Site Load Times

This page is to document the time the site takes to load.

2011-07-05

Live Server

This is before Varnish has been deployed and also tests have only be done using http as https requests get a 302 redirect back to http.

apache bench

Requests were done from another machine in the same rack, 200 requests for the front page, 10 at a time, using http, this was done several times and the results below are for an average result, some were faster and some were slower, the first request took about 4 seconds and almost all the rest were less that 0.1 second:

ab -v 4 -n 200 -c 10 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

LOG: Response code = 200
LOG: header received:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:02:58 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Drupal-Cache: HIT
Etag: "1309867375-0"
Cache-Control: public, max-age=0
Last-Modified: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:02:55 +0000
Expires: Sun, 11 Mar 1984 12:00:00 GMT
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 7727
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Time taken for tests:   5.131 seconds
Complete requests:      200

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%     57
  66%     66
  75%     74
  80%     77
  90%    100
  95%   4014
  98%   4019
  99%   4039
 100%   4050 (longest request)

YSlow

• The page has a total of 29 HTTP requests and a total weight of 421.8K bytes with empty cache
• This page has 3 external stylesheets. Try combining them into one.
• This page has 17 external background images. Try combining them with CSS sprites.
• There are a total of 1 CSS expression:
  • ​http://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/default/files/css/css_9bf5bdd80b33ef2e38c9b89845c474c9.css
  • CSS expressions (supported in IE beginning with Version 5) are a powerful, and dangerous, way to dynamically set CSS properties. These expressions are evaluated frequently: when the page is rendered and resized, when the page is scrolled, and even when the user moves the mouse over the page. These frequent evaluations degrade the user experience.
• There are 27 components with misconfigured ETags (all css js and images)

pingdom

• ​http://tools.pingdom.com/?url=http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

The test here will run for 30 secs max and it generally takes longer than that to load the front page, in part because (as far as I can see) pingdom loads all images referenced in the CSS even if the pages doesn't use them. Some stats:

• Total objects: 76 (677.5 KB)
• (X)HTML: 1 (32.8KB)
• CSS: 3 (92.7KB)
• Scripts: 1 (150.7KB)
• Images: 71 (401.2KB)

Dev Server

Running Varnish on port 80 and apache on 443.

apache bench

This is with the first hit being passed to apache:

ab -v 4 -n 200 -c 10 -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://dev.transitionnetwork.org/

LOG: Response code = 200
LOG: header received:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache
Cache-Control: public, max-age=3600
Last-Modified: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:51:05 +0000
Expires: Sun, 11 Mar 1984 12:00:00 GMT
Vary: Cookie,Accept-Encoding
ETag: "1309870265"
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 7353
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:51:07 GMT
X-Varnish: 1553439536 1553439337
Age: 0
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: close
X-Varnish-Cache: HIT

Time taken for tests:   1.616 seconds
Complete requests:      200

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      3
  66%      3
  75%      3
  80%      3
  90%      4
  95%      4
  98%      5
  99%   1412
 100%   1412 (longest request)

This is for subsequent requests which don't hit apache:

Time taken for tests:   0.149 seconds
Complete requests:      200

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
  50%      7
  66%      7
  75%      8
  80%      8
  90%      9
  95%      9
  98%     10
  99%     11
 100%     12 (longest request)