Use Firebug in Firefox or "inspect element" in chrome to run an audit.

From what I see (and I'm no expert), there's a lot of unused CSS, no gzip, and no caching enabled. Lot's more info in Chrome's audit, but no way to cut and paste.

[edit]
Looks to me like there is an issue with your host. Takes forever to connect.
[/edit]

[edit2]
Bit of a weird page structure too. Loads CSS, then some javascript, then some more CSS, then some more javascript. I think you could streamline it to load all the CSS for the page first, then the jsp. Might help page speed overall.
[/edit2]

I am not too tech saavy. How would I load all the css first etc.?

If you want to PM your email addy, I could spend some time to look into your setup a bit.

If I want to do what to my what?
Sorry, I am new to all this and have no idea what you just requested.
You want me to open something to you. Let me know what it is.
I appreciate your help.

Send me an email (brian at mytooq dot com) with a phone number, if you'd like me to have a look at your setup for you (Assuming you are comfortable having a stranger log into your C-Panel setup and Concrete5 site).

-Brian

can you have them expand on what they meant by "reloaded concrete5"?

Does that mean a new copy installed with just sample content in it?
Does that mean they restarted the server with the same site in it?


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz

They told me they reinstalled it and then copied my files over so I am guessing that was a new copy installed.

I sorted out some other problems by reading the forum and for now it seems to be running a little faster.

Is there a script out there that will visit all the pages on my site if I enable the full page caching option? Otherwise if I understand it correctly, the first user of that page will always have a slow load if i cleared the cache recently.

have you tried turning all caching off entirely from the dashboard?


best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz

Okay, can someone explain when caching makes your website faster and when it doesn't?

I turned all the caching off and now everything loads in 3-6 seconds which is a great improvement. Thanks Franz

That doesn't shock me.

All caching does is replace database calls with static files.
Databases are memory intensive, file calls are hard disk IO intensive.
When you're tweaking performance sometimes you have more quality
memory or more quality disk space available - sometimes you don't.

If you're on a shared server that's got a lot of sites on it, with an
older (slower) hard drive, it's quite possible caching will slow your
site down. Particularly over time as it creates more and more tiny
files it has to look for or delete and recreate, your waiting on a
hard drive head to physically jump around the platter to serve your
site.

If you have a large complicated site sometimes caching might slow
things down just because of the sheer volume of files it needs to
create.

3-6 seconds still sounds lengthy, but usable given the budget host
nature of where you're at. The next version of concrete5 should have
some more inherent performance improvements under the hood that should
help. It comes out in about 6 weeks.

best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz

My site slowed down to 20 second load time again last night. I called Blue Host and they said that it was due to long sqrl call times from the data base. Is that a server issue or something I could have someone fix in concrete 5?

I am really trying to figure out if this is a concrete 5 issue or a hosting server issue. If it is a hosting issue then I need to transfer to a host that can perform because this potentially will be a very high traffic site.

Our company also uses Bluehost to develop C5 sites on and the load times are awful and frankly embarrassing when presenting to clients. The performance changes drastically when loading the same site on our other development host ukwebsolutionsdirect. I would recommend looking at another host.

It sounds like you might be on a server that's completely full. If
you're not using caching at all, the only reason you'd see
/differences/ in speed like that is if MySQL was running slow on the
server period. Ask them if they can move your site to a different
server that doesn't have as many database intensive clients on it.

I've tested sites on bluehost that are perfectly fast, which is why we
recommend them for budget centric projects. That being said, they're a
huge host and they have a lot of shared hosting boxes which probably
each have their own unique characteristics. If you're planning on
basing a business around a high traffic site, you might consider not
looking for the cheapest deal around. ;)

best wishes

Franz Maruna
CEO - concrete5.org
http://about.me/frz

By the way, You are awesome Franz and I love Conrete 5.

I talked to bluehost again and they said that it looks like I have a very large data base for my site and it may need to be optimized.

I turned off all caching and had a 3 second call time on saturday.
Sunday it was back up to a 20-60 second call time and then today is down to 5-6 second call time.

Do I need to optimize my database? If so how would I do that? Because one day it works and the next day it doesn't, I am more suspicious of the host, but if I am going to switch to a professional host I need to make sure anything on my end is resolved first.

Thanks for all the help.

I have two concrete 5 sites installed on one blue host account. The one site is technically a subdomain to the other on the cpanel side of things. Could this be causing a problem?

Hi Franz,

I am curious about your statement here about how turning off caching may improve the performance of complicated sites when the C5 dashboard claims: "Full page caching can dramatically lighten the load on your server and speed up your website, and is highly recommended in high traffic situations."

I run a large intranet and we are trying to troubleshoot speed issues.

Thanks,
Spencer

Well to be honest budget hosting like blue host will have its ups and downs despite trying to hack away the core to make it load a bit more faster.

Problem is one day you could have had less traffic ans resource usage from other clients at bluehost.

If speed is your number one concern and you have money to spend might want to look at a vps option like linode and run nginx. We're running one and we've been able to load c5 in a matter of seconds (avg 2-3s).

If it's not an option look at loading your theme resource files at amazon cloudfront. It will help improve the speed. Plus Andrew posted a great how-to to speed up your site -http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/five-easy...

P.S. tried a hack on c5 regards to 12345j's optimizer and it resulted in some nasty editing problems.

Hope that helps :-)

I have had bad response times with concrete5 on bluehost, and decided to try the "pro" package, as it was money back if not happy after 30 days. It was a world of difference. I'm hosting 5 concrete5 sites under my account now, and until now they have all been very responsive at all times of the day (and night). It is a bit more expensive, but way better.
Sverre

I actually did the same. They didn't ever try to sell me the pro package until I was on the phone with them for the 10th time. Since I've been on the pro package, no problems on speed.