[META] My Negative Results

[-]Grognor14y240

I defy your data. LW has been acting consistently damn slow lately, and I've seen other people in the LW irc channel have been complaining about this.

Edit, 1 day later: on reflection, "consistently" was a terrible word choice. I stand by this statement with that word removed.

[-]RobertLumley14y30

Hm. I thought so too. Maybe I hit it at a good time?

[-]daenerys14y30

Also upvoted for Doing Science!

But I agree with your hypothesis that you hit it at a good time. Occasionally LW has been working great, but occasionally these past few days it won't load AT ALL.

[-]RobertLumley14y00

There have been several instances where it cut out completely for me. But my internet at home is very sketchy, so I wasn't sure which it was. Other sites would typically load, but they were usually pretty slow.

[-]jsalvatier14y00

I and others have experienced both slowness and totally cut out of the site.

[-]daenerys14y-10

But my internet at home is very sketchy, so I wasn't sure which it was.

Ditto.

Graph over time?

[-]RobertLumley14y00

The spikes for me don't last more than two minutes (if that), and are pretty infrequent, as far as I've noticed. It might be helpful to create a thread to point out when we see them, but a reliable graph over time would require far more resources than I am willing to devote.

[-]Luke_A_Somers14y20

Inappropriate application of Denying your Data. This data is quite consistent with erratic performance.

[-][anonymous]14y00

I can confirm that LW is really really slow (15 second load time) sometimes.

[-]Alex_Altair14y180

Upvoted for actually doing science.

[-]Douglas_Knight14y60

You are pretty much wasting the x-axis, which is pretty much redundant with the colors. It would be better to do a scatter plot of time and size, rather than imposing the ratio on people like me who think it is a silly metric.

This may be a realistic way to measure time for new users, but that is irrelevant to your complaint, since you are not a new user. The large size of the site includes files that don't change much, like the javascript. These load quickly, at least per byte, contributing to a fast measure. Some users will be bandwidth-limited. But when you return to the site, these files are cached and the total download is much smaller. But you still have to wait for database queries to build the main content. This has only a very loose relation to number of bytes, even the number of bytes the pages, and using number of bytes as an excuse for speed seems silly to me. (But there is a lot of variation from time to time and if you had caught it at a bad time it would probably look bad by your metric, too.)

[-]RobertLumley14y00

Hm. I don't know much about the way websites are parsed, but I figured it wasn't a perfect metric. At any rate, that's why I did both raw time and website size.

[-]Douglas_Knight14y-10

No, you did not do raw time. That's the whole point of my comment.

[-]RobertLumley14y00

Perhaps you can't see the graph for some reason. (But why you could see one and not the other is beyond me) There were other complaints as well, and I had a problem getting them to show up just for me. I tried uploading them as images, but I got a "Bad image" message. I'd suggest just opening up the spreadsheet I linked to, it's in there.

[-]Douglas_Knight14y10

Sorry. My fault.

[-]jimrandomh14y40

These days, in practice, "slow" is usually a special case of "broken"; and the tricky thing about software brokenness is that there tend to be additional preconditions before it appears. I have occasionally seen Less Wrong being slow, but it doesn't appear to be slow consistently.

The best way to investigate page-load time issues is to open Chrome's developer tools panel (ctrl+shift+i or command+shift+i), go to the Network tab, and refresh. This will give you a list of all the individual parts of the page (including things loaded from third party CDNs, which are frequently sources of trouble), and a breakdown of when they started loading, how big they were, and how long they took. On the other hand, the problem might be on the server side. In that case, most of the time will go to the first entry in the list, the page's HTML; and further investigation will have to be done on the server, rather than on the browser.

[-][anonymous]14y20

Load times should be measured in milliseconds, not seconds.

Related: Shit-ass Websites

[-]RobertLumley14y00

I measured to millisecond precision, I just didn't bother changing the graph.

Related: Hyphen

[-][anonymous]14y10

Let me try again - if a page takes more than a second to load, it's too slow.

[-]ahartell14y20

Some of the images aren't loading for me, specifically, those immediately above and below the quoted text:

Surprisingly, LW is still one of the best even when only raw load time is compared. But the discussion page (remember, that's the first 5 points) takes somewhat longer than the other pages:

I'm using Chrome and Mac OSX.

[-]RobertLumley14y20

Hm. Works for me in Chrome. They're just the graphs of load time and load type per byte. I'd recommend using firefox (That may not work though, if chrome isn't) or just looking at the spreadsheet - they're in there.

[-]Normal_Anomaly14y00

Firefox shows them for me.

[-]RobertLumley14y00

Sorry for any confusion. I had a lot of problems with the graphs. I think it's fixed now though.

LESSWRONG
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LESSWRONG
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[META] My Negative Results

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