Forum is Slower than other Sites. Difficult to log in.

[agjm]

Hello.
I must say that I really, really enjoy frequenting these forums. The maps are beautiful and inspiring.
This makes it a shame that the forum takes forever to load (It's slower than my E-Mail). It takes a good five to seven seconds to load any page on this site, whereas it takes a fraction of a second to load something such as a Google search, FaceBook, high-resolution images, etc.

I'm not sure what the cause is, but it's somewhat frustrating.


The other issue I'm having is with logging in. Here's what it looks like on my computer:


I'm not sure why it does this, but I have to zoom in to 125% page size to get the "Remember Me" checkbox and text out of the way, just so that I can hit the Log-In button. It's cluttered and messy, too.

It's making these forums a pain to use - which is a shame.
I'm not sure if it's on my end or the sites. Is there any way I could fix this?

[Redrobes]

I agree 100% with the site speed. I thought we moved to dedicated hosting to improve the site but its still dead slow for me as well. Theres a lot of users now and lots of images being viewed. We don't have dedicated content management system for all of the images so the poor server is probably trying to dish up several very large images at any one time.

I don't get the log in layout issues tho. I am using Firefox and I believe that Chrome looks ok too. Its possible that old browsers may render it incorrectly but thats not something I see here. I get other issues which seem unique to me tho but thats another story.

[Larb]

I have issues with the initial load. When I try to visit the CG, it takes half a minute or more to initially load the website. After that it is slow but fast enough not to make it annoying. I don't know why that is.

I am using Waterfox (a variant of firefox). I don't know if that matters.

[Bogie]

It is mostly the home page that is slow to load. I went to the Forums page and bookmarked that. Now when I use bookmarks ( or Favorites ) to get here it loads much faster.

[Jaxilon]

It is definately slower since they did the move. Originally we were faster than ever but then we had the strange bungle up where they did something (maybe RobA or Arcana can recall). Actually, that's the night I texted a message to Arcana. Ever since that time this place has been really really slow for me.

Anybody know what's going on? Honestly, the site has never been slower for me.

[Mark Oliva]

The start page is by leaps and bounds the slowest site I call in Internet. I assume it's carrying way too many bytes ... maybe complete graphics rather than thumbnails. The secondary pages such as the forums, etc., aren't fast, but they run OK.

[Diamond]

Yep, slowness issues for me too. And now it's taking longer and longer to load an image, to the point where just now I tried to load a map and gave up after staring at the screen for almost 5 minutes.

[Jaxilon]

I suppose if we've picked up that much more traffic since the upgrade it could just be an honest reflection of our growth.

[RobA]

I consistently get 9-12 second load times for the front page and 5-8 second load times for pretty much any other page on the site, which makes it hard for me to troubleshoot.

Most of the slowness we do see is due to vBulletin and server load.

We have seen a lot of new traffic:

There are currently 246 users online. 10 members and 236 guests

We also recently allowed guests to view full attachments in some of the forums, which chews up even more time.

Our sql server is still on a shared host, so that may be one of the performance issues...

-Rob A>

[Korash]

Our sql server is still on a shared host, so that may be one of the performance issues...

-Rob A>

Are there plans to change that, or is it part of the dedicated server thing that is still in the works?

And I know it has not been said enough, but A Great Big Bunny Hug to you and Arcana for all the work that goes into keeping this place running Thanks.