freecadweb.org performance issues

[kkremitzki]

Not sure if anyone else has noticed, but for me, the performance of several of the web apps powering the project leave quite a bit to be desired, so I wanted to make a thread to discuss the issue and see if anyone can make suggestions for improvements.

I did some very cursory testing, both of "production" freecadweb.org as well as "staging" staging.freecad.io. The first is located somewhere in Germany and the second is in Italy so both will experience the trans-Atlantic lag from my location. I did forced refreshes with Ctrl+F5 on Firefox Nightly and got the following results:

Prod:

• Homepage: 838 KB, 2.63s
• Forum: 1.05 MB, 2.01s
• Wiki: 586 KB, 7.48s
• Tracker: 1.12 MB, 8.30s

Staging

• Homepage: 597 KB, 1.27s
• Forum: 501 KB, 1.57s
• Wiki: 485 KB, 3.46s
• Tracker: 688 KB, 2.42s

[Kunda1]

Reminds me of this quote:

If it could save a person’s life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.

Just swap out 'boot' for 'load'.
I think it's time to do something about issue #2895 like... find a better host.

[DeepSOIC]

at the moment I'm in CZ, very close to Germany. The forum page full refresh takes about the same: 1.5-2 seconds.

[NormandC]

What tool did you use to get these exact timings Kurt?

I think it's time to do something about issue #2895 like... find a better host.

Good luck. jriegel is still the one who pays for it, and he's always been adamant about using a European host, even a German one.

When I had a blog (years ago) I was with a small Montreal web host with outstanding service, basically a one-man company. I'd ask the guy for something and he'd do it the next day at the latest... Updating dependencies would have been done in a cinch.

[kkremitzki]

What tool did you use to get these exact timings Kurt?

Using Firefox's dev tools. I hit Ctrl+Shift+I to launch them (or F12), go to the Network tab, and then load the page to see the results.

[yorik]

We should pursue this discussion after the release, but it might be time to think again about the web provider issue. Also the freecad.io servers seem stable enough, we could maybe simply switch to them and redirect freecadweb.org...

[Kunda1]

We should pursue this discussion after the release, but it might be time to think again about the web provider issue. Also the freecad.io servers seem stable enough, we could maybe simply switch to them and redirect freecadweb.org...

+1
I think kurt said he has paid for the freecad.io till march, right? We could consider keeping freecad.io
the webprovider issue main problems are:
+ kurt needs to update everything via FTP aka he doesn't have shell access (which says a lot about his dev ops skill... to be able to update phpbb, mediawiki, etc... )
+ limitations on using outdated serverside software
+ limitations to running certain tests with travisci (api hooks)
etc..etc..

[kkremitzki]

I can't recall what thread we discussed the performance improvements seen on www.freecad.io, but for a long time I've been wanting to set up a staging environment for the tracker that shows some of the benefits we could get from moving it off shared hosting. I've finally got that environment created at https://tracker.freecad.io. There seems to be a bug with the header still but otherwise it should be working OK.

For anyone interested, please give it a shot and let me know what you think about its performance. It seems faster to me.

[chrisb]

I have the feeling it loads significantly faster here in germany.

[kkremitzki]

I have the feeling it loads significantly faster here in germany.

For the record both servers are in Germany, freecadweb.org in Nuremberg and freecad.io in Frankfurt.