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EE Perfrormance (White screen flashes between loading pages)

June 09, 2011 2:44pm

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  • #1 / Jun 09, 2011 2:44pm

    diadyo

    25 posts

    Hi everybody,

    just finished my first EE project (http://www.arcmeletitiki.gr). It was a nice experience and took about a week from start to finish. The site went live a few hours ago and unfortunately it appears somewhat slow.

    The site is hosted on Rackspace Cloud and we are browsing from Greece, this certainly is a factor however we have many other sites on the same service with no apparent problems or slow performances (projects build on Cake PHP, Codeigniter, Wordpress etc).

    Other than the site being somewhat slow it flashes a white screen in between loading pages! Check out this small screencast—> http://screencast.com/t/uCLGEIVEv

    Sereal Designers (http://www.sereal.net) is also on Rackspace Cloud but it is performing fast and it is build on Codeigniter.

    I’ve checked with Rackspace and their system is fine - no degrading performances at the moment.

    So I was wondering (for anyone based in the US)if the site is slow for you and whether you see a white screen flashing before loading another page.

    Could it be the cloud environment? I am not using any of the caching features offered by EE.

    What do you suggest I should do? Experiment with cache? .htaccess file? (I am using the File and Directory Check method) Consider a different hosting environment?

    Thank you for your time
    Evangelos

  • #2 / Jun 09, 2011 3:26pm

    Matt:P

    277 posts

    Hi Evangelos

    I’m in the UK and can see the white flash you mention. Are you doing anything differently in this project compared to previous projects?

  • #3 / Jun 09, 2011 4:24pm

    diadyo

    25 posts

    Hi Matt,

    Thanks for your reply. This is my first EE project so I haven’t got a previous experience to compare with. We’ve been using CakePHP and Codeigniter to build most of our client’s websites. We have developed a small custom CMS (on CakePHP) that fits most of our customers and we’ve spend many hours configuring cache views, queries, images etc to make it as fast as we can (you can have a look at http://www.cretalive.gr, 20-30k visits/day build on our custom CMS). But I’ve always wanted to try EE because a lot people give the thumbs up for it. I am guessing the white screen and the sluggish performance is probably because there is no data caching enabled on the site. But it could be the cloud environment as well.. no idea really 😊

  • #4 / Jun 10, 2011 3:52am

    John Henry Donovan

    12339 posts

    diadyo,

    I’m in Ireland and can’t see the white flashes. Greg has a great blog post on troubleshooting site performance issues which may help if you run down through them


    If nothing there helps come back to this thread and we will further troubleshoot and see where the issue could lie

  • #5 / Jun 10, 2011 7:16am

    diadyo

    25 posts

    That’s a great post indeed by Greg. I will go through it. I need some help with something else though. I’ve been experimenting around cache and I’ve noticed that a) the slightest update (like a status change) clears all cache (tag, page etc) and in a multilingual site when the page is cached in say english, it will always be displayed in english even if you switch languages…. I am guessing i need to pass a key to distinguish between different page versions (english, german etc) how can this be achieved?

  • #6 / Jun 10, 2011 7:28am

    Mark Bowen

    12637 posts

    Not entirely certain if this is it or not but you don’t have an opening <body> tag on the site, only the closing one. I’d personally run the whole of the site through the online validator at http://validator.w3.org to see what else is wrong with the site too and see if it still exhibits that behaviour after fixing the errors there.

    Hope that helps a bit.

    Best wishes,

    Mark

  • #7 / Jun 10, 2011 7:36am

    diadyo

    25 posts

    Not entirely certain if this is it or not but you don’t have an opening <body> tag on the site, only the closing one.

    wow… completely missed it! thank you for pointing that out. I corrected it but the white screen still appears ... for me at least…

    still trying to figure out why 😖

  • #8 / Jun 10, 2011 7:39am

    Mark Bowen

    12637 posts

    As mentioned I’d try getting all the pages as close to perfectly valid as you can using the online validator and see if it still does it.

    If it still does it after doing that then I’d try some cut down templates (ones that aren’t linked to on the site just for testing purposes) and take out everything that’s not necessary just for now, things like Javascript etc and see if it still does it then.

    If you get rid of the problem then you can start adding things back in again until it breaks and then you’ll know what the problem is.

    Hope that helps a bit.

    Best wishes,

    Mark

  • #9 / Jun 10, 2011 7:44am

    Mark Bowen

    12637 posts

    You also have a stylesheet - /-/css/contact.css which I believe is missing so might want to look into that issue too.

  • #10 / Jun 10, 2011 10:09am

    diadyo

    25 posts

    Hello again, thanks for pointing out the forgotten css file as well 😊 I fixed a few validation errors (mainly alt text on images) and now the only thing that does not validate is the issuu flash embed object… (and another ul list on one page but that is not important)

    Anyone has an answer about the cache? I cannot seem to be able to cache the same page on different languages… or at least I am not sure how. The cached page is always displayed in the language it was created… switching the languages does not create another cached version with the language as a key…

  • #11 / Jun 11, 2011 3:54pm

    Greg Salt

    3988 posts

    Hi diadyo,

    This may will be to do with the position of your external script tag (in the head). Try moving that to the bottom of your page. How are you generating your language pages? Are they in the same entry but just with extra custom fields for each language? If so, then that I think is the reason why the caching seems to only work with one language, it is just one entry.

    Cheers

    Greg

  • #12 / Jun 20, 2011 6:47pm

    diadyo

    25 posts

    Hi everybody

    apparently the white flashes were all due to a flash embed code of issuu.com that we had on the site—> http://screencast.com/t/fUSjeQoya

    So nothing to do with EE or our hosting all together.

    Thank you for your replies. All the best, Evangelos.

  • #13 / Jun 21, 2011 12:41pm

    Kyle Cotter

    730 posts

    Thanks everyone for assisting here.

    Glad you got everything sorted out diadyo! Please feel free to post again as needed.

    Thanks!

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