Is Gwulo too slow?

I think so!

I've been trying a few changes over the last few weeks to make the site faster, but it's still running too slowly.

Change is afoot

The next round of changes will mostly affect visitors who aren't logged in. I'll replace the "What's new" block on the left of the screen with something that takes less computer power to build. It will also allow me to use more caching, which hopefully will speed things up for all of us.

I'll try my best not to break anything, but if you find anything that isn't working properly, please leave a comment below to let me know.

What caused the slowdown?

A couple of things. First the site gets steadily bigger, so its databases get larger, and slower. eg look at the url for this page: "http://gwulo.com/node/13386". The number at the end goes up by one each time a new page (photo, place, person, etc) is created, so we're well past 10,000 pages.

Secondly, as the amount of content increases, we've moved up the ranking in Google's search engines. That's good, as means we're often near the top of the list if you're searching for something about old Hong Kong. Unfortunately it means we also get a lot more attention from the spammers.

eg, in the last week there have been 11,900 attempts to register a new user on Gwulo.com. I'd love to say they were 11,900 people interested in Hong Kong's history, but the vast majority were automated attempts from spambots. Our anti-spam measures keep most of them at bay, but all that extra traffic slows down the site for real visitors like you and me.

What next?

Even after the changes mentioned above, I guess the site will still be on the slow side. If that's true I'll try an upgrade to a more powerful hosting package. I'm hoping the combination of changes to the website, and a faster underlying hosting service, will make the site a lot snappier.

So, please bear with me if you're finding it slow around here. By the end of October I expect to see noticeable improvements.

Regards, David