site performance

Hello,

The last 2 days I've been busy optimizing the performance of my website.

I upgraded from 2.08 to 2.15 fixed all issues with deprecated code. Optimized the html and turned on all caching settings. Checked the entire site for 404's and checked the apache error log and it's all fine i think...

Now here's the thing. When I (and i assume nobody else) don't visit the site for like 10 minutes. The time the site loads is way to high. When i reload the page from the server right after this, it loads fast. But when i wait again for like 10 minutes it's slow again. (during this process the cache is not cleared)

Last night i run skipfish and it said the average http requests per second is like 22. I'm not sure but this seems low to me. To me it felt the performance issue was related to the server configuration. So i contacted the people at my shared hosting solution. They said it's probably related to plugins. Which seems weird to me because it loads the second time much faster.

Does anyone here have some experience with this kind of issues? Any advice would be greatly apreciated.

Kind regards,

Mayhem

It sounds like the cache is getting cleared and then when you load the site files have been recached thus fixing the problem.

Can you tell us more about the hosting environment, do you have any uncached calls, if so what are they?

I managed to find a temporary solution. I created a cronjob that does a single ping to the domainname every 5 minutes. The site loads fast now at the first load. Only i have to keep my pc on always.

I load all snippets cached except for getfeed, formit and the results of simplesearch. So i guess all calls that can be cached are cached.

I did a reverse IP lookup and there seem to be 58 websites on this server. There seem to be no warez sites or porn sites on the server. After a few clicks i found a wordpress site which has the same issue. Is there anything more you want to know about the server?

The way this is going it looks to me the problem not modx related. The problem seems to me that on the first page load the time to the first byte is too high. [ed. note: mayhem_1980 last edited this post 12 years, 5 months ago.]

You would need to tell us more about the hosting environment, for example is this a shared server, what version of apache/php/mysql are you using, how is php configured (dso/phpsuexec/cgi..), what is the typical server load.

Keep in mind there can be more sites on a server than a reverse ip lookup will reveal, as different ip addresses could come into play.

Today I put the site on another server as a test with the same configuration of modx.

It loads fast as hell, allways. It seems to me the problem is definitly server related. I'll confront my hosting with this and see how it goes.

I'll probably move to another host...

Glad to hear you were able to track down the problem. If you need any help with the hosting let me know. It sounds like the current server is just overloaded.