should be loading a lot faster. Or, at least somewhat faster.
I think some of the slow load times may also be caused by the Pajamas Media ads to the left. I’ve emailed Pajamas Media about the load times, but they don’t seem to think it’s their fault. I think they’re wrong, but I’m not sure what else I can do.

Tags: Site Announcements

MikeAdamson

Thanks Rob.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

You're welcome, Mike.
http://Array carrick

The Gravitars were definitely part of the problem with the slow load times. Is there any way that you can set up the rest of the content to cache, including the PJ Media ads?

I think this illustrates the problems with relying on other servers to be fast enough to not affect load times.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

Carrick, I'm trying to work with Pajamas on a solution. Not sure that caching would work, but I'll check.

I'm contractually obligated to have the ads (and the revenue they produce is what allows me to keep SA running), so I've got to keep them. No doubt about that. Unless a bunch of you get together and use the subscribe button so donate $5 or so a month.

Anyway, pulling content off other servers can definetly cause some problems. The only content int he SA template (outside of the occassional YouTube or Google videos in the posts) are the Pajamas ads, some traffic monitoring code also from Pajamas (you don't see it, but I think they have it to make sure I'm not using fraudulent means to drive up my traffic for ad revenue) the Google Reader feed box to the left (never had a problem with that loading) and the public sitemeter traffic code at the bottom.

That's not a lot compared to other sites. The problem right now really is Pajamas, I think. I just don't know how I'm going to fix it.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

One thing to keep in mind is that in November of last year SA had just under 50,000 unique visits and 100,000 page views. Last month SA had 110,000 unique visits and 190,000 page views.

Traffic has doubled in less than a year. And commenting activity is way up. I don't have accurate stats on that, but just eyeballing it SA was getting about 100 – 200 comments a day just a year ago. Now we're routinely hitting 500.

The server loads are significant. We do our best to keep things running smoothly, but I just don't have a lot of money to throw at hosting and such.
http://king-of-fools.com/ King of Fools

Pages are loading like lighting for me this morning. So much better than the pages that never finished loading even after 5 minutes. (Never interfered with reading or anything since the content was all visible…but the site is really screaming this morning.)
http://www.thatedeguy.com/ thatedeguy

One thing you could do is to clear your computer's cache, and time the load on the site. Then, clear your cache again, remove the pajamas ad and time again. Of course, you can't leave the pajamas ad out, but it would give you an idea as to how much time it's adding to the load time. And a little ammo if you need to argue with them about it.
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

Actually, the King (who does most of the maintenance around here) thinks we may have isolated it to Pajamas counter code in the footer.

Everything seems to be loading quickly to day though.
http://king-of-fools.com/ King of Fools

The tricky thing is sometimes the ads load very quickly. And sometimes, it just never finishes. The ads do appear so the issue appears to be the tracking code in the page footer.

But it is really difficult to measure this kind of thing without touching that code, which is something that would probably be unacceptable to them. I did add some simple javascript to the body onload tag, and it was telling me the page was loading in .134 seconds (when it was taking several minutes to complete).
http://king-of-fools.com/ King of Fools

Ok, the sidebar issue has been narrowed down to a specific Advertisement. I think Rob will be contacting the people and get them to fix it soon.
MikeAdamson

All hail to the King of Fools!
http://sayanythingblog.com robport

The ad was causing the problem, and PJ media took it out of cicrulation. Everything should be working smoothly now.

Things are certainly loading quickly for me.
MikeAdamson

me too
2Hotel9

Wow! And I thought everything was better because I just got the laptop back from Da Geek. Had an advert-trojan that I just could not get rid of. Littlesister ran it to ground and stomped it to death. First thing I did when I got back online was email a reservation for her at her favorite waterhole. Next time she walks in the door her money ain't no good, and somebody is going to have to carry her out. Glad your getting the tech-issues cleared up, you have spoiled me with a blog that works, and rapidly, all the time.

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