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Page loading slow and twitchy


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I really don't want to be one of those that looks a gift horse in the mouth but...

 

We've had this new forum software and layout for a while now but there still seem to be a fundamental problems. Maybe it's just me but just about every page that loads from RMweb is slow compared to other sites. I'm not using the latest super turbo whizzy devices and I'm on mere 20Mbs broadband link but there are fundamental issues with the way pages are being served and rendered.

 

You can see the layout twitching about as different elements of the page are being loaded as the sizes of images and other things are being accommodated in the browser rather than being computed ahead of time. This means that you go to touch or click on an item and if there is a delay in an element downloading it can move and you end up clicking on something else.  When I was designing user interfaces this was always seen as a big no no as it frustrates the heck out of the users.

 

Much of the general slowness seems to be with loading adverts or sidebar content and the user avatars.  I never observed this with the previous software so something is being done differently.  I'm not sure what can be done about this but I wouldn't mind betting the developers never test their software on anything other than in-house ethernet or fibre broadband so never see how poor this all is out in the real world with a complex site like RMweb.  I have to admit I do less on the site these days as it just too frustrating to use.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

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That seems to be slower building than I have been able to reproduce - apart from the early weeks before tweaks were implemented. Even tethered to a mobile I get better than what you're describing Dave. 

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What browser and OS versions is the OP using? I find that older versions of Internet Explorer (which I was using at work until recently) can be very slow to render pages. At work we've been moved on to Chrome, and that renders much faster. I use Firefox on Linux Mint at home and that's not had any real issues with rendering time.

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OK done some more testing.  On a fairly aged Windows 7 laptop running Firefox performance is not bad but certainly not snappy and there are still twitches as bits of the page resize.  Not such an issue as the complete page loads in a reasonable time.

 

On my Android tablet with Chrome the performance is poor.  The layout  twitches around as various bits load and things resize.  Several seconds to completely load a page.

 

Running Chrome on the Windows 7 PC again the performance is poor and the pages dance around as various bits load.  Tried it on a much more recent Windows 10 laptop, again with Chrome, and while better it's still not quick enough to avoid seeing all the bits of the page dancing around as the pages load.

 

Not a definitive set of results but to me it would indicate that there is something in the page layout that is causing Chrome to struggle.  Not ideal given the number of devices and users that use Chrome.

 

Taking a look at the page source it would only take a miniscule difference in the download and caching behaviour between browsers to cause mayhem as there are an awful lot of downloaded scripts and other stuff!  Seems somewhat OTT to my dinosaur eyes.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

 

 

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I have a very poor connection - ADSL, not fibre, on a pole-route - so I am used to image-heavy pages taking some time to load. But sometimes RMweb is absolutely mustard. Just now I hit post and it was there almost instantly. Other times less so, but not often enough to be truly tiresome. The OP's description does not match what I see. Mac OS 10.14.4 using Safari. 

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It seems this software likes to load everything first, and then subtracts according to a user's settings and cookies, e.g. even if one chooses the 'condensed' format of thread listing, the 'expanded' form will be loaded first, and then reduced.

 

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Page loading has gone really slow again over the past couple of days - typically taking about 30 seconds to load any page.  This is on IOS 12 on an iPad Air over a sky fibre max connection.  Other sites (eg bbc.co.uk,  which I tend to view as a benchmark) are taking 1 to 2 seconds.

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Slow to load on my iPad mini with Chrome browser. Replies to threads often hang for minutes, timeout or crash. This one probably won't!

 

Update: it did.

Edited by Dava
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One thing I have noticed recently, though this is nothing directly to do with RMweb - if you live in an area with lots of wifi users and you're also using wifi (as I currently do), then channel interference can cause problems with websites loading (most wifi routers will try to use channels 1, 6 or 11 for 2.x GHz wifi, and it only takes two units on one of those to cause issues). It can be random, and will affect different sites at different times. I do think that somehow, RMweb may be more affected by this than other sites, but I can't for the life of me think why.

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I doubt very much it is down to WiFi channel interference.  If this were the case we would have problems with every web site and page loaded even if only intermittently. 

 

To my mind the crux of the problem is the complexity of the page layout and the sheer number of different things that have to be loaded for each page.  Even if these are cached locally much of the time it causes significant load in the client browser.  From my basic experiments this seems to impact Chrome more than other browsers and the older the hardware it is running on the worse it will be.

 

As a grumpy old software developer I would put this down to stuff being developed by folks who have little understanding of the underlying hardware and just add stuff because they can without thinking about the overall performance of the system.  Software bloat.

 

I do find using RMweb increasingly frustrating.

 

Cheers

Dave

 

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On 25/05/2019 at 10:10, Zero Gravitas said:

Page loading has gone really slow again over the past couple of days - typically taking about 30 seconds to load any page.  This is on IOS 12 on an iPad Air over a sky fibre max connection.  Other sites (eg bbc.co.uk,  which I tend to view as a benchmark) are taking 1 to 2 seconds.

 

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, particularly after the issues over the weekend, but the page loading is getting slower. Took over two minutes to open the forum homepage just now - conditions as above.

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If it helps Phil, page loading times here (VM high-speed Fibre) was about 30 seconds around 21:30, but back to almost instantaneous now - 20 minutes later.  Apple Mac OSX 10.14.4 on Safari 12.1

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I have experienced these issues most evenings at what I have presumed were times of high demand since the software upgrade a while back. Generally fine during the day.

 

Izzy

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I'm seeing this more and more at the moment and it is the only web site that behaves like this for me. Time of day seems to make little or no difference.

 

About 14.35 today it took around 25 seconds to load the first page after signing-in and then perhaps just slightly less to move to my Followed unread area. Other navigation is slightly quicker, but not anything like I would expect to see.

 

iMac with macOS 10.14.5 and Safari on an FTTP broadband connection.

 

Additional comment: Just clicked on a Mark Forum As Read and the banner which appears at the top of the screen stayed there for about 20 seconds, effectively preventing further navigation.

 

John

Edited by JJGraphics
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I can't replicate this, but you will have noticed an outage on Monday which the hosting service seemed to struggle with. I'll punt the problem back to them to see what they can do. Sadly, only Andy seems to really know how this stuff works, but I'll do what I can.

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