Links to BBNC are extremely slow to load

Kath Lee

Our site is extremely slow. We have links to challenge event registration forms on our main site, which take up to 20 seconds to load. How can we make them faster?

Karen Badham

Hey Sonja,

There's a lot of things that could make a site slow, so this may be better as a support case, but here's a quick list of the common things I see.

1. Not resizing your images before uploading. Images should be resized, then uploaded. If we use HTML to size them the browser will generally load the large image then size it, adding time to your page loads.
2. Javascript that's calling an external resource that has performance issues.
3. Split hosted sites where the internet connection, network, or hardware itself is not where it should be on The Raiser's Edge web server or The Raiser's Edge database server.

I'm sure there's more, but that's generally what I've seen, and some good places to start reviewing.

Thanks!
Karen

Warren Sherliker

Hi,



We also have a FREE tool we are going to be releasing in a couple of weeks that ensures the NetCommunity web server is ready to receive requests - something that it is not always the case as you will see below.



Each time a NetCommunity (or any Microsoft ASP based) site is inactive for a certain period (around 20 minutes) the web server dumps it's cache of your pages, user roles etc. The next request causes the web server to reload all this information again which for the first request takes some time.



We have written a little FREE executable to sort this out for you by making a request to the website once every x minutes to ensure it does not loose it's cache. Simple but very effective. Load times for pages are dramatically reduced. You can install this in your office or on the NetCommunity server, there are no special admin rights required for the tool.



Keep an eye on our bulletin for release info or the website: http://www.smartthing.org (you can sign up for the bulletin there too).



Cheers



Warren

Kerry Shippam

You can also set the application pool not to time out which will stop site cache from being cleared.

Raluca Staicu

Warren Sherliker:
Hi,



We also have a FREE tool we are going to be releasing in a couple of weeks that ensures the NetCommunity web server is ready to receive requests - something that it is not always the case as you will see below.



Each time a NetCommunity (or any Microsoft ASP based) site is inactive for a certain period (around 20 minutes) the web server dumps it's cache of your pages, user roles etc. The next request causes the web server to reload all this information again which for the first request takes some time.



We have written a little FREE executable to sort this out for you by making a request to the website once every x minutes to ensure it does not loose it's cache. Simple but very effective. Load times for pages are dramatically reduced. You can install this in your office or on the NetCommunity server, there are no special admin rights required for the tool.



Keep an eye on our bulletin for release info or the website: http://www.smartthing.org (you can sign up for the bulletin there too).



Cheers



Warren

Hi Warren



If I understand correctly, it should work on hosted RE too, right? As long as the computer the tool is installed on is not shut down...



Thanks


Raluca

Warren Sherliker

Warren Sherliker:
Hi,



We also have a FREE tool we are going to be releasing in a couple of weeks that ensures the NetCommunity web server is ready to receive requests - something that it is not always the case as you will see below.



Each time a NetCommunity (or any Microsoft ASP based) site is inactive for a certain period (around 20 minutes) the web server dumps it's cache of your pages, user roles etc. The next request causes the web server to reload all this information again which for the first request takes some time.



We have written a little FREE executable to sort this out for you by making a request to the website once every x minutes to ensure it does not loose it's cache. Simple but very effective. Load times for pages are dramatically reduced. You can install this in your office or on the NetCommunity server, there are no special admin rights required for the tool.



Keep an eye on our bulletin for release info or the website: http://www.smartthing.org (you can sign up for the bulletin there too).



Cheers



Warren

Yes, this will work for any BBNC configuration. As Kerry says, if you have server access to the NetCommunity box, are IT savvy enough and your IT department are happy to extend the application pool timeout it is better. In a lot of cases this does not happen though so this tool is the best solution. It can run anywhere.

Kath Lee

Thanks all. The issue is with the cache being cleared, then the BBNC pages having to reload every time. Thanks Warren - we'll be looking at your tool, very helpful thank you. Kerry - I'll also look into resetting the time-outs, thanks.