I'd like to inquire as to just how fast and successfully others find signing on to the AAVSO's Website and forums.
I have a very high speed server and connect virtually instantly to every other web site/forum I visit on-line and I have many. But in the case of the AAVSO site my quickest connection time is rarely less than 10 seconds, with 20-30 being much more common and there are even numerous occasions when the connection simply times out.
I've been advised several times by HQ that this is likely a problem involving my service provider, however since this happens ONLY with my connecting to AAVSO I find this difficult to accept. So, I'm asking others if they might post their estimated connection times just to see if the problem is indeed isolated to just me.
J.Bortle (BRJ)
I also have experienced very slow AAVSO Internet response at times. It seems to be worse around the noon time EDT. VPHOT can be very very slow during this time. It is worthy to note that website issues ranked number 4 on the AAVSO Strategic and Operations Survey, with 4.62 % of the respondents citing this as a Weakness issue. While this is an overall low score, it is worthy of investigation. The cumulative effect of small improvements over time at the AAVSO can leading to dramatic results.
Is slow website response a Drupal issue or one of website architecture? All of this is beyond me. It would be interesting to see a block diagram of the AAVSO's website, showing servers, discs and all of the inter-connections. I am sure we have some IT experts in the membership. If Drupal is a possible issue, check out this web article:
http://nadeausoftware.com/articles/2007/03/essential_steps_speed_drupal_web_site
Kevin Paxson - PKV
I, too, have wondered about the AAVSO server responses. Of course, it is hard to tell on who's end is slowing it down. VPHOT is especially annoying at times.
I'm near Boston (20 miles west). I have FIOS 20Mbps connection down / 5 Mbps up.
I click firefox and AAVSO web site is open in a count of 3-4 seconds. Perhaps 1-2 sec slower than some other sites.
I click on VPhot in data/data analysis and it goes to first page in 1 sec. I click on login to VPhot and my image list is open in 1 sec.
I think these are my normal times.
Yes, I too have a sense of slower response times especially since the mail lists were converted to forums. I was wondering whether it was because of increased web traffic because of the forums.
BTW, I hate using forums with a passion and much prefer mail lists but I can see the reasons for conversion. I guess we're stuck with them.
....Tim
I just thought
Hi Folks:
I just thought I'd make a general response.
Web speeds can be very difficult to pin down. Is it the web server? Is it the pipe on the AAVSO's end? Is it your end of the pipe? Is it any of the myrid computers in between? What path do the packets take from point A to point B? It could be very different from one website to the next.
We've tried various things to speed up the website. The best of these was bringing the mysql DB engine from Occam, the server where it was for years, to Mira, which is our web server. Since the Drupal engine uses the DB so much more than just apache we reasoned that putting the DB on the same box as the web site would speed things up. We did see an increase in speed, in fact, much more than I honestly anticipated. So, that was an improvement.
Usually, when we see complaints of slowdowns or time outs I haven't been able to pin them down to anything here at HQ. That, however is not always the case. A good example of this was very late last Friday morning (8 June, local time) when a large query was being done on the DB engine and because the DB engine was busy this WAS affecting the speed of the website. So, it can certainly happen, but its not usual.
A good example of geographic problems happened this morning with our own Director, currently in AK at the AAS meeting. Arne was seeing 15 second response times to an internal remote desktop session he was running at 5 second response rates to the website. Aaron and myself, simultaneously and independently immediately started testing the website, and I started looking at network traffic. Network traffic was well within bounds and we were getting less than 1 second response rates from the website here, indicating that Apache, mySQL, and Mira herself seemed to be working fine. We concluded it was an issue upstream toward AK.
As far as the forums are concerned, I can say that the switchover to the forums has not significantly changed our network traffic profile, and I didn't expect it to. I don't THINK its really affected the load on the webserver, but I don't have firm numbers on that metric yet.
With regard to VPhot, VPhot runs on a virtual server on the Amazon Cloud. Once you go into VPhot you are no longer using the AAVSO's bandwith, but Amazon's. So, the AAVSO website and VPhot are in VERY different environments and ARE very different environments. The website runs on a physical Fedora Linux server here at AAVSO HQ, whereas VPhot runs on a virtual Windows 2003 server in the Amazon cloud.
I hope this is of some help, folks.
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Doc Kinne, KQR
Astronomical Technologist
AAVSO
The AAVSO web site has been VERY slow to respond in the past several days. It took me minutes just to get on VSP 2 days ago.
Chris Stephan SET