Forum Loading speed

chris66 · 2022-10-01T12:34:02.774Z

Any chance to get a quicker loading time?

Old forum: 1.0 secs
New forum: 4 secs

My OS: windows 10, browser: Firefox

mmd · 2022-10-01T12:50:16.540Z

One topic to double check is the logging level. IIRC the log files used to be fairly verbose when I checked them last time (around January maybe?). This will add quite a bit of overhead and slows everything down, similar to running a Rails port in development mode.

In general, as already mentioned on the old forum, I’d definitely wait till the migration is done before starting with a deep dive performance analysis. The much bigger data volume will almost certainly bring up new exciting issues.

Nadjita · 2022-10-01T14:21:06.507Z

To me, it feels that this forum loads faster than the old one. Measuring gives me 850ms on this one and 1120ms on the old one. Odd. Different server locations, maybe?

mmd · 2022-10-01T14:26:56.503Z

Yes, server locations are indeed different: see https://hardware.openstreetmap.org/
—> jakelong and clifford

Firefishy · 2022-10-02T02:26:41.059Z

Discourse (which powers this site) is quite content heavy, the page load speed will be affected by internet connection speed.

Throttling my connection down to “Fast 3G” the site loads in around 4 seconds on subsequent pages. The initial page takes 6 to 8 seconds to cache the large application.js objects etc

The site already uses brotli which one of the best compressors for web pages.

ezekielf · 2022-10-02T12:38:20.727Z

Firefishy:

Discourse (which powers this site) is quite content heavy … large application.js objects etc

All that JavaScript takes more time to execute on slower CPUs too. So the load time is increased on older and lower end devices even if the network connection is fast.

Emilius123 · 2022-10-02T14:10:17.473Z

Paying our price for nice looks . I know it was probably long before I even existed that this was decided, but Discourse might’ve been the wrong choice.

chris66 · 2022-10-02T14:18:40.978Z

Sooo, at weekend it seems to be faster…

Today (sunday) I see response times of circa 2 secs.

mmd · 2022-10-02T14:45:26.648Z

@Firefishy : for some reason, our disk utilization used to be fairly low in calendar weeks 10-21 (March - May '22). End of May, it suddenly started to jump to 10%-20% and remained at that level for a few months now, all day long. I’m still suspecting that Discourse is writing an awful lot of logging information to disk.

Maybe there was some upgrade back in May, which changed those logging settings to some factory default?

sda (Munin :: openstreetmap.org :: jakelong.openstreetmap.org :: diskstats_utilization :: sda)

TwistedSnake · 2022-10-02T15:54:30.118Z

I would assume that the content is loaded without the need for JavaScript, so at least we’re not waiting (much) to read the content.

Personally, any time that Discourse spends executing JS is made up by the time I save scanning though the UI to look for the options I need. Although I’d admit that this opinion appear to vary from person to person.

Firefishy · 2022-10-05T12:21:03.120Z

The disk utilisation is increasing because the RAID controller has disabled writeback caching due to failing controller battery: jakelong needs a replacement RAID controller battery · Issue #757 · openstreetmap/operations · GitHub

The log level is set per discouse_docker default level.

Firefishy · 2022-10-05T12:21:58.610Z

I have increased the number of discourse web workers to the recommended level in commit: community: increase web workers to recommendation · openstreetmap/chef@8338ca5 · GitHub

nukeador · 2022-10-10T10:07:50.667Z

@chris66 is it possible to check again if the recent changes to the server have improved your loading speed? Thanks!

chris66 · 2022-10-10T10:59:41.669Z

Hi, in the moment I have loading times of around 2 secs. Which is ok.