As a side note you should show guests as little as possible, one thing thats a load on your server is showing the "who's Online" to guests, disable it for them. Try to cut down on the amount of things you let them see, also with my mod, if they still exist in your list, prune out "custo" and "DA".

Mostly when you see a bot/spider on your forum you can enter it's name (one name on one line) in the list and after your whos online timeout period has expired the offending bot will be no more :), some bots have variations of their name in their useragent and some dont have their display name in the useragent string at all!

make sure you make use of these tools in the mod description here https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=264932

cool tips. i've disabled who's online for guests now. contemplating whether to disable it altogether....

Your members generally like to see it and browse it so maybe put up a poll and ask your memebers to vote whether they want to see it or not?

BTW i'm on your site as a guest and i can see whos on line!!, i'd also turn off stats for guests too, that will save plenty of queries and overheads.

You have not. You have only removed the link to online.php from the main page. Disable permission to view online.php in usergroup permissions if you really want it gone to visitors and guests.

http://forums.sgclub.com/online.php <--- Anyone going here can still get the who's online page load.

I note SIGNIFICANT improvement in both number of visitors and also page load speed!

But you still have many problems:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131007_1W_M2J/

First byte time is still terrible - this is your host. You're still loading a huge number of requests (277, that's you.)

I agree with Simon, you should dump the advanced stats for visitors. But if you keep it, make it only five instead of 12. Also you should restore the "What's going on" on main page, this tells legitimate humans you have a busy site and encourages more registrations.

is it really necessary to disable the online.php? pretty sure most visitors won't deliberately go to that php without any link?

my images are already served from CDN. not sure how else i can improve FBT?

isn't the 'whats going on' still there on the homepage?

again, appreciate all the suggestions and feedback. i'm seriously looking into it.

Bots and search engines don't need the link in order to crawl it, most bots have a preprogrammed list of urls to start at. You can leave online.php enabled including the links but you turn off all guest privilidges to view it, do the same for the stats.

I think Max_Taxable is making reference mostly to your host, your system, provided by the host, is delivering the first byte, or if you like shaking hands with the person requesting the page, in far to long a time.

As for your requests either reduce the number of stats you show and auxiliary bits n pieces or use some type of compression, try to amalgamate js files and minify them, compress your css files. Change your images from being a lot of individual images to one sprite and then deliver them from co-ordinates on the sprite.

There really is a ton of stuff to do if you know how and can be bothered ( I don't say that like you're not I say it because sometimes it all gets a bit to much and can put you off)!

Actually, no they are not.

Having the URL be "cdn.mysite/image" is NOT the same thing as having a CDN.

Here's every image your site loads, none of them are coming from a actual CDN.

http://www.webpagetest.org/pageimage...run=1&cached=0

Here are the details of your pageload, every call and how it served. No CDN here either.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/13...M2J/1/details/

Bingo.

tks for the tips. online.php permissions have been turned off for guests as suggested.

i have contacted my host to see what they can do about the first byte issue.

i am contemplating a redesign of the forum and will definitely get the coder to look into your suggestions on compression and sprites. :)


hmm, cdn.xxxx.com is setup to point to my amazon cdn account where a copy of the image files reside as well. how do you tell if they come from the actual CDN?

There's no actual, real Content Delivery Network (CDN) involved in your pageload, is all I know. You can put images in a 3rd party server all day long and point the script to those files on that server, doesn't make it a cloud server or a CDN. Look at the webpage test results - it's clear and evident that your "CDN" not only is causing many more unnecessary calls, it's also actually slowing your page load down. See that big black X at the upper right hand corner of the test page under "Effective use of CDN?"

I doubt he would have to worry about using a cdn after implementing one or more steps from my guide (its in the sig). Unless his website consumes over 5GB worth of bandwidth daily, then he might want to pursue the cdn issue. Even then, there are some free cdn's he can use if needed.