Hi friends (as pD would say),
As a few of you have noticed, LBRB is getting a bit slow. I think there are some obvious reasons for that – the database is heavy with nearly 9 years worth of posts and comments, our hosts are not all they could be etc.
However, there are a few things I can and have tried. I’ve cut out a few of the site features and I’ve optimised scripts etc to within an inch of their life. What I need now is your input. Is the site faster? Is it performing better? What pages/sections are particulalry troublesome for you? etc etc.
Thanks for any input you can offer.
Left Brain Right Brain 
No change here. Be interesting to know the performance of other sites on the same server. Obviously, you don’t want to go slashing at the page code if the issue is elsewhere.
speed is not important to me because the content is very good,i love this site slow or fast
It still seems very slow to load – have you looked at tools like Google’s pagespeed? http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/ Might give a clue as to where the problem is.
Yeah Alan, I checked the site out in that – it gives us 80/100 which is pretty good but it doesn’t test the page load time which seems a bit of a waste of time. Never mind, there are tools that do.
Ah! One of the Google tools give page load speeds per file, but obviously not that one…
I find that the site is loading faster now. Not sure why others are having a different experience, but I’m not all that tech-y anymore.
Have you thought of archiving older posts and comments, say everything over a year old?
Actually it is a bit faster. And please do not archive old posts.
Page loading seems fine to me (quicker than my own blogspot for example). The only issue for me is that the Search page never seems to work – click on the link and there’s no box to input a search term. I use Safari on a Mac but I’ve just tried and the same happens with Firefox.
Performance has improved for me, although I do see some code (Warning: ob_start() [ref.outcontrol]: output handler ‘ob_gzhandler’) at the top of some pages in both Chrome and Firefox.
The home page certainly is lots faster, but I think the actual headline/comments are still a little slow though not as slow as before. Much improved overall. Thanks.
Faster today Kev.
Could I suggest you put instructions on how to use google advanced search on your search page, for doing a site search.
Jon Brock:
I have found that some sites have issues with their internal search systems. For this site and several others I just use Google’s site command.
Go to Google and put this in the search box:
subject site:http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk
Not as fast as some other pages I visit, but faster just now than it has been for me in the last few months, and acceptable.
Fine now. I don’t get the sense that something might be hanging. Thanks.
Much better! Thanks Kev!!!
It’s slow again this afternoon. Are you by any chance with Bluehost? If you are there are big problems reported with them.
Yeah we are – we’re victims of CPU Throttling too 😦
Is there another host you can easily move to?
Not at the moment – theres about 10 domains (some admittedly dead) on here but some live. It’ll take some co-ordination and time plus some research of who to move to.