By Over the past few weeks or even months, many of you have noticed, commented, emailed discussed and overall just voiced your displeasure with the horrific load times on Phandroid. We heard your complaints and implemented several tactics to lessen the server load and improve server load time. They worked… but not well enough as witnessed by Ahmed’s comment back-to-back comments on the Middle East Android article:
1. ahmed wrote on August 27, 2009
omg omg omg yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
my goooood i am soooo happy u cant believe it i have been jumping about the house fdor the last five minutes calling everyone updating every status put everything on sale
wowwww im soo happy thanx a billion for telling usgosh im soooo happy u made my year
2. ahmed wrote on August 27, 2009
ps:why does ur website suck i follow u on google reader and it took me like 6 refreshes to get to the web site
i mean the accessibility not the design the design is awesome
Unfortunately Ahmed was right – anything less than loading lightning fast is irresponsible – Phandroid’s want their Android news and they want it NOW! In the past, Phandroid and other site’s in the network (AndroidForums, PalmWebOS, etc…) were running on a dedicated server. Incremental improvements weren’t cutting it so we doubled down – Phandroid is now run by TWO dedicated servers that split the load and should have the site running lightning fast the vast majority of the time.
If slow load times have bothered you, we hope you’ll be unbothered and then pleased and excited about our improvements. Have a great weekend and we hope you love the new speedy snappiness as much as we do!
UPDATE: After complaints in the comments about the server STILL being slow, Phandroid readers who specialize in server optimization (Artem Russakovskii & Thaya Kareeson) contacted us offering to help. After a step-by-step solution was implemented… problem solved! Probably OVERsolved, actually. I think its safe to say that load times aren’t going to be a problem around here for quite awhile.
Well done, now I don’t have to go to the iphone fanboy pages to see what they hate and what I’ll like =)
Bravo maestro …..!!!!!!!
:o
thanx a billion for listening and yah the website new speed is amazing
im going out in few minutes to the mall to check out the phone wondering how will get the money i just bought a 5800 3 weeks ago
This article took more than 30 sec to load. Still – FAIL.
I think 2 DEDICATED server is way overkill for this website.
I’ve been working for highly visited, highly interactive e-commerce and social websites that ran fine with a single server.
Something else must be wrong …
Er, it’s still agonisingly slow…
You should have a development copy of this site with debugging on so you can figure out which queries are slowing it down. Probably something really inefficient like executing a query in a loop to find a value instead of using a variable in the query. That’s incredibly common. Could also just be that the tables need to be optimized.
i agree, it is stll slow. after clicking there is a pause before any action.
I think the slowness is the ad serving….that’s my guess.
And yes I want you to have ads to keep it free, just suggesting a culprit not related to your servers.
Very nice! I notice it loading faster on my g1. No 3g where I live, so it is appreciated.
@Dave – thanks for the honesty buddy. Anything you guys can say/observe to help us identify how to speed things up is appreciated. I suppose it COULD be the ad server but even if it was… no WAY should it take 30+ seconds… that doesn’t make sense.
@Rob, well I’m assuming he’s from overseas so it could possibly be his connection/distance.
And when I first read my name I was like, “wait, what?” Haha. Oh and no, I’m not the same Ahmed in the article :P.
@ Rob – I think it’s ad-related too. Loading up the site in Firefox w/ Adblock is fast as hell, but loading it up in Google Chrome takes longer, and Chrome renders faster than FF. So.. must be the ads. Where do you Ads come from (company/country)?
Also Rob, you MAY want to choose to hide your domain registration info dude. Most sites offer it for a few bucks extra. Got your name, addy, phone, email all out there o_O
Great job on improving the speed. But u didnt need a new server, you could have rubed cheetha blood on the old server. ;)
Also.. are you hosted on Windows or Linux?
umm, I never had a problem with the site. I mean its not like a BBC ticker that I would need super lightning action. And considering android news is like 3-4 articles per day on an average, its not really much to be coming back to so very often. Sorry if I sounded a bit off, my two cents :D
Gimme a shout if you need anything mate. Two servers is too much, it’s probably something relatively simple but finding these things is always a pain. As a rule of thumb load the page, then do View Source when it hangs…it will tell you which bit of code is causing the prob. I run coolsmartphone.com by the way
@ybandg: I had assumed Linux, but now I realize that it’s dumb to make that assumption. If the server is hosted on Windows, that could be a large contributor. But yeah, my first guesses would be the advertisements or a minor hitch in a query. I seem to load the front page more slowly than any articles.
thank you, thank you, thank you… the load time was horrible. I had to disable graphics to get it to load at peak times.
@Ahmed – I am in the US where I think Rob is hosting this.
@ybandg – I am using Chrome as well and see the slowness.
@Rob – I see it on both sites, but know that it is very intermittant. This morning for example it seems snappy. This problem has existed for months, sometimes it takes forever.
Finally – @Ron – I agree this is not breaking news but slow servers mean people will eventually move on to another site/community.
@ahmed i suggest u change ur name ive been addicted to rthis website forever
common people it did get a little bit better