9 replies to this topic

[sabret00the]

I'm not talking about the image. If we're just talking about the image RMT is slower, but in terms of loading pages, batoto is the slowest. It seems to take an eternity just to connect to this site. I'm sure you already know but if not, I'm hoping this will finally put the issue on your radar as it's now got to the stage where MP is a more preferable location for speed alone.

[mhh]

The speed issue is always on our radar, it's not always easy to do something about it without spending a lot more money.

 

I'm not really sure what you consider to be slow but Batoto itself is pretty fast for me. And you aren't in Asia either, so you might want to do a traceroute and send that to Grumpy or censor the sensitive data and post it here. (Not sure what os you are on but on Windows it's tracert www.bato.to in the cmd console.)

 

And additionally you might want to try the new beta reader by going to http://vatoto.com/betaopt in and start reading. It preloads pages so that should help a lot with reading speed. Since there are no banner ads but very infrequent pop ups (which are being tested right now) we can actually properly preload now.

 

Also: http://vatoto.com/forums/topic/22613-new-image-distribution-network/(so the loading speed will hopefully improve even more.)

[sabret00the]

I'm running Ubuntu, since mtr allows you to resolve the IPs there's nothing sensitive in there.

 

Host                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. routerlogin.net                   0.0%   101    1.8   2.9   1.2  52.8   5.8
 2. 10.242.20.1                       0.0%   100    9.4  10.2   7.9  53.9   4.6
 3. bmly-core-2b-xe-230-0.network.vi  0.0%   100   10.2  12.9   8.4 107.1  11.8
 4. ???
 5. ???
 6. ???
 7. ???
 8. ???
 9. ams2-ic-1-ae0-0.network.virginme 27.0%   100   34.1  35.8  33.0  65.8   4.7
10. ams-ix.nl.eu.swiftway.net         2.0%   100   29.7  35.7  28.1 187.6  24.6
11. 251.17.100.94.static.swiftway.ne  0.0%   100   31.4  32.1  28.6 113.6   8.7
12. bato.to                           0.0%   100   32.5  30.0  27.4  49.1   2.9

 

Basically coming out of Virgin Media's servers there's a 27% loss it seems.
 

[Daktyl]

There's a good amount of network strain going on, but aside from that IP.Board (which Batoto runs on top of) isn't exactly the fastest piece of software. It contains thousands of lines of PHP code. PHP in-and-of itself isn't very fast (great for personal/smaller sites, not so much larger ones) and when you add in the fact that the current version was written 2 years ago (or was it 1.5?), it gets pretty bad pretty quick.

 

There are a couple things that could be used to fix this:

1. using HHVM (Facebook's PHP interpreter/compiler). The major problem with this is that it doesn't support all of PHP yet, so it might not work with IP.Board (or Grumpy's custom code).

2. Upgrading to IP.Board 4.0 soon. It's a re-write of most of the code to be faster and more modern (aka written with better practices).

 

Of course, Grumpy has the final say in those things so...

[sabret00the]

There's a good amount of network strain going on, but aside from that IP.Board (which Batoto runs on top of) isn't exactly the fastest piece of software. It contains thousands of lines of PHP code. PHP in-and-of itself isn't very fast (great for personal/smaller sites, not so much larger ones) and when you add in the fact that the current version was written 2 years ago (or was it 1.5?), it gets pretty bad pretty quick.

 

There are a couple things that could be used to fix this:

1. using HHVM (Facebook's PHP interpreter/compiler). The major problem with this is that it doesn't support all of PHP yet, so it might not work with IP.Board (or Grumpy's custom code).

2. Upgrading to IP.Board 4.0 soon. It's a re-write of most of the code to be faster and more modern (aka written with better practices).

 

Of course, Grumpy has the final say in those things so...

Given all that's happening especially with the rise of personal mobile devices, seeking an alternative to IPB seems a pretty good long term solution. I do much more of my browsing on tablet and phone these days and the user experience even excluding the speed issues, isn't great for touch devices.

[Subbed]

I can confirm that the loading speed is not caused by the Linux OS, as I'm using it as well and the pages load instantly pretty much every single time for me. As far as the distro is concerned, I wouldn't know about Ubuntu, as I'm a Fedora user myself.

Besides upgrading your custom browser to the latest version, checking if your internet connection speed is reasonable and clearing the cache, I couldn't really find anything to recommend on the matter from my side.

[Daktyl]

Given all that's happening especially with the rise of personal mobile devices, seeking an alternative to IPB seems a pretty good long term solution. I do much more of my browsing on tablet and phone these days and the user experience even excluding the speed issues, isn't great for touch devices.

1. Grumpy has already separated out the reader/front page/etc into it's own code. It no longer sits on top of IP.Board (merely uses hooks to grab the theme and uses IP.B's database structure). Comic pages and the follows system (not the follows page) are still using IP.Board though iirc. So IP.Board isn't slowing Batoto down directly, it's more of an indirect thing because so many people use the forums. Given how much they're used, it'd be way more of a pain (for both Grumpy and the users) to try converting to anything else (besides, the only really "faster" thing you're going to get is NodeBB, which isn't that great in the features department... all of the best alternatives also use PHP). Upgrading to IP.Board 4.0 when we're ready is the much simpler solution (though, "simpler" is a relative term *sigh*).

 

2. Grumpy has (at least tried) to disable the mobile version of the site because it tends to screw up the reader, while the desktop mode of the reader actually looks pretty okay on mobile devices. IP.Board's mobile forum view is quite nice and slim/fast (if you know how to get to it).

[Mad Hero]

Giving a glance to the homepage (and other pages) I see a lot of html repeated (mainly style attributes). Would reducing the html (using classes for css instead) improve the speed a little?

[Grumpy]

I actually have quite a lot of stats on speed and such that gets out.

 

Of 10,000 pages processed, about 20 take more than 0.5 seconds and 2 take more than 2 seconds. Which means ~99.978% of the pages load very well. Our average page processing time is 75~80ms. This is very consistent throughout the day except during few cron jobs which doesn't take that long. During these timed tasks, we still achieve 98% of the pages processed under 0.5seconds.

 

So if Batoto is slow for you all the time, there's likely an issue somewhere other than our site itself, and something likely out of my control.

 

Some other things will add to the time of 75ms as a user. 75ms is strictly from server side processing.

 

Site lookup - actually finding where bato.to resides. (like 200ms)

SSL - If in forums, or similar (like 100ms)

Distance/Latency - How long it takes (like 100ms)

etc.

But as I said, these are networking stuff that's not really in my direct control.

 

--------------------------------

 

The following line is actually not a concern:

ams2-ic-1-ae0-0.network.virginme 27.0%   100   34.1  35.8  33.0  65.8   4.7

 

Lot of mid-points have ping throttle in place. So these types of tests tend to get high packet loss score. If this one got 27% and then the next one similar and so forth until the end, then it would highlight that point as the fault.

 

It only matters that you get 0 packet loss at the end point. Batoto server has ping throttle as well, so, heavier ping requests or multiple testing ping at the same time often also get a wrong conclusion of packet loss.

 

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If you make excessive requests from our server, you will actually get throttled (and in extreme cases, banned), putting you in worse position than if you didn't. If you are using scripts or something else that might cause more requests from our site than a normal user would, I suggest you turn it off.

 

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If you are using private browsing, or other forms which prevents browser caching, it also makes a huge difference. Batoto is very heavy in css/js requirements (lot of it being from the IPB). Once loaded, they're supposed to be remembered by your browser and not ask for it again. Because of that when browser caching is disabled, the css/js have to be re-downloaded or re-checked every time. This makes a HUGE difference in your load time.

 

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Ads can also affect loading time of the page. Which is again, bit out of my control. But they are supposed to load after the primary comic image. Though... supposed to and actual is a different story.

[sabret00the]

I filed a bug against Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1171391