My Site is SLOWWW and I keep getting "you have chosen to open" errors

Here is the site that we released a few weeks ago. Periodically it gets very slow and my browser won’t even load the pages before that annoying timeout "You have chosen to open..." FF dialog box appears (see attached jpg) trying to download an empty PHP page (or is this a clue in itself?)

I’m using shared Site5 hosting and would switch to dedicated in a minute if I was sure it would fix the performance issues, unfortunately Site5 doesn’t report any uptime or load issues on the server I’m on and I’m not convinced it’s the issue.

If anyone is willing to take a look I’d be forever grateful, ask questions I’ll answer. The site:

http://www.diopa.org

I’m using the NewsParserX snippet once on the homepage but for now I’ve left it cached so as to reduce it as an issue. All the pages take a long time to load and get around to timing-out eventually. The "Diocesan Office" page is arrived at through a "ForwardToFirstChild" snippet I also found around here. That page used to go really slow but I was able to tweak a few things to make it at least no slower than anything else.

I expect delays on the Calendar (iPhpIcalendar in an iFrame) and "Church Finder" (Google Maps mash-up) pages, but all the other ones are straight text content. I do use the [~78~] style of reference for internal links so I suppose this is causing some extra DB calls?

AIM: NL7XF -- feel free to IM me...

Any ideas? Is anyone else seeing this site as slow-to-very-slow? I’m on a Wireless broadband connection in Northern New Mexico which is a factor as well, but every other site I’m working with is coming up in respectable times...

Thanks,

Loren

I visted the site; there do seem to be some odd delays, after the content is rendered even, as if some process is taking a long time at the end of the request? Do you have any plugins installed and configured on this site that run OnWebPagePrerender or OnWebPageCache? Also, the calendar page in particular seems to hang the longest, and never responds with anything useful for me; just blank content in the standard template. Very odd...

I did have the emailobstficator plugin installed but could never get it to work. It was hooked into the OnWebPagePreRender (I think that was the event). I both disabled that and unchecked the event earlier today though...

* The calendar page work for me and is a iFrame... I suspect you just need to wait longer, eventually the page loads the phpicalendar and then auto resized the iframe.

I allways get month.php to download when I try to view the calendar page.. loads a while at first, then sends the month.php for me to download.

Gotcha about the calendar. I’ve gotten that results a couple of times today as well.

This is the same thing I get when other pages don’t come-up (though then it’s index.php). I believe this behaviour is a FF 1.5.0.2 "problem", like after waiting X time period for a page to load it gives up and tries to send what it has so far which is an empty file so it won’t load and is assumed a downloadable...

As for the slowness I can’t seem to crack it except that I can’t really say I’m seeing the same results on my local server install so it must be something funny about Site5’s setup. I’m considering moving to a dedicated server but I’d hate to start doing my own administration if it’s not related to this issue...

I can’t really say I’m seeing the same results on my local server install

In this case it seems quite obvious that it’s not a MODx but a server issue.

Is everyone getting "normal" load times on the Home page and Diocesan Office page/s? If so I’m pretty sure I’ve got a local ISP issue. The Calendar page is a problematic either way and it can be ignored for now.

I kept assuming this was a hosting issue as well, but I’m getting basically the same results on both:

Site5: http://www.diopa.org

and

HostGator: http://www.goodgourd.com/diopa

Last night I was getting ping times in the 500-600ms range over my connection, but this morning they’re back down to 90-200ms range. I’d assumed yesterday that my ISP was the only issue and wrote them a message telling them so. This morning though the ping times are back down to a tolerable range and I’m still getting FF asking me to download blank PHP pages after timing-out.

If anyone still has a moment to try this again it’s greatly appreciated.

Either way, thanks for the help!

Loren

Both sites are far too slow.
http://www.diopa.org didn’t open at all, http://www.goodgourd.com/diopa works, hm slow, but it works (except the calendar, of course)
To track this issue down I would suggest you put a bit of static content on both sides, maybe with images of some 100 kb in size. Than you could separate the server/connection issue from application (MODx) issues. Next step would be to create a dump of your mysql database, since the db is another potential source of performance-issues.

** Of course just as I ask for help ruling out the hosting provider the server goes down: http://florida.websitepulse.net/uptime/J6486I9161.html -- So www.diopa.org will not work for the moment. So we’ll focus on http://www.goodgourd.com/diopa as it’s definately up and exhibits basically the same behaviour.

I have a static version of the homepage up and it loads about 5-7 seconds faster than the ModX home page: http://www.goodgourd.com/diopa/test.html

I have backed-up the database and the entire site (thanks ModBak for making it easy) and restored everything locally and get what I think are totally reasonable load times on the pages (2-4 seconds on the home page). Adding a bit of remote transfer time to that shouldn’t make for such slow response on the site.

If ppaul hadn’t suggested the alternate site was slow too I’d think that their might not be a problem. How many seconds are others seeing this home page load in?

Sorry for being so verbose, I’m having multiple issues here and trying to isolate them.

Thanks,

Loren

Hmmm, all the pages I’m accessing, both the static html and the modx delivered pages, seem to be responding very quickly; under a second on my attempts just now.

Don’t you just love working on the internet... sigh