Slooooooooooooooooooooooowwww!
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Wow.. CodeProject is running so slow, it's taking minutes to load pages...
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Wow.. CodeProject is running so slow, it's taking minutes to load pages...
CodeProject has received a huge increase in visitors and the traffic is really taxing the servers. I'm sure you are all aware that Chris is in the thick of moving the whole site to .Net, but the benefits of that work are still a few weeks away. In the meantime, we're taking steps to improve the site's performance, but we're all going to have to be patient. Trust me, the site's slowness is a royal pain for all of us.
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CodeProject has received a huge increase in visitors and the traffic is really taxing the servers. I'm sure you are all aware that Chris is in the thick of moving the whole site to .Net, but the benefits of that work are still a few weeks away. In the meantime, we're taking steps to improve the site's performance, but we're all going to have to be patient. Trust me, the site's slowness is a royal pain for all of us.
No offense, but I don't buy it. I'm getting < 60ms pings to the server, which tells me there's plenty of bandwidth available. That would mean that the bottleneck is the servers and scripts themselves. It's 4am CST on a saturday here, and the server is still dog slow (upwards of 2 minutes to load a page). Now, I realize that there are a lot of people from around the world that access the site, and it's not 4am everywhere, but geez.. it's a saturday, traditionally codeprojects lightest load is on weekends (if you go by the number of posts). This is what i've noticed: 1) I haven't seen a huge increase in posting in recent weeks. Now, one would think that if traffic increased 40% or more in a few weeks we'd see at least a 40% increase in posts on average (perhaps a little more or a little less). 2) While codeproject has been steadily getting slower over the last few weeks, this massive drop in performance happened (literally) overnight. The only thing that would explain this would be a huge advertising campaign, and I thought I read that this was still weeks away, or a major change in the scripts or queries which cause a bigger performance drop (I suppose hard disk fragmentation might cause some as well) I don't know... if my sysadmin was out mountain climbing and schmoozing with product managers while his site was in seriously degraded performance, I'd fire him (That's a joke, I know chris is hard at work.. maybe he should fire himself ;) )
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No offense, but I don't buy it. I'm getting < 60ms pings to the server, which tells me there's plenty of bandwidth available. That would mean that the bottleneck is the servers and scripts themselves. It's 4am CST on a saturday here, and the server is still dog slow (upwards of 2 minutes to load a page). Now, I realize that there are a lot of people from around the world that access the site, and it's not 4am everywhere, but geez.. it's a saturday, traditionally codeprojects lightest load is on weekends (if you go by the number of posts). This is what i've noticed: 1) I haven't seen a huge increase in posting in recent weeks. Now, one would think that if traffic increased 40% or more in a few weeks we'd see at least a 40% increase in posts on average (perhaps a little more or a little less). 2) While codeproject has been steadily getting slower over the last few weeks, this massive drop in performance happened (literally) overnight. The only thing that would explain this would be a huge advertising campaign, and I thought I read that this was still weeks away, or a major change in the scripts or queries which cause a bigger performance drop (I suppose hard disk fragmentation might cause some as well) I don't know... if my sysadmin was out mountain climbing and schmoozing with product managers while his site was in seriously degraded performance, I'd fire him (That's a joke, I know chris is hard at work.. maybe he should fire himself ;) )
now dont get me wrong ... am not kissing butt here but ... this site is an amazing resource for us windoze devopers and i am very happy its here ... the performance is a bit up and down lately but i see no reason to doubt the reasons being given by chris and others ... i dont see what he would have to gain from telling porkys i have developed a few asp-type sites and know (as do many of us) that getting things right is a fine balancing act between theory and practice and that nobody can get it right all the time given the variable conditions that a site such as this will encounter ... add to that the peaks in traffic and other stuff (2 way transfers, discussion threads, etc etc) and i think i couldnt do half as well as it is being done right now without making it a full time career (no thanks ... that wasnt an offer) so basically ... without meaning to be rude or offensive or flamey or anything but friendly ... shaaaadap :) --- "every year we invent better idiot proof systems and every year they invent better idiots"
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No offense, but I don't buy it. I'm getting < 60ms pings to the server, which tells me there's plenty of bandwidth available. That would mean that the bottleneck is the servers and scripts themselves. It's 4am CST on a saturday here, and the server is still dog slow (upwards of 2 minutes to load a page). Now, I realize that there are a lot of people from around the world that access the site, and it's not 4am everywhere, but geez.. it's a saturday, traditionally codeprojects lightest load is on weekends (if you go by the number of posts). This is what i've noticed: 1) I haven't seen a huge increase in posting in recent weeks. Now, one would think that if traffic increased 40% or more in a few weeks we'd see at least a 40% increase in posts on average (perhaps a little more or a little less). 2) While codeproject has been steadily getting slower over the last few weeks, this massive drop in performance happened (literally) overnight. The only thing that would explain this would be a huge advertising campaign, and I thought I read that this was still weeks away, or a major change in the scripts or queries which cause a bigger performance drop (I suppose hard disk fragmentation might cause some as well) I don't know... if my sysadmin was out mountain climbing and schmoozing with product managers while his site was in seriously degraded performance, I'd fire him (That's a joke, I know chris is hard at work.. maybe he should fire himself ;) )
FYI My copy of MSDN arrived a few days ago and on page 2 is an add for Code Project. I do not have any idea of how many hits this site gets but I would assume not anywhere near that of a site such as Yahoo or Microsoft. So I also assume that it would not take much of an add to drastically increase traffic. My personal thank you to Chris, David and all of those that make this the best developer site around.
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FYI My copy of MSDN arrived a few days ago and on page 2 is an add for Code Project. I do not have any idea of how many hits this site gets but I would assume not anywhere near that of a site such as Yahoo or Microsoft. So I also assume that it would not take much of an add to drastically increase traffic. My personal thank you to Chris, David and all of those that make this the best developer site around.
That's the source of the traffic bump. We've obviously known for some time that the magazine Ad was coming, but we expected to have the magazines ship late next week which would have allowed some of our preparations to be in place. Erik is right however, the problem seems to be more than traffic. Some change in the script has really loaded SQL Server, and I'll be spending most of today and tomorrow trying to track down what happened. I'm also looking into APGen from http://www.webgecko.com which I think will be a tremendous boost if it works as promised. David
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FYI My copy of MSDN arrived a few days ago and on page 2 is an add for Code Project. I do not have any idea of how many hits this site gets but I would assume not anywhere near that of a site such as Yahoo or Microsoft. So I also assume that it would not take much of an add to drastically increase traffic. My personal thank you to Chris, David and all of those that make this the best developer site around.
Well, that would explain it I guess. My appologies to David. I was going by what he said a few days ago when he said that advertising would begin in a few weeks, perhaps it came early. In any event, I would have to question the wisdom of advertising when you don't have the infrastructure to support the hits.
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That's the source of the traffic bump. We've obviously known for some time that the magazine Ad was coming, but we expected to have the magazines ship late next week which would have allowed some of our preparations to be in place. Erik is right however, the problem seems to be more than traffic. Some change in the script has really loaded SQL Server, and I'll be spending most of today and tomorrow trying to track down what happened. I'm also looking into APGen from http://www.webgecko.com which I think will be a tremendous boost if it works as promised. David
Something else you might look into is MS's web cache software, SWC. I know that Version 3 is in beta right now and is expected to be released soon, but version 2 is available and is supposed to greatly improve the speed by not requiring dynamic content to be generated as often.
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now dont get me wrong ... am not kissing butt here but ... this site is an amazing resource for us windoze devopers and i am very happy its here ... the performance is a bit up and down lately but i see no reason to doubt the reasons being given by chris and others ... i dont see what he would have to gain from telling porkys i have developed a few asp-type sites and know (as do many of us) that getting things right is a fine balancing act between theory and practice and that nobody can get it right all the time given the variable conditions that a site such as this will encounter ... add to that the peaks in traffic and other stuff (2 way transfers, discussion threads, etc etc) and i think i couldnt do half as well as it is being done right now without making it a full time career (no thanks ... that wasnt an offer) so basically ... without meaning to be rude or offensive or flamey or anything but friendly ... shaaaadap :) --- "every year we invent better idiot proof systems and every year they invent better idiots"
I wasn't crticisizing the content or usefullness of this site, or the intentions of it's publishers. I just didn't buy that traffic alone was the cause of the problem, especially considering the fact that that code project was just upgraded massively in hardware in the last few months, and it did not appear to make that much of a different performance-wise. It would be nice, once all the problems are solved, to know what the problem is though.
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That's the source of the traffic bump. We've obviously known for some time that the magazine Ad was coming, but we expected to have the magazines ship late next week which would have allowed some of our preparations to be in place. Erik is right however, the problem seems to be more than traffic. Some change in the script has really loaded SQL Server, and I'll be spending most of today and tomorrow trying to track down what happened. I'm also looking into APGen from http://www.webgecko.com which I think will be a tremendous boost if it works as promised. David
Whatever it was..... It seems to be fixed now. I still don't get a few pages immediately and have to hit refresh, but it happens much faster now. Now I can USE the site again. Brad I'm still curious about what caused the problem though!!!!
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Wow.. CodeProject is running so slow, it's taking minutes to load pages...
I think the site is using sessions with a high timeout - maybe 20 minutes. Wouldn't take long to bottleneck up to max sessions (say, 500) and leave people waiting for a connection. But just a theory. Hey, while were on the subject, wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to open all the messages in a thread at once? I mean, its sometimes rather disheartening to see a thread with 20 responses and know that it must be an interesting topic but be faced with opening each one (with all that that entails) to catch up on whats been said. I guess it would be a tricky page to display tree wise, but bandwidth shouldn't be a big problem - unless people start using really spiffy signatures... :eek:
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I think the site is using sessions with a high timeout - maybe 20 minutes. Wouldn't take long to bottleneck up to max sessions (say, 500) and leave people waiting for a connection. But just a theory. Hey, while were on the subject, wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to open all the messages in a thread at once? I mean, its sometimes rather disheartening to see a thread with 20 responses and know that it must be an interesting topic but be faced with opening each one (with all that that entails) to catch up on whats been said. I guess it would be a tricky page to display tree wise, but bandwidth shouldn't be a big problem - unless people start using really spiffy signatures... :eek:
Hey Tim, The bottleneck is squarely in the SQL server, so although the session count is in the stratosphere, the web server idles along at about 20% CPU load. The SQL Server is pinned during the times you see the site running slow. The path to solving this is clear: either an effective way of reducing the number of SQL queries that are now run (and they are run for just about everything on CP), partial page caching (whole page caching or reverse proxying would force us to remove much of the nice personalization stuff, and I'd hate to see that happen), or a big hardware upgrade. All of these things are underway. Something is in the works to allow display of the whole tree at one pull. The problem here has always been making the site as usable as possible while not completing killing the site's page views (thus advertising potential). Although it's an archaic measurement, page views are still used as a metric to determine a site's importance. David
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I wasn't crticisizing the content or usefullness of this site, or the intentions of it's publishers. I just didn't buy that traffic alone was the cause of the problem, especially considering the fact that that code project was just upgraded massively in hardware in the last few months, and it did not appear to make that much of a different performance-wise. It would be nice, once all the problems are solved, to know what the problem is though.
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Hey Tim, The bottleneck is squarely in the SQL server, so although the session count is in the stratosphere, the web server idles along at about 20% CPU load. The SQL Server is pinned during the times you see the site running slow. The path to solving this is clear: either an effective way of reducing the number of SQL queries that are now run (and they are run for just about everything on CP), partial page caching (whole page caching or reverse proxying would force us to remove much of the nice personalization stuff, and I'd hate to see that happen), or a big hardware upgrade. All of these things are underway. Something is in the works to allow display of the whole tree at one pull. The problem here has always been making the site as usable as possible while not completing killing the site's page views (thus advertising potential). Although it's an archaic measurement, page views are still used as a metric to determine a site's importance. David
Ok - I guess blaming everthing on sessions was a bit simplistic. Site's smokin today tho. What's different? Something is in the works to allow display of the whole tree at one pull. The problem here has always been making the site as usable as possible while not completing killing the site's page views (thus advertising potential). Although it's an archaic measurement, page views are still used as a metric to determine a site's importance. Well, yes but if I get disgusted with the prospect of wading through 20 refreshes to get 20 messages and just disconnect (and, sadly, I often do), where does that leave the hit count? And leaving everything server side like that might be part of the reason the SQL server is overworked.
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Whatever it was..... It seems to be fixed now. I still don't get a few pages immediately and have to hit refresh, but it happens much faster now. Now I can USE the site again. Brad I'm still curious about what caused the problem though!!!!
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No offense, but I don't buy it. I'm getting < 60ms pings to the server, which tells me there's plenty of bandwidth available. That would mean that the bottleneck is the servers and scripts themselves. It's 4am CST on a saturday here, and the server is still dog slow (upwards of 2 minutes to load a page). Now, I realize that there are a lot of people from around the world that access the site, and it's not 4am everywhere, but geez.. it's a saturday, traditionally codeprojects lightest load is on weekends (if you go by the number of posts). This is what i've noticed: 1) I haven't seen a huge increase in posting in recent weeks. Now, one would think that if traffic increased 40% or more in a few weeks we'd see at least a 40% increase in posts on average (perhaps a little more or a little less). 2) While codeproject has been steadily getting slower over the last few weeks, this massive drop in performance happened (literally) overnight. The only thing that would explain this would be a huge advertising campaign, and I thought I read that this was still weeks away, or a major change in the scripts or queries which cause a bigger performance drop (I suppose hard disk fragmentation might cause some as well) I don't know... if my sysadmin was out mountain climbing and schmoozing with product managers while his site was in seriously degraded performance, I'd fire him (That's a joke, I know chris is hard at work.. maybe he should fire himself ;) )
I don't know... if my sysadmin was out mountain climbing and schmoozing with product managers while his site was in seriously degraded performance, I'd fire him I don't know...if I had access to a free site like this and knew the guy running it was trying to juggle a million things while dealing with demanding readers I'd say "Thanks".
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Wouldn't it be funny, if eventually we discovered that the slow performance is due to, say .NET itself? Sorry for being politically incorrect (can't help it). ;P
Well, it might be funny but it wouldn't be accurate. ;P Our initial tests have shown that moving to .Net will result in a ~5x improvement in performance of page generation. Throw in web gardens, partial page caching, etc., and it should all make for a nice bump in performance. No, the problem right now is the load on the SQL Server, and the majority of that load is caused by the forum code. David
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Something else you might look into is MS's web cache software, SWC. I know that Version 3 is in beta right now and is expected to be released soon, but version 2 is available and is supposed to greatly improve the speed by not requiring dynamic content to be generated as often.
SWC (Scalable Web Cache) is only good for static pages, and only had significant benefit for NT 4.0. It cached static pages in memory, using a per-processor memory cache (making the cache per-processor made it faster). W2K already does good memory caching of files, so SWC doesn't add much performance. In any event, SWC is only good for static pages, which won't work for CodeProject because they do ads and all sorts of dynamic stuff. Of course, my preference for improving performance are our products: Active Page Generator for pre-rendering pages and page fragments. And ASPCache for data caching and page fragment caching. John Crim johnc@webgecko.com http://www.webgecko.com
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I don't know... if my sysadmin was out mountain climbing and schmoozing with product managers while his site was in seriously degraded performance, I'd fire him I don't know...if I had access to a free site like this and knew the guy running it was trying to juggle a million things while dealing with demanding readers I'd say "Thanks".
I don't know, did you not see the fact that I put a smiley in there to indicate it was a joke (and explicitly qualified it afterwards?) Why do you try to take a comment out of it's context and attempt to portray it as something else?
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Well, it might be funny but it wouldn't be accurate. ;P Our initial tests have shown that moving to .Net will result in a ~5x improvement in performance of page generation. Throw in web gardens, partial page caching, etc., and it should all make for a nice bump in performance. No, the problem right now is the load on the SQL Server, and the majority of that load is caused by the forum code. David
First I have to say that I really LOVE this site, and the forums :-) I have a few questions I really would like you to answar; How many daily sessions are there on this site? How many pagehits? What database are you using? (SQL Server 7.0 I guess) I can see that you are using IIS 5.0... Are the webserver and database server on the same hardware-box? What kind of hardware runs the database server (processors, ram, disks, raid)? How big is the database-file? I mean, I have been working with databases for several years, and I have seen queries that took almost 30 seconds to execute, but when we optimized the SQL code, they executed in under 1 second... No offence, really, I have a great respect for you guys, it's just that I know my way around SQL Server, and don't see why it's so slow... Lately Chriss was talking about a Serverfarm, a database cluster and that kinda stuff, but I guess you haven't implemented it yet... - Anders