Why is this forum always so freaking slow?

[JorenBus]

Seriously, it takes a solid 20 seconds for the main page to load entirely.

Same if I want to open a category or open a topic.

Other websites open instantly. I'm from Europe.

What's that about? It makes me use the site less and less.

[2FA]

It's pretty much instant for me.

[Damascus]

Its instantaneous for me as well

[Mr.Meerkat]

Try changing to Google's DNS servers? 

[paddy-stone]

Don't know what you mean, I'm from the UK, using a VPN that's based in the Netherlands and it still loads instantly for me too... what DNS servers are you using?

[AlwaysFSX]

My internet is terrible and it still loads quickly.

[BrinkGG]

2 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

Seriously, it takes a solid 20 seconds for the main page to load entirely.

Same if I want to open a category or open a topic.

Other websites open instantly. I'm from Europe.

What's that about? It makes me use the site less and less.

That's not a problem for me... This is actually one of the faster sites I use. 

Use tracert to see how many hops you make before connecting maybe?

[RollinLower]

i'm from the netherlands, and the page loads instantly for me. 

[Technomancer__]

no problem with me ither

[JorenBus]

3 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

Try changing to Google's DNS servers? 

 

3 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

Don't know what you mean, I'm from the UK, using a VPN that's based in the Netherlands and it still loads instantly for me too... what DNS servers are you using?

How exactly can I do that? Even in my dorm room, where I get around 100 mbs download speed, it still takes a long time. I have this problem on my gaming pic as well as on my laptop, both using chrome.

[Guest]

It's only ever slow if I use wifi. Wifi is usually pretty shit however no matter what I do with it. My cell service works better than that nonsense.

[Mr.Meerkat]

3 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

 

How exactly can I do that? Even in my dorm room, where I get around 100 mbs download speed, it still takes a long time. I have this problem on my gaming pic as well as on my laptop, both using chrome.

https://www.howtogeek.com/167533/the-ultimate-guide-to-changing-your-dns-server/

[Mr.Meerkat]

2 minutes ago, Nicholatian said:

Changing over your DNS servers isn’t always a good idea. Changing it to a location that isn’t close to you will result in CDNs becoming confused and they’ll serve you content from far away.

Tru...

But for me, I'm from the UK and google's DNS servers are 10x faster than my ISPs plus it solved a couple of issues I was experiencing sooooo  

[paddy-stone]

21 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

 

How exactly can I do that? Even in my dorm room, where I get around 100 mbs download speed, it still takes a long time. I have this problem on my gaming pic as well as on my laptop, both using chrome.

As @Mr.Meerkat linked to above. But what I was getting at is you blaming the forum for being slow to load when it's a problem with either your schools network/DNS or whatever.

Changing DNS servers has been a thing now for many years to either bypass, slow/laggy ISP DNS servers or get around content restrictions that could be enforced by schools, governments etc... it's a totally ineffective way of blocking people from content, but is still usually the first thing they implement when trying to block you.

Yes it could be bad for some to do this, but there are many public DNS servers that could be used, just try some to see if it helps in your situation  http://public-dns.info/

if after trying some of them, you still get lagginess on your network I would suspect that it's your schools problem then maybe... try someone elses connection/PCs etc at your school and see if theirs are like it too.

[Mr.Meerkat]

1 minute ago, paddy-stone said:

As @Mr.Meerkat linked to above. But what I was getting at is you blaming the forum for being slow to load when it's a problem with either your schools network/DNS or whatever.

Nawh, talktalk just force feeds their shitty DNS servers...

I mean when I search up my external IP address, it shows up as I'm somewhere 200 miles away  

 

Also, you're telling me faceit.com needs to be blocked? Was loading completely fine for a year and then one day, it completely stopped loading when I changed my DNS server to google's and well...faceit.com would load again  

[Blade of Grass]

Can you give the output of https://linustechtips.com/cdn-cgi/trace

Just the colo, spdy, http and loc is fine

[HelplmChoking]

Even from New Zealand I have no issues, aside from image heavy build logs on mobile (usually only when on low battery) and some hiccupping on my laptop, which is Atom powered anyway.

[RevoltTrain]

Loads instantaneously for me

[colonel_mortis]

49 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Seems to be bad optimization. Chrome audit reports that there are multiple CSS and Javascript files that could be combined and minified.

It's not quite as simple as that. Combining and minification is done, but not everything can be combined because then you would either have to load loads more unnecessary stuff no matter what page you visited, or you would have to re-download everything if you go to a different part of the site. A balance has been found between those two extremes, and while I'm not sure that it's optimal, it's not a significant issue in terms of speed.

49 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

They're not using cache as they could/should. Static content is not served from a reverse proxy/cache server, when it could be.

Static content is given a long TTL (2 months, which is similar to how frequently the files end up being modified), and it is served from a CDN (it is just a transparent CDN, so it is all served on the linustechtips.com domain).

49 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

The order of CSS/scripts could be reorganized and there are a lot of unused CSS rules. They could compress and resize images (main problem), and the list goes on.

 

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flinustechtips.com%2F&tab=mobile

The order of CSS/script doesn't matter, just their placement on the page. For a site like this, it is not feasible to split the CSS into above the fold/below the fold styles as Google pagespeed suggests.

Resizing images is an area that we are aware of, but there are a number of issues with doing so, including that the images that are being identified are profile pictures, which are used in various sizes across the site, so producing a version for each size would increase the number of cache misses. It's a trade off that we have yet to solve.

 

The pagespeed insights list does not go on.

 

The problems being faced by the OP are almost certainly caused by problems out of our control, involving how his computer connects to our CDN. However, we will need to see the output of the cloudflare cdn-trace page mentioned by @Blade of Grass above to be sure.

[JorenBus]

On 26-3-2017 at 9:36 PM, Blade of Grass said:

Can you give the output of https://linustechtips.com/cdn-cgi/trace

Just the colo, spdy, http and loc is fine

Sorry, was inactive for a while.

colo=AMS

spdy=h2

http=h2

loc=NL

[colonel_mortis]

1 hour ago, JorenBus said:

Sorry, was inactive for a while.

colo=AMS

spdy=h2

http=h2

loc=NL

That looks like it ought to be OK. Is it still slow?

[mariushm]

Not sure if it would help, with linustechtips.com being on cloudflare, but you could download WinMTR  and enter the linustechtips.com domain and hit the Start button.

Let it run for a few minutes and you should see all the servers / routers / whatever the data travels between you and the cloudflare computer that serves the website.

The list should tell you if there's some packet loss at some of those nodes, which would slow up the website as data has to be re-transmitted everytime some data is lost.

If there's some loss very close to your computer (first entry) , that should tell you the problem may be in your ISP's court and a phone to ISP support may solve the problem.

 

Here's a screenshot of how it looks in my case (Cloudflare sends me to France datacenter)

 

 

As you can see everything's fine .. that 1% loss is not an issue, usually when there's problems you have more than 5% loss over a long period of time. All nodes between my computer and the datacenter in France respond very fast... 39 ms average latency is perfectly fine. 

 

[JorenBus]

2 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

That looks like it ought to be OK. Is it still slow?

Well I haven't opened this site since last week, but now it seems like it opens pretty fast. Placebo much? haha

[-TesseracT-]

I find it slower than most other websites. On a related note, I have made a comment about how I think the forum is down quite frequently (under maintenance), but people didn't agree with me.