Performance Issues - Site Slow version 5.6.1.2 - looking for troubleshooting assist

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Site Slow and I'm looking for assistance in troubleshooting performance. Pulling my hair out on this one. This site has in the past performed pretty good.

Initial Page loads are the issue

Any Assistance or direction would be greatly appreciated.

Website is runing on a VPS. I have contact my hoster for assistance as well.

Site:http://www.markhamtoday.ca
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140214_Q2_R2N/...
Help in reading this or understanding what changes could make improvements would be appreciated. Looks like some of my images could be reduced in size.

Speed and Caching Settings
Block Cache ON
Overrides Cache ON
Full Page Caching ON - In all Cases
Expire Pages from Cache - Every 30 Minutes.

Environment
# concrete5 Version 5.6.1.2
# concrete5 Packages
Advertisement (1.7.7), Galleria image gallery (2.0), SimpleEvent (5.0.1), Sortable Fancybox Gallery (1.17), ViewPort (1.0), Whale Nivo Image Slider (1.1).

# concrete5 Overrides
blocks/guestbook, mail/block_form_submission.php, mail/block_guestbook_notification.php

# Server Software Apache
# Server API cgi-fcgi
# PHP Version 5.3.27

HOBOcs
 
lackadaize replied on at Permalink Reply
lackadaize
The following is a great took to analyze what can be changed on your site to speed it up: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.markhamtoday.ca/htEGmnLd...

Each section of the Yslow and Pagespeed are highly useful and will walk you through what you can do to speed up your site. One of the major things I'm seeing is that not all of your site files are being compressed. You probably also want to minify your .css and .js files.

You do have some images that are larger than they need to be but the bulk of what's slowing down your site is that your site isn't minified and it's not completely gzipped.

Can you show us what you have in your .htaccess? Also, are you using Miser at all?
lackadaize replied on at Permalink Reply
lackadaize
I think it's mostly a server configuration issue though. If you look at the pagetest link you provided you'll see that the light green bars on the graph represent "Time to first Byte." This generally signifies how long it takes the server to respond to a browser's request. Your hosting service can likely help you trouble shoot exactly what's going on.
Cahueya replied on at Permalink Reply
Have you tried playing around with different settings for .htaccess regarding caching, compression and headers?
You could set up APC Cache as well, you will find much information in the forums here.

If TimeToFirstByte is slow, this could be, because the server is waiting for external information, live a twitter feed.

Try setting up a "nude" page with no blocks or content on it (www.domain.com/testpage) and run webpagetest through it.

Try to add more and more content of your original homepage to it and run the test after every change and see where it starts getting slow.

Whats also strange is, that your images are rather small but load really slow, you can still try to optimize the JPEGs and reduce size in total (check ImageAlpha if you're working on a Mac).

Just go through step by step.

If I had that many images on a page, I would consider a CDN...
lackadaize replied on at Permalink Reply
lackadaize
Can you explain why a CDN would be offer an advantage in that situation? I've honestly never used one before so I was just curious how you thought about it.
Cahueya replied on at Permalink Reply
Well, he is using a lot of images that consume a lot of the loading time of the pages.

And it seems like the server is not doing very well with delivering the images.

Images are static content so they can be anywhere on the web. CDNs have quick servers on multiple locations (nearer to the client?) and thus, reduce the number of calls to the webserver.

I hope I am not very wrong about that :)
lackadaize replied on at Permalink Reply
lackadaize
Gotcha. Thanks for the info.
HOBOcs replied on at Permalink Reply
HOBOcs
Thanks for the suggestions guys - much appreciated.
I still need and am waiting on an in depth review from my hoster.
ConcreteOwl replied on at Permalink Reply
ConcreteOwl
Try turning the pagespeed module off by adding this to the bottom of your htaccess file
<IfModule pagespeed_module>
  ModPagespeedDisallow http://www.markhamtoday.ca/*
</IfModule>
Phallanx replied on at Permalink Reply
Phallanx
Your main CSS file url is malformed.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.markhamtoday.ca/packages,_theme_viewport,_blocks,_page_list,_templates,_secondary_posts,_view.css,qv==29d68c84632ad8bf77285f6066cd8793+updates,_concrete5.6.1.2_updater,_concrete,_blocks,_rss_displayer,_view.css,qv==29d68c84632ad8bf77285f6066cd8793+packages,_theme_viewport,_blocks,_page_list,_templates,_posts_list,_view.css,qv==29d68c84632ad8bf77285f6066cd8793+updates,_concrete5.6.1.2_updater,_concrete,_blocks,_slideshow,_view.css,qv==29d68c84632ad8bf77285f6066cd8793+packages,_theme_viewport,_blocks,_page_list,_templates,_feature_posts_slider,_view.css,qv==29d68c84632ad8bf77285f6066cd8793.pagespeed.cc.9BNZwMSD70.css"/>


Fix that and you should see an improvement.
ConcreteOwl replied on at Permalink Reply
ConcreteOwl
I wonder if you are using googles beta pagespeed service?
I tested one of my concrete sites with it and it added 46 seconds to the page load!
Needless to say I declined the offer from google..
Info is here
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/service...
HOBOcs replied on at Permalink Reply
HOBOcs
Not sure if I tried this - I will check as well. I might have, thinking it would help too.
HOBOcs replied on at Permalink Reply
HOBOcs
Thanks Phallanx - I'll check my version and update/test- (briefly) what was it that you saw that need correction?

Anything that helps is great!!
Phallanx replied on at Permalink Reply
Phallanx
After reading what weyboat said, I took a closer look at the URLs and they all have "pagespeed" in them. So the reason they are "malformed" is because you are indeed using pagespeed. Turn it off and we can start looking at Concrete5s performance.
HOBOcs replied on at Permalink Reply
HOBOcs
Ok - good point. I'm not sure when this page speed was introduced. I trying to figure out where I added it (C5??) or hoster.
Any thoughts on how to turn off?
HOBOcs replied on at Permalink Reply
HOBOcs
OK found where to turn the Page Speed "Beta" off.

Ran another performance check athttp://www.webpagetest.org/result/140218_3H_T34/...

Not sure how this now affects the Link Style sheet stuff or if that is ok now.