Strange performance issue

Rails
1

I have a strange performance issue and have no idea how to find the
bottle neck. A page on my site (Premium Domain Broker - DNX.com) is
taking way too long to load. So I decided to test it out via curl to see
how fast it was downloading the page and this is what I got:

ben-johnsons-macbook-pro-17:neco-website benjohnson$ time curl -o
output.txt Premium Domain Broker - DNX.com
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time
Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left
Speed
100 955k 100 955k 0 0 198k 0 0:00:04 0:00:04 --:–:–
251k

real 0m4.954s
user 0m0.018s
sys 0m0.077s

5 seconds for a page that size is not too bad. But in the browser is
takes around 15 seconds to load. Are there any tools I can use to
determine was part of my layout is taking a while to load? Because the
browser seems to work VERY hard to display that page. Why is the browser
working so hard? Our competitors sites (ex:
http://www.stubhub.com/dallas-cowboys-tickets/cowboys-vs-vikings-8-28-2008-615078/)
have pages with more tickets that load faster and their pages are
actually bigger in size. I’m just really frustrated and confused.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

2

Also, you can see a significant speed decrease for our competition:

ben-johnsons-macbook-pro-17:neco-website benjohnson$ time curl -o
poo.txt
http://www.stubhub.com/dallas-cowboys-tickets/cowboys-vs-vikings-8-28-2008-615078/
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time
Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left
Speed
100 613k 0 613k 0 0 52750 0 --:–:-- 0:00:11 --:–:–
53612

real 0m11.920s
user 0m0.016s
sys 0m0.054s

Yet, their page loads much faster in the browser, and takes twice as
long to download. Really weird. Here are the 2 URLS, try for yourself:

http://www.stubhub.com/dallas-cowboys-tickets/cowboys-vs-vikings-8-28-2008-615078/

3

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Ben J.
[email protected] wrote:

Yet, their page loads much faster in the browser, and takes twice as
long to download. Really weird. Here are the 2 URLS, try for yourself:

Premium Domain Broker - DNX.com

http://www.stubhub.com/dallas-cowboys-tickets/cowboys-vs-vikings-8-28-2008-615078/

Ben,

Your main page itself is loading in less than a second. It’s all the
other stuff on the page that’s causing problems.

Use Firebug’s net tab to see all the stuff your page is loading. Use
YSlow to get some pointers on how you aren’t exploiting HTTP well.
Both are Firefox plugins you’ll soon find indispensable :slight_smile:

  1. You aren’t bundling your assets. For example: <%=
    stylesheet_link_tag :all, :cache => “cache/all” %> to generate a
    single public/stylesheets/cache/all.css
  2. You aren’t setting an Expires header on your assets. Every page
    request has to hit the server for every image, javascript, and css
    file. Setup an Expires header long in the future so they’re never
    re-requested until the file itself changes.
  3. The only thing in your app that’s too slow is seats.xml. Speed up
    that action or cache it.

But most of all, get friendly with Firebug and YSlow!

Good luck,
jeremy