How to speed up performance of folders?

MileHighAko · August 7, 2013

I have a site that is showing very poor performance displaying folders. The following two pages consistently take more than 10 seconds to fully load (the shell will load, but it takes a LONG time for all of the folders to display):

http://www.sabercatphotos.com/Year-201213/Football
http://www.sabercatphotos.com/Year-201213/Wrestling

Both of these pages contain galleries that are smart galleries - is that why they load so slowly?
Also, this account was a trial account until today - are trial accounts treated differently?

I have gone through and manually selected the preview image of each gallery in hopes that it would help speed it up, but that had no impact.

Any advice is appreciated.

Aristophanes · August 7, 2013

Tried your site and it took over 15 seconds to display.

Ferguson · August 7, 2013

Just so you have a data point from another internet connection, I get about 3 seconds on the first and 8 seconds on the second (I'm on a 120mbs Comcast connection).

And for what it is worth, I've found SM in general to be quite slow today, surprisingly so as I expected it to be worse during the initial few days (and indeed the first day was bad, but mostly steady since). I've seen a couple people mention it in passing but nothing specific from SM.

Sorry I have no real help to offer.

PS. I've been here for many years and never heard that they treat trial accounts differently. Also I don't use smart galleries so I have nothing to compare to. But some of my regular galleries and folders have been pretty slow, and if I do something similar to a smart gallery like click through on a keyword search some of mine take more than 10 seconds to load also.

MileHighAko · August 7, 2013

Ferguson wrote: »

Just so you have a data point from another internet connection, I get about 3 seconds on the first and 8 seconds on the second (I'm on a 120mbs Comcast connection).

Thanks Ferguson for your response. However my guess is that the 3 seconds on the first is not correct. I don't think the full page had loaded. What I've noticed is on the first page it will load the "Misc" folder quickly, but there are 4 folders on that page: Varsity, JV, Frosh, Misc. If you wait 10-15 seconds it will finally load the other folders.

mbonocore · August 7, 2013

Hi Adam,

They actually loaded in pretty normal and quick time for me, and I have a pretty bad internet connection here at home too.

Trial accounts are definitely not treated any different. If anything we would make everything faster to get you to stay! (Joking people...JOKING

)

MileHighAko · August 7, 2013

mbonocore wrote: »

Hi Adam,

They actually loaded in pretty normal and quick time for me, and I have a pretty bad internet connection here at home too.

Trial accounts are definitely not treated any different. If anything we would make everything faster to get you to stay! (Joking people...JOKING )

Thanks for your response. But will you please look at the pages again and see the difference in the page loading and the contents loading?

The page does load quickly - but the contents take several seconds. I have tested this from multiple internet connections, browsers, etc.

The problem: the page loads, but the folders content takes several seconds to complete loading, and there is no indication that it is still loading. See the example screen shot below. Notice there are 4 folder sections on this page, with 26 galleries.

Try the page yourself: http://www.sabercatphotos.com/Year-201213/Football

How long does it take to display all four folders and all 26 galleries?

phaserbeam · August 7, 2013

MileHighAko wrote: »

Try the page yourself: http://www.sabercatphotos.com/Year-201213/Football

How long does it take to display all four folders and all 26 galleries?

about 15secs on FF23, Konqueror using the WebKit rendering engine and old Opera12.

mbonocore · August 7, 2013

lt took about 9 seconds for me. It is rendering a good amount of previews. I am not sure how the back end works regarding this, but I will ask! But to be honest, it's probably not something we will be able to look into right away, but I will keep you posted.

MileHighAko · August 7, 2013

mbonocore wrote: »

lt took about 9 seconds for me. It is rendering a good amount of previews. I am not sure how the back end works regarding this, but I will ask! But to be honest, it's probably not something we will be able to look into right away, but I will keep you posted.

Tell the heroes I said "thanks"! It is working MUCH speedier now.

phaserbeam · August 8, 2013

MileHighAko wrote: »

Tell the heroes I said "thanks"! It is working MUCH speedier now.

Confirmed... loads much faster right now.

Ferguson · August 8, 2013

MileHighAko wrote: »

Thanks Ferguson for your response. However my guess is that the 3 seconds on the first is not correct. I don't think the full page had loaded. What I've noticed is on the first page it will load the "Misc" folder quickly, but there are 4 folders on that page: Varsity, JV, Frosh, Misc. If you wait 10-15 seconds it will finally load the other folders.

You are correct, I see 2 galleries quickly and thought i was done, didn't wait (many seconds) for the rest.

MileHighAko · August 8, 2013

It seems to be much faster now, but still isn't "quick". It is acceptable for the time being - I can accept that because they are 100% smart galleries pulling from different smug accounts that there is a bit of a performance hit.

What's interesting now is that if I don't refresh the page for a while (I haven't timed it, but think of increments of 30-60 minutes), the content takes about 5-8 seconds to fully load, but afterwards it only takes about 2 seconds (even on different computers/browsers). I'm guessing that some cache engine in the background has to be poked now and then to keep the content fresh.

My primary smug site that doesn't use smart galleries is very fast, loading a folder with 104 galleries in less than 2 seconds. So I'm pretty sure that the heavy use of smart galleries is having an impact. Like I said, it's acceptable for now (5-8/2 is much better than the 10-15 seconds I was previously experiencing), hopefully over time it will improve.

Ferguson · August 9, 2013

MileHighAko wrote: »

What's interesting now is that if I don't refresh the page for a while (I haven't timed it, but think of increments of 30-60 minutes), the content takes about 5-8 seconds to fully load, but afterwards it only takes about 2 seconds (even on different computers/browsers). I'm guessing that some cache engine in the background has to be poked now and then to keep the content fresh.

I don't know the details but am pretty sure SM uses a caching service (Akamai?).

How to speed up performance of folders?

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