Site is slow - Trade area

Anyone getting slowness in the trade area? Other areas seem ok.

I notice it big time when on the forums, not sure about the database.

What, the 30 sec load times? ;P

DR caused a lot more ppl to come to the site and it's ran by a single dev. He's doing his best to get it under control but it can be rough if you have a lot more traffic to a site. Optimizing code and implementing efficient caching that works while people are logged in takes a lot of work. So it will likely be a long while before it's consistently fast, if he even has time to keep working on it.

I do this kind of stuff for a living so I understand. I wish him luck. It's a nice site. So I hope he can wrangle it.

There's only so many "quick" fixes you can do. Like add cloudflare and set page rules for aggressively caching everything. And they only go so far. Adding stronger servers also only goes so far and gets really expensive fast. The hard part and stuff that works best is optimizing database structure and queries and minimizing how much php (or whatever server side language) and the database are even hit by caching requests and caching entire sections of the page that don't depend on logged in users. Then you also have to start dealing with things like redis or memcached and things like litespeed server and cache or varnish. CDN's can help but that's a ton of money potentially. Separating DB to a diff server can help split the load and let you grow horizontally instead of just vertically.

But most of what I'm mentioning can take weeks of work to do properly. And who knows by that time traffic might be more manageable anyway. Kind of a catch 22 for the site owner. From my position as just a user I just wish them the best and sorry to hear what they're having to go through right now with all the unexpected traffic. What's worst is with popularity comes botters and ppl scraping your site constantly and it's near impossible to stay on top of that. Some of them will make 20 requests a second or more. They can just floor a site. Sucks for the rest of us.