Site growing pains...

OK, site running for two years now.

Site size in cpanel 14.82GB, with 1050 members.

Problems are coming up as members complaining of the site being slow.

I never really checked; the admin account is super fast. So I logged into the test accounts to check and sure enough, the regular site members experience a very sluggish site, the admin account is lighting fast. I'm at a total loss.

I checked the databases for overhead, 4MB and cleared/optimized but no change.

GT still shows the site being fast as it is to the guest, once logged in, the site starts to creep.

Server

• 10 cores
• unlimited MHz
• 4GB RAM

site address?

 you should know the site I'm referring to... pm sent. TY 

Damn, today has been good here.

Some much missed activity from good conversation folks.

well your first response time from the server is pretty high.

I would suggest install the profiler module and look whats taking so much time, send me the admin login too, i will take a look.

Plus, any good reason to turn off JS compression?

 Because Deano always says, or I thought he did, to turn it off.

OK, follow up to my dilemma.

Turns out a VPS just don't cut it anymore.

This is the results now.

I was directed to a new server.

I now am running Nginx, with Webmin, no more cPanel as suggested for speed.

Running the OPcache system which is perfect!

Three more dollars than I was currently paying too, that is all.

Now I have a dedicated server with SSD drives, the speed is like night and day to what I've been running for two years now.

Old server,

New server,

I assumed since the admin account was fast, so was the site for users; this was/is not the case.

It was the hard disk throughput/transfer rates too.

Dedicated servers have always been faster than VPS. I don't care how many CPU's or memory they claim that cram into them. They can't outperform a dedicated.

However even tho the SSD drives are fast, they do not have anywhere near as much storage space as normal drives. I guess as long as you don't need it. But i would not use SSD's. To small for me.

Yup. I always run with it off. It can cause to many problems. For me reliability is more important than speed. If i need more speed, i'll get a better server.

I had someone to go with SSD because of the speed of the drives.  However, I question the use of such drives as there are more things to a fast website then just pulling data from the drives.  I think the other bottlenecks in the server/webserver/MySQL server would come into play and negate the use of SSD and the small size; as Deano pointed out, make them impractical for a site where there are a large number of users uploading large content such as videos.  That aside, that new server is a nice piece of kit.

Welcome to the world of Nginx

 Size right now is not important, site speed is the golden rule for Google, slow site means lower or not ranking at all.

If I need more space I will just upgrade, I was going to get the 2 x 2TB but they were not avalable when I looked. I'm very happy with what I have now,

I mean look and the HDD for old VPS,

•  (2.1 GB) copied, 10.0075 s, 2.3 GB/s, that's ten seconds to transfer a 2GB file.

The new dedi server reports, 

• (2.1 GB) copied, 0.94072 s, 2.3 GB/s, down from ten seconds load time to less than ONE second. I'm extremely pleased with these results.

 Jumped right in, but I have a good teacher helping me! 

Ah, but you said guest speed was fine. And considering google browses the site as a guest, well.. google would not see the slow down for logged in members.

 Yes your right, as the GTmetrix didn't change that much.

The reason for speed, when members leave because of the sluggish site performances.

So true, people are impatient.

 Are you kidding, they want the pages there like FB speed, nothing else.

If not I have friends that have told me that, just to slow on pages, I just never paid it mind. Until it was laid out in the SSH test.

I have been fine with the new profiles each day, and none are spam accounts.

Got tools in place for that.

What did concern me was the return visits, very low. Now I see why.

tune your database, you'll see that helps

 I'm not good at that.

mysqltuner.pl

Simply run it, and it'll tell you what you need to do.

 Thanks for the reply; you mean in SSH?

Yep. You'll also need the MySQL root username and password (you may be able to simply run it in most cases, like on cPanel servers).

 Thanks

Hi,

I would recommend to check your sql vars just from phpmyadmin:

query_cache_limit

query_cache_size

106 requests is slowing you down.  Do have some rss feeds or ads on the home page ?  50 page blocks on one page ?  reduce some of the content on that page and it will speed up a good amount.  See if you can get it down to 50 or less... 

My pingdom score was :  and yes it's only a vps and i have to disagree with dean on some of the points made above.

http://dolphin-techs.com

Tested from New York City, New York, USA on August 13 at 23:45:54

 me?

Page load time: 1.52s
Total page size: 495KB
Total number of requests: 47

Just saying try for less requests if you can... thats all, even just a couple heavy ones.  You can always put it back but see if the trade off is worth it to you.

 i did, my piwik code was in there and i forgot it was. that was on an old server here at home and was adding a lot of time to it.

thank you..