Performance Improvement?

[StangFlyer]

As of now, significant server and network upgrades have been completed on our end that should further enhance MW (and all the sites we host). Broadband users should particularly notice, but I think even modem users should see a decent benefit too. So just out of curiousity, does the site now seem faster?

[Dark_5.0]

Well I have DSL at work and it took this page 10 seconds to load for me to make a responce.

Honestly this site is the slowest site that I visit. I was in the chatroom and it was lagging really bad the other day. I would type something and hit send and it would dissapear but it wouldnt go. Then I would retype it and hit send and it would finaly go.

I mainly go to three car related sites. This one and

www.anythingcars.com
www.ricehatersclub.com

The other 2 sites run way faster than mustangworks I dont knw why

I dont dare get on mustangworks at home where I have a dial up connection cause it takes 30 seconds for each page to load.

Even today it doesnt seem any faster to me.

I am not bitching about it I am just giving honest feedback.

[Hethj7]

Dan - I know you have done a lot on your end to make this a fast website, but I'll agree with Dark_5.0 that this is one of the slower websites I visit. I don't know why, but it always loads slower than a lot of sites I visit. This is from different locations too, whether it be from home, school, or work. Just as Dark said, I am not complaining, just giving honest feedback.

The site may be loading a little faster today, but I wouldn't call it a real significant difference from before.

[StangFlyer]

Man... I just don't know what to tell you two... It's FLYING over here! Of course on the local network, but it also runs quick when I test it on dial-up. I talked to both Darius and Kevin this morning too. Both of them surfed around the site this morning at work. Darius from Ford and Kevin on his DSL. They both noticed a definite speed enhancement and also said it was flying nicely. Well, what kind of computers are you guys on (specs, OS, browser, versions)?

Actually, the only delay I can find with the site is occasionally the page load will "hang" for a few seconds due to the ad delivery. A majority of the time the ads are delivered here from the advertising company we work with. When they are delivered from them the ads are loaded from their servers, and I've noticed some times their servers hang... Most people, however, would assume that delay is on our end.. although... it's not.

If ya'll knew what was behind MW hardware wise... you'd FREAK!

[Hethj7]

I know the hardware you've got behind MW is incredible. It doesn't take me ten seconds to load pages like it does some members, but it is a little slower than a lot of sites I visit.

At home I have a Sony Vaio, 2.66 processor, 1 gig of RAM, and cable modem.

Right now I am at school on a Silicon Graphics Octane Unix box. I use this machine for CAD type stuff. I believe it runs dual 450 MHz processors. But, remember that this is a Unix machine, so the 450 MHz Unix processor is probably roughly equivalent to a 2.6 PC processor.

[StangFlyer]

Originally posted by Hethj7
I know the hardware you've got behind MW is incredible. It doesn't take me ten seconds to load pages like it does some members, but it is a little slower than a lot of sites I visit.

10 seconds is not that slow for the web to be honest... But, any time I've tested the site on broadband from various locations (different friends cable/DSL, and my own dial up account on 56K) it never takes me over 5 seconds to load a page (except for the occasional hang on the ad loads I mentioned) and only about 20 seconds or so (depending on the page) for dial up. Now it's taking me 2 or 3 seconds to load a page (broadband) and only about 10 to 15 seconds on 56K.

The actual reason for this posting was that over the past six months we've been building a full scale, corporate level web farm for the company (MTI, parent company to MW). There will be some minor additions over the next couple months, but for all intense purposes the whole system is now fully operational. There is some significant server power running everything now. And of course, MW is hosted on it.

[Dark_5.0]

The computer I am on is a Toshiba lap top. Well there you have it that is all the computer knowledge I have.

My boss has a bad *** computer I got on his computer when he went to lunch and mustangworks did run a little quicker on it.

[lx mike]

I'm on cable and it loads pretty quick for me and i have a slow *** pc. i didn't use a clock or anything just the ole " 1-1thousand, 2-1thousand, 3-1thousand" and any page here would be loaded by 4-1thousand. ocassionaly it'l hesitate due to the ads but besdies that is ok for me.

[Hethj7]

Now that I am home, it does seem to be loading pretty good. It does hang up on the ads in some circumstances, but other than that it seems to be running pretty fast.

[bri32zz]

It loads really fast on my end. No problems at all

[fastas69]

I am new here so I dont know what it was like before, I have cable and it seems to be pretty quick. I've been to a few other sites that seem alot slower.

P.S. I think this is a great site, keep up the good work!!!

[Fox Body]

I dunno, maybe it's location-oriented. I am and have been on dial-up for a about a year. I just got a new modem 3 days ago (U.S. Robotics 56K PCI V.92 faxmodem). If I can remember correctly, this site loaded a little slower than, say, Stangnet's homepage. But lately, I can honestly say that just about every page I go to in the forums load in anywhere from 7-13 seconds (usually around 10 sec)! That is awesome to me. I do remember a time that this website was slow, but I remember that being right b4 Dan did the major change and made the bg color grey (that musta been, what, 2 years ago???-- I know it got faster when he did the upgrade, but it seemed to get slower for a time after that than picked up again...). On my brother's computer in Atlanta and Cartersville, GA area (running cable from a company called Adelphia), MW flies --- consistently. I don't understand why MW is running slow for some people with cable and DSL .... and I'm pretty far out from the city...takes me 20 minutes to get to "town". I'm in what you'd call, the "country"...

Well, out of all that... I'm saying that this site runs EXCEPTIONALLY fast for me on the dial-up modem. No problems on my end.

Okay, I just counted the seconds to load the MW Home page:
Trial 1--10 seconds-- on dial-up!
Trial 2--8.5 seconds

Trial 1--12 seconds for the Message Board (Forums) main page!
Trial 2--8 seconds

Trial 1--11 seconds for Blue Oval Lounge forum!
Trial 2--7 seconds

Trial 1--9 seconds to load this thread...
Trial 2--10 seconds

Trial 1--10 seconds preview my reply to this thread.
Trial 2--Like clockwork...10 seconds
Trial 3--16 seconds...
Trial 4--10 seconds

That, to me, is remarkable....especially for me with the dial-up. ...And my network connection right now is at 24 Kbps (usually at around 26). And it's around 12 AM where I am.... Oh yeah, and one last thing... I have a pop-up killer so I assume that helps a bit.

Later...

[StangFlyer]

Well, I'm glad to hear that most of you seem to be seeing good performance from the site like I do when testing.

Fox Body, you're "independent" testing is good, especially if you are only connecting at 24 Kbps! You must not have a very clear phone connection being out in the "country" or something. I just did the same pages you did on my own dial-up account. On the 56K modem built into my laptop I connect to my account at 52.3 K/s. It took under 10 seconds to load all the same pages you just quoted. On average, it looks like it's taking 8 seconds for site pages to load. Going to the homepage of MW only took 6 seconds (for example). Saturday afternoon I was an hour away from here and I used someone's cable modem to surf around the site. Load times were 2 or 3 seconds per page. Of course, most of the time I am on the actual internal network with the servers. So, I'm hitting them at 100 Mbps and loading is almost instantaneous for me. The only delay I ever see is from the ads on occasion that get loaded from the ad providers we work with.

Mustang Works now lives on a large scale hosting environment consisting of 16 dual processor IBM servers with multi-drive SCSI raid arrays. The servers are on a multi-100 Mb network (front side and backside networks) using all Bay Networks enterprise level switching equipment (gigabit interconnectivity) and goes into a proxy/firewall system that connects to our fractional T3. Eight of these servers are web servers that are configured in a cluster behind Alteon hardware load balancers, and pull content from central file servers. They function as one to spread the request and serving load across all eight servers for performance, high scalablity, and redundancy/failover. Our load balancers can also handle 1024 connected web servers and 200,000 requests each second per box too. So, we can grow and scale at a whim now. We have default machine images set-up that can be used to load machines with our default web server configuration. With them we can load additional web servers and have them online in 15 minutes per box. Additionally, we have multiple, dedicated database servers with each having seven drive U160 SCSI raid 5 arrays that are SMOKING fast. This "web farm" has been slowly built over the past six months and is now done. It's an enterprise level, scalable web solution not only meant to power MW, but other projects in the works and client sites / projects of MW's parent company, McClain Technologies, Inc.

So, when I said I didn't know what else to throw at MW to improve performance (aside from perhaps a slightly lighter weight site design)... I wasn't kidding! If you'll recall back last year when we had the big Cobra abuse thread fiasco and were suddenly receiving millions of page hits per day (at its peek, 1300 connection requests per second!)... well, if something like that ever happened again we could now "scale" up to handle that kind of onslaught of traffic.

[MidNiteBlu 5.0]

runs pretty damn fast for me