BigBlueBall Website Performance

Several people (Amy, Eagle_Kiwi to name two) have voiced concerns about BigBlueBall being a slow-loading website. I want to dig into this and determine if we’re talking about milliseconds or 20-30 seconds.

The server is adequately configured to handle the load, and when you examine the page build times (i.e. “Page generated in 0.20721 seconds with 6 queries), you’ll see that they are generally sub-second builds, which should be perfectly fine. So then, the problem (or at least the part we can control) lies in a combination of the total page size (HTML+CSS+Javascript+images) and our network bandwidth.

I’d like to get your ideas for 1) benchmarking our performance vs. similar or even bigger sites (forums mainly) and 2) coming up with suggestions to improve that performance (if necessary).

I know that I’m not in a good position to judge, because with my 15Mbps fiber-optic connection, it loads pretty darn quick. But this is an issue. When you check the data about BigBlueBall reported by Alexa, it reports the following:

Site Stats for bigblueball.com:

• Traffic Rank for bigblueball.com: 58,914(29,252)
  
• Speed: Very Slow (95% of sites are faster), Avg Load Time: 6.5 Seconds (what’s this?)
  
• Other sites that link to this site: 70
  
• Online Since: 21-May-1999

So according to Alexa, 95% of all sites they index are faster than BigBlueBall. That puts us in the bottom 5%, and that stinks.

Let’s not get into an argument about whether it’s slow or not, let’s do some real benchmarks with other sites (suggestions on sites to compare with?) and then let’s fix it. I’d be happy if we were just in the top 50% at this point.

Thanks in advance for your construction suggestions.