Website load time is crazy variable

worc

I have two sites set up on one shared hosting service in Ireland - hosting provider is in the "Where to get hosting" sticky in this forum. Been with them going on 4 years now and no troubles until the last few weeks.

I'm now finding that when clicking through to the sites the screen will stay grey for upto 31 seconds (I've been timing it) until the sites even begin to load up. Testing to make sure it wasn't just my connection I've also opened my sites then clicked open 11 other sites I have in my quicklaunch toolbar and everyone of them opens perfectly while my site still doesn't. Annoyingly, sometimes I check the two sites and they load in 2-3 seconds. I've tested the sites at various times and as late as 4 a.m. and they still have big variances in load/response times.

Both sites are Joomla with PageSpeed's of 83 and 82, both YSlow grades of B (haven't set up Parallelise Downloads or Cookieless content). Just to say I'm no pro designer, infact I'm not a web designer at all, I'm a self-taught "joomla module rearranger/css/image editor" :rolleyes:.

While the sites are acting up I have pinged them and get 12-13ms Max. One site gets about 30 visitors a week while the other gets about 200. Monthly bandwidth allowed is 100GB, of which the most ever used was about 800MB. No flash content on any site, no fancy image rotators, and only one non-standard joomla plugin which is a paid plugin from rockettheme so pretty sure it's up to scratch.

I'm sort of stumped on this and can't understand what's going on. Would anyone know if there's something I need to check, change, test etc?

cormee

What about JavaScript? If you have any (especially if it's calling on external resources - ie. Google Analytics ) in the body of your document try moving it to just before your </body> tag

Webmonkey

Could be delayed access to MySQL database for example, holding the site up.

You should submit a support ticket to your hosting provider.

worc

Thanks for the replies guys.

I didn't consider the google analytics, have moved it just before the </body> now, thanks for that one. Where did (I think) I read advice saying google analytics should be in the head!? Shows I'm still a nub at this.

If the sites continue to be slow I'll get onto hosting and ask about the databases then, cheers!

PaulPinnacle

worc wrote: »

Where did (I think) I read advice saying google analytics should be in the head!? Shows I'm still a nub at this.

Chances are you would have read to include the code just before the </head> on the official Google documentation at the time you generated the code.

Eoin

Perhaps also try checking a completely static page that doesn't do any database calls or reference any other files.

jmcc

It sounds like an overloaded database server. A lot of brochureware websites using PHP and MySQL are written by people who should never have been allowed near a database without proving they know how to use an index in a table. Consequently a pile of really badly written queries and schema on a lot of small databases can grind a shared database server down and this may be what you are seeing during peak business hours. However diagnosing this stuff on database servers is tricky, even for people who know what they are doing, and the best solution would be a move to dedicated hosting.

Regards...jmcc

cormee

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Chances are you would have read to include the code just before the </head> on the official Google documentation at the time you generated the code.

Didn't realise they had changed that - I was still working off the traditional method http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55480

Sorry OP - bad advice

worc

No worries Cormee - though I searched google for "google analytics in the head or body" and first option that comes up is this saying exactly what you did...then back in May there was this. Seems to be taking a long time for the instructions to be updated if that top poster is at google.

PaulPinnacle

worc wrote: »

Seems to be taking a long time for the instructions to be updated if that top poster is at google.

To be fair, it all depends on which code you're using. There was different 'advice' for the old code, the beta asynchronous code and the 'new' (non beta) asynchronous code (which they recommend you should be using/upgrade to).

For the 'old' it was before </body>
For the beta it was after <body>
And for the 'new' it's before </head>

In many cases, it will still work fine in 'other locations', I'd personally stick with the </head> location to help ensure you get the code to fire quickly so you don't miss rapid bounces.