i know our community has got some heavy optional features like signatures and auto-play video, but a number of our core users are complaining about latency that seems to get worse after having been logged on for a while in a seesion. They tell me when they first load the site on their Windows machines, that the site loads fast. But then as they start browsing, liking and posting, the site gets increasingly slower. Could there be any logical explanation to this? The complaints seem to have started the past month, which cohld have correlated to the latest release, the video plugin or even the additional advertising. Any suggestions on troubleshooting? I am going to try to find some PCs to check from, but was curious if anyone heard any similar complaints or had thoughts on possible reasons for performance to degrade over time.

The fix to unload the ads is deployed. Let me know if it’s any better @charleswalter. Putting an ad after every 4th post seems way too often to me since those ads are often full of animations and don’t load immediately. If you want ads that often, maybe a setting to pre-load fewer posts in the stream would help.

The browser used is way more significant than OS. What browser are they using? If it is IE or even Edge performance will be mediocre, sadly, due to lack of JS engine improvements in the areas that affect Ember.

If perf is gradually degrading my strongest suspicion would be that this is plugin related, if the users can easily reproduce this I would recommend disabling various plugins one at a time to see if any are at fault.

[image] sam: recommend disabling various plugins one at a time to see if any are at fault. Yes, unfortunately memory leaks are something many scripters don’t consider or test for. My guess would be the auto-play video is putting a large amount of data into objects that aren’t being destroyed. (memory not available for garbage collection) That would be the plugin I’d start with.

Chrome has a memory profiler that is handy for looking for leaks

Thx guys for taking this seriously. I want to notify my favorite plugin writers as well @Falco @dtchau @neil . The users notifying me of what appear to be memory leaks are all on windows and chrome. Does it make any sense that if the users have the plugins inactive that they could still experience problems related ro the plugin? Or must I turn off the plugin from the admin to accurately test. One user says that if she refreshes the page, it helps her.

So, I tested disabling the ads every nth post and my test user was able to confirm that her latency issues went away. I’m going to leave the nth ads off this week and see if there’s a difference in pvs per session on Windows/Chrome users. I sent a note to @neil to see if we could consider capping the number of ads that would load per topic. My hunch is that as users scroll through topics quickly, it could impact performance on some browsers.

Very interesting, this certainly sounds like a bug with the ads plugin, we should be completely eliminating all traces of the injected HTML after it is offscreen for a bit. cc @neil

Traffic seems to be holding up well this evening and I have not heard any complaints so far. Thank you for the quick fix! Regarding the ad every 4th post. In my ideal scenario, we’d show an ad after the first 2 or 3 posts, but then wait another 5 or 6 before showing the next ad. The length of the first message is usually longer than the replies, and I think there’d be a good flow for an ad after reading the first reply to the message. Something to think about perhaps for the future.

Extra latency due to ads every nth reply?

Product Support

neil (Neil Lalonde) May 16, 2016, 2:49pm 9

Ok sounds bad. I’ll look into it. I thought it would be using the post stream’s loading and unloading stuff, but maybe it’s not.

Topic		Replies	Views
Nice work on DFP plugin update Praise	6	2519	April 29, 2016
Screen jumps with AdSense responsive ads Product Support advertising	7	2225	February 4, 2020
Website is so slow Product Support	7	1262	September 20, 2021
Adsense blank ads Product Support advertising	17	6664	January 20, 2020
Dropping ad revenue Product Support	53	5555	June 7, 2021

Extra latency due to ads every nth reply?

Related topics