[8thos]

Originally Posted by extreme-gaming

I believe from what I've been reading is that if your forum is in the root, then it sharding won't work (because the cookies affect any subfolders within, just like a htaccess does to folders if it's set at the root). Cookies will still be delivered. If you make a folder for your forum and move it there to like /forum, then the subdomain sharding would work to prevent cookies.

Ooohhhhh.

Crapppp.

That would break a whole lotta links right? Cause my ranking to go down?

Damn.

[final kaoss]

It would. You can setup a 301 redirect for google and your visitors though. Within 3-4 month's you should be getting less & less crawl errors/redirects. Personally, I would mass message your members about the change or announce it, then go for it. Or register a new domain.

[8thos]

Damn.

--------------- Added 01 Aug 2011 at 03:32 ---------------

By the way I used that link you posted to optimize images and it made my first byte time faster. Thanks a lot man.

[final kaoss]

No problem, it wasn't too hard to follow the way I explained it was it?

EDIT: Seems you could still use a few more optimized images
Optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 35.6KiB (57% reduction).

Originally Posted by Octavius.

Damn.

--------------- Added 01 Aug 2011 at 03:32 ---------------

By the way I used that link you posted to optimize images and it made my first byte time faster. Thanks a lot man.

[8thos]

I optimized those images and after uploading them they did not work. They appeared as question marks. The main ones that site was worried about were my menu images. I optimized those. I think I can optimize photopost thumbnails. I had jaxel's media library in the side widget but I need to optimize the thumbnails to be smaller first. I can do that in the settings.

[final kaoss]

You must have dome something wrong. Appearing as question marks means it didn't find the image. Aka a 404 error.

[Mooff]

Originally Posted by Octavius.

Damn.

--------------- Added 01 Aug 2011 at 03:32 ---------------

By the way I used that link you posted to optimize images and it made my first byte time faster. Thanks a lot man.

What?

Sorry to say that, but how is optimizing images related to first byte time?

Originally Posted by wiki

Time To First Byte or TTFB is a measurement that is often used as an indication of the responsiveness of a webserver or other network resources.

It is the duration from the virtual user making an HTTP request to the first byte of the page being received by the browser. This time is made up of the socket connection time, the time taken to send the HTTP request and the time to taken to get the first byte of the page.

In rough the time adds up like this:
Sending http-request (timing should be similar to a ping) - your webserver (apache?) connecting to your php-system, your php system then will check whether the site can be served via your php cache or whether it has to compute everything new. For vbulletin: running the forum.php including all those database queries, takeing the output, go through the template - build the html page. And finally it goes to the user. At this point your webserver finally does know what images/html it has to send. Up until this point he does nothing and waits. So optimizing images does not influence the first byte at all. I would go for statistical fluctuation here.


You can speed up that process by using a web accelerator (varnish for example). With this it would go like that: http-request goes in, web accelerator sends cached page back. We would avoid all database queries and php compilation etc.
Since we can't really serve our users some cache data which does not check for their permissions, web accelerators can only used (not 100% true) for guests and crawlers.

But well guests and crawlers make up most of the traffic anyway, so varnish is a huge gain, really huge gain in speed and server load.

(web accelerator setup is pretty advanced and probably can't be explained in a simple how to - you need a tech admin who knows exactly what he is doing)

[8thos]

Originally Posted by Mooff

What?

Sorry to say that, but how is optimizing images related to first byte time?



In rough the time adds up like this:
Sending http-request (timing should be similar to a ping) - your webserver (apache?) connecting to your php-system, your php system then will check whether the site can be served via your php cache or whether it has to compute everything new. For vbulletin: running the forum.php including all those database queries, takeing the output, go through the template - build the html page. And finally it goes to the user. At this point your webserver finally does know what images/html it has to send. Up until this point he does nothing and waits. So optimizing images does not influence the first byte at all. I would go for statistical fluctuation here.


You can speed up that process by using a web accelerator (varnish for example). With this it would go like that: http-request goes in, web accelerator sends cached page back. We would avoid all database queries and php compilation etc.
Since we can't really serve our users some cache data which does not check for their permissions, web accelerators can only used (not 100% true) for guests and crawlers.

But well guests and crawlers make up most of the traffic anyway, so varnish is a huge gain, really huge gain in speed and server load.

(web accelerator setup is pretty advanced and probably can't be explained in a simple how to - you need a tech admin who knows exactly what he is doing)

I installed and ran vboptimize, some parts of vbsupercharged, disabled plugins, optimized some images, got rid of apture, activated cloudflare, used some of their compression settings (except for rocketload and minimize javascript and html because they messed up parts of my site) and even ran united forum sprites and my first byte time remains an F. Forwarding this to my host so they can take a look. Thanks.

[final kaoss]

You can always try this plugin as well, to reduce cookies from javascripts, css & images. (just point the resources to a subdomain)

http://wiki.netdna.com/Implementation/vBulletin

[8thos]

You mean buy vbSEO?


...............................

[final kaoss]

No, that plugin is free.

[8thos]

Where is the download for it? I didn't see it on that site. So I can use cloudflare cdn through this plugin?

BTW I found out what was slowing down my first byte time. It was vbenterprise translator. Either it's not configured right or it's just too much for my site. Disabled for now. Pretty dissapointed right now as it costs $200 something. Asked the mod creator if he does refunds just now.

[final kaoss]

http://discovertheartist.com/product-cdn.xml

(right click and save) & upload

[8thos]

Thanks! Trying to figure this out now.

--------------- Added 01 Aug 2011 at 21:59 ---------------

This is all I have left to fix for speed.

Combine static CSS and JS files: 0/100
Proper cookie usage: 32/100

That vbseo cdn link should fix the proper cookie usage right?

[final kaoss]

it should as long as you point it to either:

A cookieless subdomain
A cookieless domain

You can always get a free hosting account at x10hosting and put your static there & point to it.