This site seems to get slower and slower. Any tips on how to improve its performance?

[Ontario Honker Hunter]

This site seems to get slower and slower. Any tips on how to improve its performance?

[Dcast]

Fire IT staff!

[mspl8sdcntryboy]

One thing I have found to improve speed, especially in loading the content, is to set the answers or message boards as the web browser default setting. The front page of the website has too much content to load speedily.

[Ontario Honker Hunter]

Yeah, I shortcut to the Message Board a long time ago. But just moving from there to Answers seems to take forever.

Dcast: Sometimes I wonder if there's anyone in the IT office to fire. ;-)

[jhjimbo]

My log in seems about normal, things do slow down around noon and 4PM. I have been told that is because the server 'throttles' the band width at those times and that slows things.

Does anyone know how to get a spell checker on this site?

[Pray- hunt-work]

Upload before you go to bed, check when you wake up....

[Ontario Honker Hunter]

Jimbo, I presume, like me, you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer. I downloaded Speckie as a spell checker add on to my browser. Seems to work very well. Things run just a teeny bit slower with it activated. My daughter uses Firefox and it has a spell checker built in but I have found it is considerably slower and lots of nasty spyware seems to find its way onto her computer. I'm not sure if Google Chrome has a spell checker built in. Have heard some good things about it though.

[rjw]

Honker,
I have speed tested IE and Firefox and Firefox has a consistently higher speed, at least for me. I too have a female in the house and her system (IE)is always loaded with spyware, after watching her surf it is easy to see why, they tend to click on pop ups like they are a coupon, basically not paying attention to what they click and then deny it could ever happen too them.

[santa]

I quit using IE and went to Firefox and have had no problems since.

[Dcast]

OH,I think we p'd-off IT Staff!

[LostLure]

Budget cuts

[Greenhead]

I use Google Chrome and it seems to be faster than IE. It does have a built in spell checker.

[chuckles]

Google Chrome definitely works better for me and has built in spell checker. Your certainly still going to have to watch you're homonyms.

[DakotaMan]

I doubt they have an IT staff from the looks of it. Its been a while for me in delivering high performance web sites, but it looks like they are misusing the WordPress freebie package and hoping for the best. They are throwing a lot of content at that package and they are not optimizing their use of it for performance. That package does not exploit modern browser software that could provide instantaneous feedback when controls (such as the navigation tabs or submit buttons) are used.

Frankly to get decent performance with this volume of content and access rates, they will have to use a more expensive package or do custom development with Java or C++ on well architected servers.

At this point, it is working fairly well except for the authentication (sign-in) and the terrible performance. Additional memory and processor capacity may also help them by caching everything on their web server. Given the number of sites that Bonnier runs, a decent Content Management System might not be out of the question.

About all we can do is try different browsers, point our browsers to the content areas we use to avoid the overloaded front page and navigation logic, and stay signed in as long as possible to avoid having to attempt another sign-in. Today it took me over a half our to crack the authentication logic for a successful sign-in. I tried about 25 times from different areas of the site and eventually succeeded.