Location of server which causes a latency issue. Usually, for sites hosted in the USA, around 200-300 ms is typical latency of the first request. The forum is heavily cacheable, uses HTTP 1.1, and works in short bursts once the request is made (see the images below), so basically, latency is simply not an issue, and probably the main reason we will be staying with cheaper hosting in the USA. AVDS is not an online game. In my testing right now, the three most common accessed pages, representing about 92% of all page requests, all complete in less than 1.2 seconds (see images). For folks in Australia, that's worst case 1.5 seconds to add on the cross-Pacific latency. It's not a huge difference, really. So let's keep looking at problems we can solve.
Server capacity. We are on a virtual private server. This is like a shared host, but instead of just a shell account, we have an entire machine image to ourselves. Sometimes, this can be slow due to what the other users on our physical hardware are up to. However, they are active when you're not, and vice versa. The slowness may be due to our configuration. We only have 768 MB of RAM without using bursting. We have bursting to 2 GB of RAM, which when it ends means we are running from disk. I've optimized the site to run in 768 MB of RAM and not burst at all. However, this does mean that some subsystems like our cache engine are a little starved. I'll look into optimizing things further, but I think the only solution here is for more RAM.
Site load. We have a very active community, and at a certain point, nothing beyond two servers will do. I will check to see if our usage logs are in that category yet. However, if we are, we're sort of stuffed, as the software doesn't support two servers in a meaningful way.
We've been skirting with scalability and slowness problems for a while now, and unfortunately, we can't really afford to do much more than we already do. Cost of hosting what have today: $48 USD / month (VPS, no CPU limits, 768/2GB RAM (guaranteed/burst), 500 GB per month, 40 GB of disk (we use 10 GB).
The cheapest Australian VPS plan I can find with just 20 GB per month of transfer is $80 AUD per month. And there's no guarantees that these servers although sold in Australia would not be hosted in the US or some other country which has no per-GB transfer costs. We use about 50 GB per month at the moment.
However, if we've outgrown VPS hosting, we need to go to dedicated hosting. We've done dedicated before, but always on someone else's terms. We've moved twice because of "free" services being extremely sub-standard or being run primarily in spammer's net blocks. It cost a lot of good will and grief. So we are going to pay for our service on trustworthy hosting providers. Dedicated hosting in the US ranges from $99 USD per month on up, about twice our current budget for hosting. Dedicated hosting in Australia is simply cost prohibitive.
I'll do some more analysis and tuning on the weekend, but there's only so much we can do with our current budget.
my comments re latency are based on the fact that I quite often get time outs in which I can not access the site at all. I will get you some more facts when this occurs again 🙂
The maximum latency of a connection anywhere on the planet is approximately 300 ms, 600 ms if it's via geo-stationary satellite. That's less than 1 second in the worst case. If you're experiencing time outs > 1s, that's not because the server is here in the USA, but due to the server having a bad day.
Does it let you back in say a minute or so later? I now have the system sending me e-mails when timeouts to the database happens. I have not had any of these since Feb 19, and have a total of approximately 20 of them in total since the beginning of February.
I'm not doubting you're having issues, just that the site has been a bit more "up" recently.
just waited from around 9:45 to 9:50 for the forum to pop up. I will be more careful with my language, the page did not time out, it was eventually returned. As you have previously mentioned the trace does not vary particularly during this "wait" time. Hope this assist 🙂
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