A few days back Domus pointed out that this site is slow when loading all comments on one page, sometimes failing to complete loading. XXX echoed the same concern saying that ever since adding the rollercoaster this site has been slower. The coaster is hosted off YouTube, so it's not adding any extra load to the site, but the performance issue is related.
The problem is two-fold:
1: Traffic keeps growing - the coaster is driving more people to the site, we steadily get more than 3500 visits a day and many people visit multiple times which puts a greater load on the server.
2: We've added a lot of extras to the site, like the comment voting and formatting system as well as the forums. It's a fairly heavy load for a hobbyist blog, but these are things that tend to make this site both interesting and useful. If we shut down the comment voting and 'foreclosure' etc comment formatting the page loads would likely get a fair bit faster.
No one has had much time to tweak the technical aspects of this site recently, but time permitting the plan is to add a barebones comment page for registered viewers so there is an option to load up a lite version of the comment page without any extra formatting. Hopefully this option for the regulars, plus some additional site optimization will solve this problem.
Don't give up on us yet, and feel free to chime in with your own feedback below.
