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tishimself
Member
—
6th January 2012 (4 months ago)
Hi,
I installed the Network theme on a new site, it has these plugins:
Aksimet, Anti-Splogm bbPress, BuddyPress, Updates and T3 Total Cache.
I used gtmetrix.com to compare your demo to my website with and w/o T3 Total cache enabled. The demo loads faster with a much larger Page Size:
3.52s/105KB vs, 2.5s/493KB
and with T3 enabled on my site:
5.87s/94KB
Any idea what is going on? you can easily run the comparison yourselves using this site to see the details.
I did notice these 404s and wondered if you had any ideas why this is happening:
There are 5 requests that are 404 Not Found
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network-child/../network/_inc/css/bp-default.css
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network-child/../network/_inc/css/layout.css
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network-child/favicon.ico
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network/_inc/css/bp-default.css
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network/_inc/css/layout.css
I installed the Network theme on a new site, it has these plugins:
Aksimet, Anti-Splogm bbPress, BuddyPress, Updates and T3 Total Cache.
I used gtmetrix.com to compare your demo to my website with and w/o T3 Total cache enabled. The demo loads faster with a much larger Page Size:
3.52s/105KB vs, 2.5s/493KB
and with T3 enabled on my site:
5.87s/94KB
Any idea what is going on? you can easily run the comparison yourselves using this site to see the details.
I did notice these 404s and wondered if you had any ideas why this is happening:
There are 5 requests that are 404 Not Found
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network-child/../network/_inc/css/bp-default.css
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network-child/../network/_inc/css/layout.css
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network-child/favicon.ico
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network/_inc/css/bp-default.css
•http://my-woodcraft.com/wp-content/themes/network/_inc/css/layout.css
a 404 shouldn't be cached,unless you have a custom 404 page. And so the server generally takes a bit longer to see if that resource is really there or not, and then returns an error, so yea linking to several resources that are missing (404) can bog you down, otherwise, it's pulling a cached copy of your sites 404 page, once for each resource, which is still wasteful.
Depending on some of your setup, it could play out in a few different ways, but I would setup a rule in your apache or nginx config to only show the custom 404 if your referrer is not your own domain.
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Support Kangaroo
—
6th January 2012 (4 months ago)
#
Greetings :-)
There seem to be several anomalies like this within many of the themes.
The Grid Market Theme for example out of the box not only gives a 404 for a missing default header jpg but also when you do insert a custom header the dimensions are wrong and it cuts part of the header off.
So we adjust the Theme so it is right and then read only permission the changed files 444 so that during the next update the changes/fixes are not over written :-)
I'm not caching the 404s, the files were missing and I replaced them. This improved perf quite a bit.
I also was having a Page Cache & Browser Cache problem, but they are fixed. One thing I needed to do was set Page Caching to Basic.
As for plugins, the purpose of this testing is to provide a baseline b4 I add the required plugins, customize the site and add content. So I have activated only what I consider essential: Aksimet, Anti-Splog, W3 Total cache, bbPress and BuddyPress. No content added to speak of and no customizing either.
So after fixing my 404 errors & caching problems I retested today:
Parent theme: 92%A, 94%A, 2.79s-2.94s, 88.3KB
Child theme: 93%A, 95%A, 2.76-2.20, 94.4KB
It is nice to the the grades go up to an A. Not sure why the Child theme rates a better grade, but it is not a significant uptick. By running this test I can monitor the impact of my use of the child theme.
There us a fair amount of variation wth the GTMETRIX load times, so I don't think it is very reliable.
But my question still remains, how is it that the theme demo page loads are 4 times bigger and loading faster? Is my InMotion VPS that much slower? Are you guys using a CDN? The demo is not even running W3 Total Cache. I would expect you are on a dedicated server.
Responses (6)
Member — 6th January 2012 (4 months ago) #
Hi,
I removed the 404 errors and my load time improved considedrably:
2.68s/97.1K
Not sure why those files were missing.
Larry
Member — 6th January 2012 (4 months ago) #
a 404 shouldn't be cached,unless you have a custom 404 page. And so the server generally takes a bit longer to see if that resource is really there or not, and then returns an error, so yea linking to several resources that are missing (404) can bog you down, otherwise, it's pulling a cached copy of your sites 404 page, once for each resource, which is still wasteful.
Depending on some of your setup, it could play out in a few different ways, but I would setup a rule in your apache or nginx config to only show the custom 404 if your referrer is not your own domain.
Just food for thought.
Sales & Support Pro — 6th January 2012 (4 months ago) #
Hiya!
It's likely that not only were you getting a lag because of the 404s but also because W3TC was trying to cache something that wasn't there...
Your extra plugins will also cause more load than the demo site.
Thanks,
Phil
Support Kangaroo — 6th January 2012 (4 months ago) #
Greetings :-)
There seem to be several anomalies like this within many of the themes.
The Grid Market Theme for example out of the box not only gives a 404 for a missing default header jpg but also when you do insert a custom header the dimensions are wrong and it cuts part of the header off.
So we adjust the Theme so it is right and then read only permission the changed files 444 so that during the next update the changes/fixes are not over written :-)
Joe :-)
Member — 6th January 2012 (4 months ago) #
Hi,
I'm not caching the 404s, the files were missing and I replaced them. This improved perf quite a bit.
I also was having a Page Cache & Browser Cache problem, but they are fixed. One thing I needed to do was set Page Caching to Basic.
As for plugins, the purpose of this testing is to provide a baseline b4 I add the required plugins, customize the site and add content. So I have activated only what I consider essential: Aksimet, Anti-Splog, W3 Total cache, bbPress and BuddyPress. No content added to speak of and no customizing either.
So after fixing my 404 errors & caching problems I retested today:
Parent theme: 92%A, 94%A, 2.79s-2.94s, 88.3KB
Child theme: 93%A, 95%A, 2.76-2.20, 94.4KB
It is nice to the the grades go up to an A. Not sure why the Child theme rates a better grade, but it is not a significant uptick. By running this test I can monitor the impact of my use of the child theme.
There us a fair amount of variation wth the GTMETRIX load times, so I don't think it is very reliable.
But my question still remains, how is it that the theme demo page loads are 4 times bigger and loading faster? Is my InMotion VPS that much slower? Are you guys using a CDN? The demo is not even running W3 Total Cache. I would expect you are on a dedicated server.
Regards,
Larry
Member — 6th January 2012 (4 months ago) #
Hi,
I forgot to mention that I loaded down the Network theme to verify the files causing the 404s were not in the folder.
Regards,
Larry
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