In case you missed it: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (or why we’re with Rackspace)
I don’t want to revisit again what happened, but suffice to say we had our worst day since maybe month 2…and the first week of the month (and September in general, but not as bad) was epic fail.
Now on Rackspace so benchmarking load times, and doing everything I can to make the site as quick as possible.
As I type this, the front page loads in 9.57 seconds, and give or take the time its loaded it’s sometimes faster, sometimes a little slower. The bulk of the readable content though is up <6 seconds, and that’s a huge improvement.
Posts are an issue. Content is up <7 seconds but the full page is way too long (18s). The biggest problem is JS-Kit, and loading icons for each comment, for example hits to FriendFeed for icons can add 5-10 seconds to load time. I’ve asked them for the option to cut the icons out, crossing fingers.
With both pre-loaded (so cache in play) I tried to benchmark the load times against Mashable and TC
Mashable: front: 32.63 page: 24.69
TC: 16:56 page: one page 8 seconds then hang, the next 11.25 then hang with half sidebar missing.
The choice of the two was important because both are on Rackspace…and we beat them, despite less resources. We can do better though, and we will 🙂
