Fansites, get a better server!

[Aeni]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Nah, FFXIO has had problems lately, most notably after hours (About 5am EST?) I've timed out on this very website tons recently and it's not my connection either (Once KI loaded faster)

I don't agree there is something wrong with the service over all, but that the admins have to go find out if someone is running DoS attacks at weird times on this site or if the site's own ISP is running maintenance nightly.

[Balfree]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Page generated in 0.39255095 seconds

FFXI is uber fast for me at all times, at work i have a 3mbit connection that serves more than 20 computers connected to the internet. At home i havf 512kb internet, and never did i notice any sort of slowdown on this site. Whereas Alla times out, KI also times out (more), and both of those are (used to, till i stoped going there) usually a hassle to navigate on.

[Murphie]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

I've never had any trouble with the speed of this place. I won't even visit KI anymore because it's too slow, and I'm glad to be rid of Alla as well.

[DrivenTooFar]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Page generated in 0.27775788 seconds

I actually never realized how fast this was until this thread started.

[Vair]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

FFXIonline is probably one of the fastest Fansite servers that I've ever been a part of. I can generate pages in about 0.17343712 seconds (89.61% PHP - 10.39% MySQL) and I'm a 52.0 Kbps dial up.

Pretty fast for me.

Extra: Love FFXIonline better than any other Fansite. Especially KI. Seems to be a lot less drama here than there. Alla can just rot.

[Ellipses]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Once again, connection speed has absolutely nothing to do with how fast the page is generated. "Page generated" is just how long it takes the server to create the HTML for the page, and has nothing to do with how long it takes to download even the HTML itself, let alone all the images.

I know it's a nice number, and part of the measurement of how fast the server is (answer: fast). I'm just a fan of clarity and accuracy.

[Macht]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Once again, connection speed has absolutely nothing to do with how fast the page is generated. "Page generated" is just how long it takes the server to create the HTML for the page, and has nothing to do with how long it takes to download even the HTML itself, let alone all the images.

I know it's a nice number, and part of the measurement of how fast the server is (answer: fast). I'm just a fan of clarity and accuracy.

Yeah, but it is a good estimate still to use for figuring out what part of the delay is actually FFXIOnline and what part of the delay is due to all the people's sigs or other uncontrolled sources.

In a way this thread is like a slap in the face to all of the Dev Team that worked well over a few years getting everything fine tuned for that pure speed the site has.

[neighbortaru]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

In a way this thread is like a slap in the face to all of the Dev Team that worked well over a few years getting everything fine tuned for that pure speed the site has.

not really, i think we've established that the OP was smoking crack or something

[Raydeus]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

I never thought about it before, mainly because the only times I think about speed is when I'm having troubles.

And i never have speed troubles in this place.




PS> On the other hand Alla was a nightmare, having to refresh a page that didn't load was standard procedure there.

[Macht]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

not really, i think we've established that the OP was smoking crack or something

Yeah, why I said "In a way" I mean if I spent a year or so working on a site I thought would be awsome to have up and made sure it was wicked fast. Having someone come by and say it's slow and even worse slower the alla! That's a low blow. >.<

[Gentoo]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Most of the time I find that it's off server images that slows a web site down (which is just one of the reasons why I tell Firefox to load images for the originating server only). The page I just read contains images from at least 11 outside servers.

Ellipses makes a really good point [about server side page rendering versus content delivery], so I decided to use wget and a little perl to do some timing on page 2 of this thread. My connection speed averages 2.6 Mb/s, and at the time of this writing an average ICMP round trip takes 31.405 milliseconds between my computer and www.ffxionline.com.

Three runs in three different scenarios (9 runs total, no caching allowed):
- just the html -- no images.
- the html and the images hosted on www.ffxionline.com.
- everything required to render the page as the server sends it (including images from other hosts)

I instructed wget to say that the user-agent was Mozilla 1.5.0.5 (mentioned just in case content differs based on browser). I also took these timing starting at 1:45PM Pacific time.

The page rendered on average in 0.3900023367 seconds according to the statistics at the bottom for all nine runs. So clearly the hang-up, if there really is one, isn't in the server side rendering engine.

Downloading just the html took an average of 1.023 seconds.

Downloading the html and restricting image downloads to www.ffxionline.com, the content download averages 4.881 seconds.

However, when I span all host to download all the content the average download time jumps to 17.599 seconds.

I can't come to the conclusion that www.ffxionline.com is the bottleneck.

[edit: everything below to address a secondary post by the OP I missed]

And no, it's not my connection, I'm on 10MB premum $80 a month cable, my connection is probably faster then yours.

It could be your connection. Most network laypeople don't know that your upstream speed affects your downstream speed also. Please see this article:
http://www.montanasky.net/help/dsl_info.html#Asymmetry
(you can also reference RFC #3449 for and in-depth discussion if you've got a burning desire to read a dry technical paper)

[neighbortaru]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

heh, well if that's not authoritative then I don't know what is
GJ Gentoo!

[Omni]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Great analysis gentoo!

Speaking of doing something about a website running slow, if you are willing to pay for a dedicated box Lhun, then hey! I'm the man for the job.

I just so happen to work for a managed hosting provider (what do you know!). If you are so kind to help pay $700 or so a month, I can get a new dell poweredge box for ffxio in my datacenter, fully managed and no cap on a 2GB/s connection. AB power, etc etc the works etc etc. :D

Then again, ffxio seems to have the best host out of all the ffxi related sites ive been on yet. The Devs have done a great job. keep it up!

[Aeni]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

Most of the time I find that it's off server images that slows a web site down (which is just one of the reasons why I tell Firefox to load images for the originating server only). The page I just read contains images from at least 11 outside servers.

Ellipses makes a really good point [about server side page rendering versus content delivery], so I decided to use wget and a little perl to do some timing on page 2 of this thread. My connection speed averages 2.6 Mb/s, and at the time of this writing an average ICMP round trip takes 31.405 milliseconds between my computer and www.ffxionline.com.

Three runs in three different scenarios (9 runs total, no caching allowed):
- just the html -- no images.
- the html and the images hosted on www.ffxionline.com.
- everything required to render the page as the server sends it (including images from other hosts)

I instructed wget to say that the user-agent was Mozilla 1.5.0.5 (mentioned just in case content differs based on browser). I also took these timing starting at 1:45PM Pacific time.

The page rendered on average in 0.3900023367 seconds according to the statistics at the bottom for all nine runs. So clearly the hang-up, if there really is one, isn't in the server side rendering engine.

Downloading just the html took an average of 1.023 seconds.

Downloading the html and restricting image downloads to www.ffxionline.com, the content download averages 4.881 seconds.

However, when I span all host to download all the content the average download time jumps to 17.599 seconds.

I can't come to the conclusion that www.ffxionline.com is the bottleneck.

I'm not sure where it's bottlenecking, but just now (11:12pm my way) the server just stalled. So I hit the refresh button and got about 1.98 seconds or so, which is 4 times slower than what I got about two hours prior. Lately it's been like this the past few nights now.

The only thing I can think of is that the servers are being hammered by visitors from the EU community (Or even JP community) but I highly doubt this is likely.

I'm thinking the host or ISP runs some kind of maintenance and switches the bulk of their customers to just one connection while performing their maintenance. The overall service is great compared to other FFXI fansites, just that at around this time, there's some weird stuff going on (It's not my internet connection because I'd have d/c'd from FFXI by now and I'm still on with R:200 in Jeuno >.>)

[Caspian]

Re: Fansites, get a better server!

I'm not sure where it's bottlenecking, but just now (11:12pm my way) the server just stalled. So I hit the refresh button and got about 1.98 seconds or so, which is 4 times slower than what I got about two hours prior. Lately it's been like this the past few nights now.

The only thing I can think of is that the servers are being hammered by visitors from the EU community (Or even JP community) but I highly doubt this is likely.

I'm thinking the host or ISP runs some kind of maintenance and switches the bulk of their customers to just one connection while performing their maintenance. The overall service is great compared to other FFXI fansites, just that at around this time, there's some weird stuff going on (It's not my internet connection because I'd have d/c'd from FFXI by now and I'm still on with R:200 in Jeuno >.>)

Yeah, I got the same thing. Just seems to happen every once in awhile. 99.9% of the time this site is super fast. (Especially compared to Alla and KI, I've clicked on a link to KI, gone to the bathroom, come back and the page is just starting to load.) Seems like just every rare occasion the server stalls out for a minute or two.