The page is taking a longer time after the changes you have

[The Jock]

Hey Eric,

The new look of the site is quite cool. but it is taking a longer time to load. I believe it's time to do some performance tuning.

[beatthegmat]

Much appreciated feedback! I'll talk to David and see what we can do for our performance.

[DavidP]

Hi Jock, thanks for the feedback. I think that all the Twitter, Facebook and Sharethis buttons are causing the slowdown. I don't think that we need all of these buttons. Will discuss with Eric which ones we can/should remove. Sorry about the inconvenience.

[arora007]

Hi David,
I guess the performance is much better than a few days back,
actually at a few places some fetch query seemed to is getting fired twice,
it might have been seen as a small blink with an already painting window...
I guess you have fixed those, many thanx

the buttons u are talking about are they this??
https://www.beatthegmat.com/page-load-ex ... 62376.html

[DavidP]

@TheJock, are you experiencing slowness when you're viewing forum posts, reading articles or both?

@Arora, actually the Facebook Fan box that you identified is one potential cause. Another potential cause are all the Twitter, Facebook and ShareThis boxes at the top of each article on our home page. Each of those little boxes requires the browser to make a separate web request, which can take lot of time. We're currently thinking about how to reduce the # of little boxes. Will update you when we make the change.

[arora007]

Thats so nice of u David... I know the challenges we as developers face, but so too is the ecstatic feeling when something new works, and works so well... I really congratulate you for the exceptional job!!
I myself have been thinking to expanding my website

https://www.skiponemeal.org/

think that people can share their pledges in a list like a forum thread...
Right now... I am preparing for retaking the GMAT, but once I am done, I have a lot to learn from you.
And your advice ( on PHP or something else..etc...)

Infact I had one idea about people sharing their score on BTG "I just beat the GMAT!" along with their percentiles in a form.
The form would help collect data and then we do some number crunching to help predict future test takers.

I had offered to volunteer to Eric to gather the old but useful data, to which he agreed. But the GMAT would not relieve me in one go.. and let me do all that I would like to do! Till then you can pray for me

[DavidP]

@arora, great to hear that. thanks for the nice comment. eric, i and the rest of the btg team have been working on lots of new features for the btg community. i'd be happy to talk with you about php and/or other programming related things. it's been a while since i studied computer science in college (16 years ago!) but i like to do some coding to keep my skills sharp.

@thejock and @arora, just wanted to let you know that we eliminated most of the little facebook/twitter/sharethis boxes that were next to each article. can you please let me know if the performance looks like it got better from your perspective?

[arora007]

yeah...seems fine... thanks



one more little thing.. I dont know if we can do something about it or not...

I searched for a long string in the search window...
"Although they are more temperamental and far more expensive than transistor"

took me .44 seconds...

I searched it on google.co.in it took me .23 seconds.... (the BTG link was the topmost)

subsequently searching the same string on BTG it took

.33 sec
.37 sec
.40 sec
.22 sec

I am not sure whether location from server adds up in the search result.
But I am sure one good thing is happening, the search strings do get cahched, either on the google servers or the BTG servers.

But the point, the same search too almost double the time from BTG.

Well... some triva related to perfectionism... from my favorite movie LAKSHYA (with subtitiles) minutes 5:52 to 6:33
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft36YBjmDR8

[DavidP]

@arora, I agree. Search performance on BTG sorta sucks. The core reason for that is that BTG's forum search engine relies only on MySQL, which doesn't work well as a free-text search engine. I've been meaning to change the search engine technology from MySQL to Sphinx, an open source free-text search engine. But we've just had so many things in our development pipeline that we haven't had the time to do this. Will update you when we swap the search engine!

[The Jock]

Hey David,

The performance is much better now.
Your quick problem resolution is appreciated.

Thanks,
Varun