How much would a Website developer charge to fix my forum performance issues?

[Hectic]

My website have become very slow and unresponsive the last 2 months or so.
My hosting company first said it was to many overseas traffic, although the site is aimed at the local market.
I do have a couple of overseas members, but it is a not a big part of my traffic.

After lots of tickets, I was told that the problem is on my website itself and I was referred to a performance report done by gtmetrix dot com.

It graded my page speed as "F" - 28% and "YSlow" - 68%.

That came as no surprise as I did the setup on the website, Installing SMF forum software and a some add-ons.
My knowledge level is probably just enough to be dangerous.

However it did work well for about 2 years and the problems were suddenly and not gradually.

Page load would take 23 - 40 seconds and I would regularly receive messages that my resources have been limited, mostly the CPU.
In the CP it would regularly show the CPU at 100%

So i tried to work on the Metrix performance report and improved the Page speed report from 28% to 72% (from F to a C) and the YSlow report from 68% to 90%(A).

I also removed everyone that did not log on to the site in the last 4 months and reduced the membership from about 230 too 74.

Page load is much better now, although there still seem to be times that it loads slow, but the page load speed are reported as fast.

After the changes I implemented, some new errors cropped up, like - "Specify image dimensions"
This occurred after I manually re-sized some of the avatars.

Other errors, I just don't have the knowledge to fix.

I was advised by my hosting company to contact a website developer.
Is it possible to guess how much I would be charged?

I'm not exactly Bill Gates and the forum is for console racing and no monies are made, so just would like to have an idea at what I'm looking at.

 

[sp4ceman]

what language is the website written in? sign up for a free newrelic account and see if you can't do some perf analysis using their awesome tools.

it's free. it will let you know if it's a server side or client side problem

Google page speed is also a good tool to use

 

[IziWhatNow]

Prepare for PM's

 

[Hectic]

what language is the website written in? sign up for a free newrelic account and see if you can't do some perf analysis using their awesome tools.

it's free. it will let you know if it's a server side or client side problem

Google page speed is also a good tool to use

PHP

 

[envo]

It's most likely that your database is the bottleneck and not the code. I've had it before.

If you're running PHP on a LAMP environment, I'd suggest installing mod_pagespeed (if possible), which will significantly improve your scores overall, however, again, if your database is the bottleneck then that could be an issue.

Google bot is also notorious for crawler a server so hard that it just makes it "blow up", so check your logs to see if it's bot traffic you're getting or not that causes CPU 100%. However, if a database is big enough/slow enough/not indexed properly, it will be quick to eat up all the RAM, spill over into SWAP and cause high CPU loads because the disk IO can't keep up with the requests

 

[shauntir]

Definitely seems to point to a db issue. However, you seem to have improved the speed by doing some data clean up.

You don't mention what new errors you have? You could post it here and someone would be able to point you in the right direction.

From some googling, you could try to setup some caching using that SMF forum software. Not a very detailed document about caching.

Then, sign up for the free cdn from cloudflare. Use the articles to setup integration with cloudflare here.

 

[Hectic]

It's most likely that your database is the bottleneck and not the code. I've had it before.

If you're running PHP on a LAMP environment, I'd suggest installing mod_pagespeed (if possible), which will significantly improve your scores overall, however, again, if your database is the bottleneck then that could be an issue.

Google bot is also notorious for crawler a server so hard that it just makes it "blow up", so check your logs to see if it's bot traffic you're getting or not that causes CPU 100%. However, if a database is big enough/slow enough/not indexed properly, it will be quick to eat up all the RAM, spill over into SWAP and cause high CPU loads because the disk IO can't keep up with the requests

I have no clue what LAMP is, will google and see if I can implement the mod you mentioned.

Definitely seems to point to a db issue. However, you seem to have improved the speed by doing some data clean up.

You don't mention what new errors you have? You could post it here and someone would be able to point you in the right direction.

From some googling, you could try to setup some caching using that SMF forum software. Not a very detailed document about caching.

Then, sign up for the free cdn from cloudflare. Use the articles to setup integration with cloudflare here.

After the changes I implemented, some new errors cropped up, like - "Specify image dimensions"
This occurred after I manually re-sized some of the avatars.

I think basically the top 3 on the "Speed page" came up.

Will look at the page regarding and see if I can figure out the cdn server thing.
Unfortunately I can only look at tomorrow morning at the soonest.

Thank you every one for the feedback.
I really appreciate it and also gaining a bit of knowledge in the process.
It is bad if you know so little about something.

Oh, I did register at the newrelic site, but I don't know the answers to the couple of questions they ask.

 

[sp4ceman]

what questions?

 

[envo]

LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP

 

[Hectic]

I'm not sure about the enviroment?
All I know, it is Linux based.

I've added some additional info if it will help in a pic.

what questions?

Also, how do I run the Linux commands?

 

[Hectic]

LAMP is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP

Okay that seems to be what I have.

So I search for the mod and download it and then upload to the server?

 

[Hectic]

Some info.
Not sure if it will reveal anything.


The forum is not as busy as it use to be and it was never slow when we were at our busiest.



Bots for January



Bots for February

 

[Hectic]

It's most likely that your database is the bottleneck and not the code. I've had it before.

If you're running PHP on a LAMP environment, I'd suggest installing mod_pagespeed (if possible), which will significantly improve your scores overall, however, again, if your database is the bottleneck then that could be an issue.

I'm using the Bronze Pro package
My Package

Not sure which package to select.

 

[envo]

Don't think you'd be able to install it yourself, you need console access which only comes with a VPS or cloud machine.

I'm also concerned that this might be an Afrihost problem and not necessarily your issue. So the hosting might be a little...erm.... not up to par.

I'd suggest you try out the guys at http://elitehost.co.za they offer competitive packages and can definitely help you tweak your stuff to run fine and fast, they should tell you why and what is causing the high load as well

 

[Hectic]

Don't think you'd be able to install it yourself, you need console access which only comes with a VPS or cloud machine.

I'm also concerned that this might be an Afrihost problem and not necessarily your issue. So the hosting might be a little...erm.... not up to par.

I'd suggest you try out the guys at http://elitehost.co.za they offer competitive packages and can definitely help you tweak your stuff to run fine and fast, they should tell you why and what is causing the high load as well

I've opened a ticket this morning with my queries and will see what they say.
If they can't help I will probably look at other options.

Thx for the suggestion.

Edit:
Was informed by Afrihost that I'm using shared hosting and that I won't be able to install mod_pagespeed file, as it would affect other users as well.
They offered dedicated server, but I assume that I won't be able to afford that.

Would elitehost also be shared servers?

 

[Hectic]

Then, sign up for the free cdn from cloudflare. Use the articles to setup integration with cloudflare here.

Thx for this advice.
My DNS request change was eventually implemented yesterday and it had very positive effect.

Pagespeed rating is up from 72% to 82% and page load times are down from 8 - 10 seconds to about 4 seconds.




If anyone has any advice for those 2 red problem areas, I would appreciate it.

 

[nand]

Thx for this advice.
My DNS request change was eventually implemented yesterday and it had very positive effect.

Pagespeed rating is up from 72% to 82% and page load times are down from 8 - 10 seconds to about 4 seconds.

View attachment 100091


If anyone has any advice for those 2 red problem areas, I would appreciate it.

I'm glad it worked, however, it's just covering up the actual problem.

I agree with others that this is a database issue. On a shared environment this is somewhat scary. They should have picked this up and asked you to move to a dedicated environment long ago.

My suggestion is that you contact the hosting company of yours and demand a proper report of why the website is slow. Sites like the one they pointed you to is rather irrelevant from a systems point of view.

 

[Hectic]

I'm glad it worked, however, it's just covering up the actual problem.

I agree with others that this is a database issue. On a shared environment this is somewhat scary. They should have picked this up and asked you to move to a dedicated environment long ago.

My suggestion is that you contact the hosting company of yours and demand a proper report of why the website is slow. Sites like the one they pointed you to is rather irrelevant from a systems point of view.

Ah okay. Did not know it was covering up issues.
I thought it was just my general lack of knowledge and it should have been done it the first place.

Maybe I must try the advice of an earlier poster and move to Elite.

Edit:
In one of the last emails there was a mention of possibly speaking to the admin about moving me to a dedicated server, but this would probably be to expensive for me?

I see cloud server hosting begins at R290.00, which I would have paid if I could, but I can't atm.
Also it is a local racing gaming forum and there are no income, nor are there any plans to generate income from it.

So I think shared hosting is in my foreseeable future.

 

[Hectic]

I'd suggest you try out the guys at http://elitehost.co.za they offer competitive packages and can definitely help you tweak your stuff to run fine and fast, they should tell you why and what is causing the high load as well

I eventually gave up on AH and moved to Elitehost.

What a pleasure!
Response time on tickets on average is 10 minutes.

The forum is also running much better.

They gave me some advice regarding the cpu resources being limited. The problem moved with me to Elitehost, but it happens about 2 times in a 24 hour period and does not seem to have a big impact.

They advised me to stay on cheaper package and see how it goes.

So far very happy.

 

[itareanlnotani]

My suggestion, is if you're using SMF, make sure you have some sort of bot blocking.

You'll probably find a high proportion of traffic is botnet stuff trying to register and post viagra and other spam ads, as well as hack attempts.

I use the http:BL over on http://www.projecthoneypot.org/, together with the Bad Behaviour plugin, on one forum I run as one mitigating solution, although the users are ungrateful buggers, sigh.

Brings load down quite a bit when you're not serving 3000% of page loads to spammers.

I'm pretty sure thats going to be the issue though, as I see lots of that. Depending on your users, you can also block swathes of countries - .UA is a prime one for blocking if you don't have users from there, as that seems to be where lots my hacker attempts come from (and I don't have valid users there).


If you saw load decreased after moving to cloudflare, I'd say this is extremely likely to be the actual issue, as they have a fair bit of bad bot blocking going on.

Whats your forum url?