We have been receiving reports of customers experiencing long page load times on our site. We so far have heard from at least 3 people, all of which report that the problem seems to be completely sporadic. “It comes and goes…”.
The issue for me is that I am unable to replicate their problems, and I have to server logs to look at to determine the issue (that I would normally be able to access under different circumstances). So, I am reaching out to try to obtain anything that can help explain why our customers are periodically experiencing page load times that are bad enough for them to call us… Can we (as NitroSell customers) obtain logs regarding our site?
Analytics shows occurrences of 40 sec. page load times in IE, but that number seems a little extreme (even compared to the complaints we’ve received). Has there been some unusually taxing transfers conducted on our box recently? If so, what can we do to get our site moved to a better server that does not get so stressed? Our little site doesn’t get enough traffic (yet ) to cause our pages to “bog down”.
As usual, any insight or assistance in diagnosing this issue would be greatly appreciated!
As you may have gathered from my reply to your post on the MS Dynamics forum, we do not host your site on “one box”. It’s a load-balanced SaaS environment where your store is served from a minimum of two web servers and two database servers.
We could certainly dig out server-side logs for you but I don’t see what you’re expecting to find. We have access logs that log requests from shoppers but standard logs do not show response times.
We are currently not experiencing any system-wide performance issues (would affect all stores and not just yours !). I would suggest that the number of Ajax requests you’re making in your templates could make the site appreciably slower. However, when I view the site both from my home and office connections, it’s very snappy and responsive.
In any case, I’ve added your site to our Pingdom monitoring service (a third-party over whom we have no control). Here’s your public report:
Note this response time is not the equivalent of a ping, it’s the page load time. Please consult Pingdom’s help pages should you need further clarification.
If there is a genuine issue with responsiveness, it will become evident in that report. Pingdom uses servers in multiple locations, which emulates end user usage effectively.
That pretty funny you mention Pingdom. I just set that up for us this morning! Great tool! I can’t believe I forgot about signing us up for that until now!
Yeah, that’s a hack (images.xml) to use remote images on our products lol. It needs to be phased out. It contains every single product one of our distributors offers, and maps their part # to ours and lists all the available product images. Think of it as a non-DB DB… There are also a fair amount of 404 errors due to the fact there is no mechanism in place for using brand images. I am working on optimization and rewriting code that I made back when we first signed up with you guys…
Anyways, the issue has seemed to go away after I updated the Social Sharing Panel. Pinterest specifically. A couple of our users noticed that when the page loaded super slow for them, “www.pinterest.com” was shown in the status bar… So we now use some simple sharing buttons that are links instead of remote resources. All is right with the world.
Thanks for taking the time to respond in regards to this. You can understand my concern. When our customers phone us about the site being slow, we are not scoring any points.
*I wanted to scope out the response times in the log files. See what resources take how long to load for our users. I can see what Pingdom and Dev Tools has to say, but those do not give me a historical log of what our customers have experienced…
) to cause our pages to “bog down”.