Anybody noticing a speed-up in server page-load time ???

[NightWolve]

Or any problems with it so far ?

[esteban]

I will check on my laptop later.

[NightWolve]

In case it breaks anything for someone, I have to mention it.

I did the following:

"Enable compressed output" = On

This option will compress output to lower bandwidth consumption, but it requires zlib to be installed.

"Disable evaluation of templates" = On

By default, templates are evaluated instead of just included. This helps with showing more useful debug information in case a template contains an error.

On large forums however, this customised inclusion process may be significantly slower. Therefore, advanced users may wish to disable it.

"Disable hostname lookups" = On

This disables host name lookups, which on some servers are very slow. Note that this will make banning less effective.

Before zlib compressed output became popular, the server would send HTML pages in clear text, everything visible (email addresses, data, etc), but it's been around forever and when turned on, it'll zip the HTML up, and all modern HTML5 browsers know how to unzip before rendering a page. Since the server has much less data to send to you zipped, it can operate faster, deal with the next page load faster, etc. Aaron's ISP bandwidth usage over time should be a lot less.

If there's a bug in a template, and debug info needed, that bridge can be crossed then, so an obvious improvement to disable it.

On disabling hostname lookup, us mods don't need to spy on your full domain hostname all the time. If there's a problem, an external link can allow for an IP address to be mapped to a host/domain name or it can easily be turned back on.

[ToyMachine78]

Nope... Your 3 push emails screwed my pc up for good.

FTW

[WoodyXP]

It's roading a little faster for me.

[NightWolve]

Nope... Your 2 push emails screwed my pc up for good. FTW

;)

It's roading a little faster for me.

Yeah, the forum feels a little more responsive to me with Chrome on my PC. I always had the "Enable compressed output" option enabled on my SMF install, but Aaron never activated it for PCEFX, accepting the defaults.

If the server zips up the HTML per page load, it sends less TCP packets to you, so you receive it all faster, just that the browser will have to unzip it at the penalty of more CPU time. Since the data transmission from server, to Internet, to your client PC are the slowest aspect, even though the browser needs CPU time to unzip, you still get a faster page load!!

This interestingly enough applies locally too, compressed data moving from the HDD to RAM and being unzipped for use can actually be generally faster than if you leave it uncompressed! It's possible more times than not.

A friend of mine, D-BOY/Derrick, mentioned a helpful ProTip with the UPX executable packer. If you have 1-2 meg or more sized executables, you can typically get them to execute faster by packing them with UPX.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/upx/

The theory goes like this, the time to read the bytes of the EXE from the HDD and write them to RAM is the slowest aspect, or bottleneck, so if the EXE is very packed/zipped, you'll get it to execute faster, because less bytes are read from the HDD and written to RAM, even with the CPU time lost to unzip the EXE data before execution can begin!!!

You gotta be a little careful with this, though... So use both on EXEs and DLLs, and make sure everything works afterwards. Most of the time it works OK and it really helped with monster software like Adobe PhotoShop! Never try this for tablets with solid state drives, I had a horrible experience in that situation... Just a regular Windows PC desktop/tower with a traditional HDD is where this can greatly benefit you on frequently used apps.