Is it me or is SEOMOZ Q&A slow

[Francisco_Meza]

I try and answer many questions here on SEOMoz Q&A, but the page load speed seems so slow I think my browser is going to time out.

I don't remember it being this slow. Anybody else noticing slow loading (especially when asking, answering, or replying to questions)?

[VITALBGS]

I don't think it's just you. It's moving like cold molasses on my end.

[Francisco_Meza]

This has been happening for days. So not just regular molasses, but cold molasses. LOL. That's pretty darn slow.

[ThompsonPaul]

See this questions from yesterday, Francisco.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-others-having-problems-with-upload-speed-at-moz

It's getting brutal.

Unfortunately SEOMoz is saying it's just "general slowness" which is a pretty silly response.

Doesn't look like they plan to do anything about it until some Q&A upgrades come out in a couple of weeks.

Disappointed;

Paul

[donford]

Been like this for me for the last few weeks.

[KeriMorgret]

Paul,

I'm so sorry that "general slowness" came across as a pretty silly response but it is the honest truth.

I was working on some things for the transition with the manager for the transition project, and we both saw how slow things were. She looked at the status monitors for the system, and there was not one major thing that had failed where we could say "ok, it is process X that is not responding, if we restart that then everything will be better".

Things in general are running slowly. No, we're not happy with it. We know that it's a pain. We are monitoring to make sure there aren't specific failures that happen that compound the current problems, and we are doing final testing on the upgrades to make sure they will have the performance and stability we all desire.

Keri

[Francisco_Meza]

All I know is if my clients' websites were as slow as SEOmoz's Q&A, they would all be out of business.

[ThompsonPaul]

Sorry, Keri - I hope participating in 160+ questions over the last 8 months shows my commitment to SEOMoz and the community and that I'm not just trying to be a dick, but that answer just doesn't make sense.

"General slowdown" just doesn't adequately explain needing 29 seconds to post a simple couple of kb's worth of a comment.

I'm hoping the following diagnostics might help narrow down the source of the issue. Apologies if these items have already been noted.

The front page of SEOMoz has a time-to-first-byte (i.e the backend server processing) of 0.251 seconds. Pretty normal.

The Q&A pages last night after 11 pm (i.e. what I would assume is a very low usage time for the site) had time-to-first-byte ranging from 10 seconds to over 38 seconds!! For the times it didn't time out altogether. That's 40X to a bazillionX too long.

• Q&A 10 seconds time-to-first-byte - http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130215_PC_58K/1/details/ (Optimal is under 0.5 sec)
• Q&A 38.7! seconds time-to-first-byte http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130215_0Y_5SZ/ (Optimal is under 0.5 sec)
• home page 0.251 seconds time-to-first-byte http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130216_X9_8BR/

The site then finishes loading fairly consistently in another 2 to 3 seconds.

This tells me there is a pretty severe server or database issue. (Just tried re-running the Q&A test and it timed out on first attempt & over 28 seconds to load on second try at 10:45pm MT))

I'm not expert enough in either of those areas to try to diagnose by remote, but I know I'd never accept my or a client's site with those kinds of load times or times to post a comment and leave them with the explanation that it's just "general slowdown". Certainly not while multiple users are telling me it's making one of the prime areas of the site almost unusable.

Your tech team needs to dig deeper, Keri. There's more at issue here than just general slowness and it's reflecting badly on SEOMoz and I hate to see that happen.

Paul

[MarieHaynes]

It's definitely slow for me too.  The slowest part is waiting for my answer to post after I hit "post response".  It's gotten to the point where I click the button, then I go and do something else and then come back later.

But, I spoke with another SEOMoz member who said everything is running well for him.  Strange?

I'm sure you guys are working on a solution...must be frustrating!  But I'd definitely make it a priority because you're likely losing users who aren't patient.

EDIT: I just timed how long it took for my response to register and it was 2 mins 45 seconds!

[Francisco_Meza]

I'll; be the 1st to admit, I'm not answering anymore Q&As for a couple more weeks until they fix their "everything is fine on our end" server.

Laters!!!

[jennita]

Yikes! I'm so, so sorry about this. We've just sent a "red alert" to the engineering team asking for them to dig deeper into the problem. This is definitely unacceptable for things to be running this slowly.

As Keri mentioned, we are working on a better solution long-term which should go up in a couple weeks. But we'll get on this ASAP to get things running better in the interim.

[jennita]

Ok we've restarted a few services and are seeing request times dropping quite a bit. I'm using this response as a test to see if it takes less time to post.

Thanks everyone for your patience and for caring enough to start & comment on this thread.

[MarieHaynes]

It does seem faster.  I'll post this and report how long it took compared to my 2 min 45 second time previously.

10 seconds...much better.  

[jennita]

Woohoo! Now, let's try to keep it that fast.

[KeriMorgret]

Everyone should be noticing the performance improvements by now. Early Wednesday morning we rolled out an update that has helped things considerably. If you find any bugs or odd happenings, please either send an email to help@seomoz.org or chime in on the thread about the update at http://www.seomoz.org/q/q-a-performance-improvements. Thanks so much for your patience!