Site Slow After Server Migration

Hi guys, I wonder if you could give me some idea on why this would be happening.

My web host migrated my site to a different shared server / data center to "improve performance" (they never actually informed me they were going to do this), ever since then performance has plummeted. On a 60Mbps connection a single post with a 1.1MB image now takes around 6-8 seconds to fully load, it's like dial up days, whereas before migration it would load in the blink of an eye.

Back and forth with the web host support they just say I need to work with the website developer to optimise the webpages but I never had this problem before migration.

Have any of you experienced this? Would it be something I need to change in the script due to it being a different server or do you think it would be more a case of the host cutting the performance or any other problem?

Hello

My web host migrated my site to a different shared server / data center to "improve performance" …, ever since then performance has plummeted. On a 60Mbps connection a single post with a 1.1MB image now takes around 6-8 seconds to fully load, it's like dial up days, whereas before migration it would load in the blink of an eye.

Back and forth with the web host support they just say I need to work with the website developer to optimise the webpages but I never had this problem before migration.

Have any of you experienced this? Would it be something I need to change in the script due to it being a different server or do you think it would be more a case of the host cutting the performance or any other problem?

There are a plenty of possible causes. Even our script can cause performance issues, but when the forum worked before without problems, I see no reason to to point the finger at the forum script as first. It is possible, that the webserver, the PHP-interpreter or the database server (MySQL or MariaDB) has a unfavourable configuration. It's also possible, that the webserver and the database server resides on different machines, where they have shared the same machine before and there is a network issue. Or maybe it's a cache issue or what ever. We don't know.

Can you tell us a little bit more. Maybe it's a version of any component, that is not complete supported by our script.

- Which webserver software in which version?
- Which PHP version?
- Which database software in which version?

Tschö, Auge

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Trenne niemals Müll, denn er hat nur eine Silbe!

- Which webserver software in which version?
- Which PHP version?
- Which database software in which version?

cPanel Version 94.0 (build 25)
Apache Version 2.4.54
PHP Version 5.6.40
MySQL Version 5.7.23-23

I didn't take much notice of the versions before the migration as everything was loading quick and we were happy. They didn't even tell us beforehand that they were going to migrate the server, I found that out myself and confronted them with it after about the seventh email back and forth with support.

Pages with just text and images under 500KB seem to load quick but any image over that takes a while. Gifs that took maybe 3 seconds to load before migration now take over 1 minute, you literally see every frame of the gif load.

Would the nameservers have anything to do with it? I noticed they haven't changed.

Hello Magma

cPanel Version 94.0 (build 25)
Apache Version 2.4.54
PHP Version 5.6.40
MySQL Version 5.7.23-23

The webserver Apache 2.4.54 is the current up to date version. I can't say anything about cPanel. The Wikipedia article says, the up to date version is 98 (stand 2022-08-10). The MySQL package is more or less outdated, but the version gets security updates until October 2023.

But one thing is inexcusable. How one can provide PHP in version 5.6 in the year 2022? PHP 5.6 doesn't got security fixes after December 2018. That's more or less three and a half year ago. Even PHP 7.4, the last major version in the PHP-7-branch reaches end of life in November 2022.

Anyway.

I didn't take much notice of the versions before the migration as everything was loading quick and we were happy.

Pages with just text and images under 500KB seem to load quick but any image over that takes a while. Gifs that took maybe 3 seconds to load before migration now take over 1 minute, you literally see every frame of the gif load.

Would the nameservers have anything to do with it? I noticed they haven't changed.

I can't imagine that. The nameserver does nothing else than to translate the domain name in a request into the matching IP(s) (name resolution). If your lightweight pages loads quickly but pages with large images or a lot of data loads extremly slow, the name resolution has presumably nothing to do with it.

Tschö, Auge

--
Trenne niemals Müll, denn er hat nur eine Silbe!

Do you know if there are any problems using the free Cloudflare plan with MLF script? Any settings that definitely need to be turned on or off in the Cloudflare dashboard? I thought I would try that.

Hello

Do you know if there are any problems using the free Cloudflare plan with MLF script? Any settings that definitely need to be turned on or off in the Cloudflare dashboard?

No and no. Sorry, I can't help you with that.

I thought I would try that.

Generally it is a valid idea to check the Cloudflare settings. Cloudflare promises to improve the performance with their service. So maybe they can help you (user manual? faq? support?).

Tschö, Auge

--
Trenne niemals Müll, denn er hat nur eine Silbe!

Hi Magma,

Do you know if there are any problems using the free Cloudflare plan with MLF script?

I don’t think so, though I’m using a heavily modified v1.8 of mlf. I’m on Cloudflare since December 2019. Some hints:

You have to move the nameserves to Cloudflare (CF). Depends on how responsive your ISP is. In my case it took a day.
Only static content is mirrored/cached. On my site I safe roughly ⅓ of traffic.
Whether the response is faster than from the previous ISP or not depends on your ‘audience’. On my site I have members of 83 countries. Based on the IP CF makes an educated guess from where the request originates and serves – mostly – from the closest mirror. Mostly because the current server load is also taken into account. If the request comes from Germany and the mirror in Frankfurt is busy, you might get the content from London. When I was in New Zealand two years ago, I set up a small test page. One hosted at my ISP in Austria and the other mirrored at CF. Down Under the difference was substantial – up to ten times faster. Since the majority of my users and visitors come from Asia, important for me.
On the other hand, if your audience is mainly located in Europe, I’m not sure whether it’s worth the effort.
A nice side-effect: Though I’m using my private scripts for spam-protection, since I’m on CF registration-attempts by bots and script kiddies went down by 30%. Not surprising cause one of the founders of CF was previously with BotScout. Furthermore, there are many useful settings in CF’s firewall.
I suggest to set up a cookie-free subdomain (e.g., static.example.com). If have there the *.css, *.js, icons, my private photo collection, you name it.
All the usual stuff (even if you don’t use CF) helps: Minimize the number of requests. I started with 30 and finally was down at 10 (now 13). Preload images which are not in the CSS. Same with scripts if possible or with the defer-attribute… Requires some experimentation.

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Cheers,
Alfie (Helmut Schütz)
BEBA-Forum (v1.8β)

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